Time always seemed to be on Martin Phillipps’ mind. The singer-songwriter and leader of New Zealand band the Chills instilled his songs with looks back, roads ahead, and faded melodies that felt worn by yesterday and anxious about tomorrow. Even when he sang a simple love song, Phillipps swirled together past, present, and future in thoughtful phrases and bittersweet hooks.
On the final Chills album, Spring Board: The Early Unrecorded Songs, time looms especially large. Phillipps wrote these 20 tunes back in the 1980s, during the seven years his band existed before releasing their first album,1987’s Brave Words. In finally recording them, Phillipps had to grapple with his twentysomething self. “A 60-year-old man couldn’t just stick to the lyrics of those formative years,” he explained. “Some of the songs were just vague recollections, incomplete, only blossoming during recording.”
Time’s weight on Spring Board feels even heavier now that Phillipps is no longer with us, having passed away last June at age 61. It was a shock given his recent comebacks, both personally and musically. After struggling for years with Hepatitis C (contracted accidentally during heroin use) and at one point given months to live, Phillipps conquered the disease via a rather miraculous experimental drug program. (His recovery was depicted movingly in the 2019 documentary The Chills: The Triumph and Tragedy of Martin Phillipps.) After nearly 20 years without releasing an album, the Chills roared back in the mid-2010s, generating three excellent LPs and touring internationally.
It’s unclear exactly how Phillipps revised the songs on Spring Board before recording them, but it’s hard not to hear them in light of the turns his life took in the last 20 years. Take “Watching Old Home Movies,” a self-consciously retrospective song about seeing history through clear if bewildered eyes. “Projector rattles out my past/People over-exposed who move too fast,” he sings over an upbeat but melancholy melody, “As seen through tiny child’s eyes/Leaves me cold, sad, and wise.” During the wry “Such Self Pity,” he chides his former neediness, even referencing the “needle still stuck in my arm.” And on the chugging “Declaration,” his urgent exhortations to “sort things out/Set things straight” rhymes with his decision to organize and sell his vast collection of music and memorabilia.
At other points on Spring Board, Phillipps’ bouts with time could’ve been written, well, at any time. On the resolute “Juicy Creaming Soda,” Phillipps revisits a familiar theme of facing the past and shedding regrets: “When all the changes are made/Try to understand that the choice was mine.” During the album’s most hypnotic track, “If This World Was Made for Me,” he conjures a dream universe in which we all “open up our hearts and say exactly how we feel” (this fantasy also includes “24 hours of great TV”). Over a rushing swell of guitars in “Steel Skies,” he confronts the changing of the seasons, picking the darkness of winter over the heat of summer. “I Saw Your Silhouette,” a swinging meditation on encountering the specter of an old friend, expresses a haunting similar to the Chills’ signature song, “Pink Frost,” though it’s far sunnier than that wistful classic.
That musical brightness runs throughout Spring Board. Phillipps still doles out his share of aching melodies, but most songs here are shiny and bouncy, a reflection of both his later-life resurgence and the skill and confidence of the group around him. “I now have a band that has the capacity to do some great arrangements,” he insisted in one of his final interviews. “And I’ve got to make use of that.” The result is rich, even lush songs featuring 10 different guests augmenting the core Chills quintet. Nearly every track sounds optimistic.
The feeling is most striking on Spring Board’s closing track,“I Don’t Want to Live Forever,” a bounding, joyful song about rejecting immortality. After laying out his reasons (“I never wished for ways to shake my destiny…Cause what I’m here for is friends, art, and family”), Phillipps leads his bandmates in a chant of his final line: “I’m going to die alive!” That paradox makes perfect sense for Phillipps, who in 2014, during an interview with The Guardian’s Michael Hann, said bluntly, “If I’m around in 10 years, I think I’ll be very lucky.” Reminded of that quote almost exactly a decade later by The Press’ John Pearson, he could only reply, “Oh wow… well yes, apparently I am!” Phillipps would die just weeks later, but we’re surely lucky to have his music still very much alive on Spring Board.
