Singer Grant-Lee Phillips, standing the test of time

What's the measure of success for a musician? Fame arrives and departs with brain-numbing speed. Fortune, these days, rewards the savvy entrepreneur more often than the serious artist. Respect? It feels nice, but it doesn't pay the bills.

Occasionally, a musician finds himself in the unusual and, one might argue, enviable position of having just enough. Grant-Lee Phillips has a good guitar and a microphone. After he makes an album, he gets to make another one. There's also a sturdy house, an intact relationship, and three cats, which combined make him feel as if he's pretty much won the personal happiness lottery. During much of the '90s, Phillips's alternative roots-rock trio, Grant Lee Buffalo, was a critical darling; five years after calling it quits the band still has a devoted fan base, and Rhino Records is releasing "Storm Hymnal: Gems From the Vault of Grant Lee Buffalo" on Tuesday.

With the release this week of his lovely, lauded third solo album, "Virginia Creeper," on Zoe/Rounder, one can say with reasonable certainty that Phillips is a lifer in this business. And that's no small feat.

"I have the luxury of a certain amount of solitude and the privilege to have all sorts of experience," says Phillips, on the phone from his home in Los Angeles. "I get to keep going, and that's a real blessing."

In a fickle, fiscally stressed industry, the concept of a small, enduring career has new appeal.

"Grant's success is measured by the fact that he has a long-term record contract, he's got a dedicated and growing fan base, and he sells out shows," says Jeff Walker, head of artist development at Rounder Records. "A musician that can be out there making a living during this extremely difficult time, that's a success."

It's not what guitar-slinging teens in California's San Joaquin Valley dream of, to be sure. Neither did Phillips -- a rough-and-tumble rocker when he moved at 19 from Stockton to Los Angeles -- fantasize about a recurring role as a wandering troubadour on "Gilmore Girls." But there he is. There were psychological adjustments to be made along the way. And limitations to deal with. Phillips, who plays at T.T. the Bear's Place on Tuesday, describes his recent solo tours as "enforced minimalism." The trick is to find the silver lining.

"I'm just beginning to appreciate it," Phillips says. "[Being alone onstage] propels you to extremes. That's a fantastic thing. Although I hear all these parts floating around my head, when I write a song now, that's the first thing to go out the window."

Phillips likes to talk about his albums as blueprints for the future, the new one included. It's as if, in the artist's mind, each collection of songs materializes in order to direct him toward the next. Indeed, 2000's "Ladies' Love Oracle," Phillips's solo debut, was an accident, a clutch of sketches recorded in his buddy Jon Brion's basement, that Phillips subsequently decided to release. "Mobilize," out the following year, was a delirious, often brilliant experiment, the very sound of an artist urging himself to the edge of his imagination. But "Virginia Creeper" sounds profoundly settled. Phillips's ornate lyrics take on a deep glow set in rustic washes of fiddle and pedal-steel guitar, warm piano and banjo, and the result is such an organic and elegant articulation of a musical aesthetic, one is hard-pressed to hear the album as a prototype for anything but the beautiful music that it is.

Phillips produced the basic tracks live in the studio, recording over three days with a collective of about a dozen musicians dubbed
Go to www.boston.com/ae/music to hear audio clips of Grant-Lee Phillips's CD "Virginia Creeper."the Virginia Creepers, among them singer Cindy Wasserman, violinist Eric Gorfain, bassist Sebastian Steinberg, and keyboardist Zac Rae. "Choosing the ensemble was sort of like casting a movie," he says. "These are people who are arguably at their best when thrown into a situation where they have to respond. I was banking on the fact that all of them would bring a spontaneity to it. That this person will click with that person. We didn't rehearse a lot. There was no opportunity to overplay. I realized that all my favorite albums were made that way: Van Morrison's `Astral Weeks.' Lots of the Motown stuff. Those early Elvis Costello albums. Sun Records. `Hey, we're making an album at 2 a.m. tonight. Come on down!' That's what intrigues me these days, the things created with an intensity and simplicity that stand up over time." Maybe that's why Phillips, who turned 40 last year, finds himself drawn to the past. Water and women keep turning up, too. Songs like "Lily-A-Passion," "Calamity Jane," and "Susanna Little" are pop tunes with tendrils that reach back to some vague bygone place, where wild girls from the wrong side of the river are full of vinegar and glitter, and moonlit women rise from swamps singing a heron's song. Phillips tells stories, good old-fashioned stories, with romance and plot and history and poetry in them.

"If I'm going to stand onstage for an hour or two and ask for your commitment, I'm not going to take you on my dream trip or throw purple clouds against the wall," he says. "I'm obliged to offer you something real."

Phillips's favorite songs on "Virginia Creeper" are "Far End of the Night" and "Mona Lisa," melancholy odes to the painful parts of the passage of time. He acknowledges being "obsessed with all things decaying."

"What I'm most attracted to is the stories that my mind instantly conjures up when I pick up an old hat," Phillips says. "There are spores from the must of old book pages lodged in my lungs. I guess for me it comes down to music being a kind of link to our ancestry. Our stories, our life experiences, are in our songs. And where there's decay there's a sign of life moving forward."

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com.