Sam Phillips fans have reason to celebrate this fall. She has a new mini-album out, called Human Contact Is Never Easy, which includes four songs that may wind up on a new album, called World On Sticks, she expects to release in 2017. You can read my review of the mini-album in the New Release Roundup from November 25, but it’s an impressive collection of songs. It includes a live rendition of “Reflecting Light,” which deserves to be called a classic song, and that’s included at the end of the podcast. It’s also featured in Gilmore Girls: A Year In the Life, the reunion series that recently debuted on Netflix. It was an emotional moment for Phillips, and interesting for her to see it presented as a love song. We talk a bit about that, and writing the “La La Songs” that were used as interstitial music on the original show and the reunion. We also talked about songwriting, and the unique way she built the news songs, the fragility of the modern world, playing live, the way the new Gilmore Girls ended, and much more. You can listen to it below or find it on iTunes, Google Play, and wherever good podcasts are downloaded.