Liz Phair

In 1993 singer-songwriter and guitarist Liz Phair released her debut album, Exile in Guyville. With her blunt, emotionally honest, and often sexually explicit lyrics, unconventional guitar chords, and atypical pop-music structure, Phair became an alternative-rock sensation. Moreover, Exile in Guyville became one of the most celebrated rock albums of the 1990s. Since her debut, Phair has released several albums that have experimented with different music styles and been met with varying success, all the while continuing to craft songs that touch on society’s perceptions of women in the male-dominated world of rock.

Childhood and education

Phair was adopted at birth by John Phair, a medical student at Yale University who became a professor of medicine at Northwestern University and a renowned AIDS researcher, and Nancy Phair (née Routt), a graduate of Wellesley College who became a historian at the Art Institute of Chicago. Phair has an older brother, Phillip, who was also adopted. Her family lived in Cincinnati, Ohio, during her early childhood and spent a year in Sheffield, England, while her father was on sabbatical. In 1976 they settled in the affluent Chicago suburb of Winnetka. When she was in the eighth grade, Phair began taking guitar lessons and was encouraged by her teacher to write her own songs.

In high school Phair began to rebel against her parents’ expectations that she replicate the comfortable upper-middle-class life they had created for her and her brother. In an interview with Vulture in 2019, Phair related, “I had a people-pleasing personality. And my older brother was in trouble so much that I was the designated good child. There wasn’t much room for my resentments and rebellion. That built up until I exploded.…I felt like there was not going to be a payoff for being a good girl, or being smart, or going to an Ivy League school.”

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Nonetheless, after graduating from high school in 1985, she returned to Ohio to study art history and studio art at Oberlin College. However, there was a thriving band scene at Oberlin, and she hung out with local rock musicians and began secretly recording her own songs in her dorm room. During her junior year, she spent time in New York City as an intern for artists Nancy Spero and Leon Golub, where she met musician Tae Won Yu of the band Kicking Giant.

Girly-Sound

After earning a bachelor’s degree in 1989, Phair moved to San Francisco with a group of friends. When musician Chris Brokaw of the band Codeine came to visit her roommate, he convinced Phair to play her songs for him and was so impressed that he dared Phair to make him a tape of the songs.

Phair moved back home with her parents and tried to support herself by selling charcoal drawings. She also lived for a time in Chicago’s bohemian Wicker Park neighborhood, nicknamed “Guyville” because of its male-oriented rock scene. Meanwhile, she bought a four-track tape recorder and made three cassettes that would become known as the Girly-Sound tapes, featuring Phair’s vocals, low-volume electric guitar, and layers of harmonizing overdubs recorded in her bedroom at her parents’ house.

Phair sent the tapes to Brokaw and Yu. In 2018 Brokaw recalled to Newsweek, “There was an urgency and a directness about [Phair’s] lyrics that you find in literature and in films, but it was pretty rare to find it in rock music. And it was certainly rare to hear from a female voice.” Brokaw and Yu duplicated the tapes and sent them to other underground artists and people in the music industry.

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Exile in Guyville

Eventually, her tapes were reviewed in fan magazines, and Phair was offered a $3,000 advance from the independent label Matador Records, which she used to record the 18 songs on Exile in Guyville. When the album was cut, producer and drummer Brad Wood worked with guitarist and sound engineer Casey Rice to create a minimal sound that highlighted Phair’s vocals and guitar riffs without the support of a back-up band. The album sold more than 200,000 copies, unheard of at the time for an indie-label release, and Spin magazine selected it as album of the year.

Phair’s profane self-assured lyrics, naked ambition, and feminist perspective in songs such as “Flower,” “F*ck and Run,” and “Help Me Mary” earned her many dedicated fans. In interviews, Phair revealed that her album was intended to be a response to the Rolling Stones’ iconic double album Exile on Main St. (1972). Many critics interpreted her songs as taking direct aim at the sexism of indie-rock scenes such as those she had experienced in Wicker Park. In 2019 she told Vulture, “There’s something about the society of men that thinks they have it all dialed in.…Exile was about believing in my perspective on life, against considerable pressure to conform to their takes on things. It’s about showing them that I can play their game and do all right in it.”

Exile in Guyville also sparked a backlash among some sectors of the alternative-rock community who expressed resentment about Phair’s quick rise to stardom and privileged background. Her most notorious critic was producer and musician Steve Albini, who called Phair and several other acts that had crossed over to commercial success “frauds” (and worse) and accused them of a “calculated and overbearing hype barrage.”

Whip-Smart and Whitechocolatespaceegg

Phair’s second album, Whip-Smart (1994), incorporated the same lo-fi production of her debut album built up with multilayered vocals and occasional synthesizer sound effects. Whip-Smart debuted at number 27 on the Billboard 200 chart and remained on the chart for 17 weeks. The album’s lead single, “Supernova,” reached number 6 on Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks (now called Alternative Airplay) chart, and the title track reached number 24 on the same chart. “Supernova” also earned Phair her first Grammy Award nomination, for best female rock vocal performance. In 1995 she was nominated in that category again for “Don’t Have Time,” a song for the soundtrack of the film Higher Learning.

Whitechocolatespaceegg, Phair’s third full-length album, was released in 1998 after being delayed because of disagreements with Capitol Records (which was distributing the album) about its lack of radio-friendly content. Phair had also married and had a child in the interim between her second and third albums; the title Whitechocolatespaceegg was inspired by a dream she had while pregnant with her son.

Whitechocolatespaceegg steps away from the minimal sound of her previous records with a more polished and sweeping sound featuring keyboards and an organ. The album reached number 35 on the Billboard 200 chart. Although it was not as successful as her previous records, the single “Polyester Bride,” with its sticky hooks and Phair’s perfectly delivered high notes, received its share of airplay.

Other albums and projects

Shifting away from alternative music, Phair’s eponymous fourth album, released in 2003, propelled her up the pop charts. “Why Can’t I” was her biggest hit from the album, climbing to number 10 on Billboard’s Pop Airplay list. Yet the album also received some of her worst reviews, including one from Pitchfork that gave it a rating of zero. She went on to release Somebody’s Miracle (2005), which offers a more traditional rock sound, and Funstyle (2010), which features some of her early Girly-Sound material. In 2018 Matador released Girly-Sound to Guyville, a 25th-anniversary box set that includes all of the songs from Exile in Guyville and 38 of the 40 original Girly-Sound songs, each entirely remastered. The following year Phair published a memoir, Horror Stories.

In 2021 Phair released Soberish, an album of new material that reteamed Phair with producer Brad Wood and received critical acclaim, with Rolling Stone calling it a reminder of why Phair is “one of the most important songwriters of the last 30 years.”