Phonons are Goldstone bosonbosons of a spontaneously broken spacetime symmetry (see e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9609466). Typically, one breaks Galileo's (or Poincare') boosts and traslations but the resulting number of Goldstones is less or equal than the number of broken generators (e.g. a spacetime dependent traslation is not independent than a boost). Phonons are spin-0 and become strongly coupled, as every Goldstone boson, to the scale (e.g lattice scale) where the underlying microscopic degrees of freedom can be excited.
Massless Spin-1 bosons are instead described by mean of gauge invariance which is a bookkeeping 'symmetry' which erase all interactioninteractions that would either give the photon a mass or lower the cutoff of the theory making themit strongly coupled at quite large distances. One can try to connect spin-1 massless gauge bosons with Goldstone bosons by breaking spacetime symmetries with a spin-1 order parameter. These are very speculative ideaideas that have a tiny chance to work only in Poincare' broken spacetimespacetimes.