Liz Phair on Exile in Guyville, Determination and the 30-Year Emotional Relevance of Her Music

It’s 1991 and a 24-year-old Liz Phair has freshly graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio. She’s determined to escape the ordinariness of college life to kickstart her rock ‘n’ roll life as a singer-songwriter in San Francisco, but it isn’t quite the dream run she envisioned. So, broke and disheartened, she returns to Chicago, the city and the home she was raised in, and begins to record and self-release cassettes under the moniker “Girly-Sound.” Three self-produced releases later, Matador Records recognizes the bristling, vulnerable, snarly wonderfulness of this upstart talent and signs her.

Her debut album was an audacious statement in every sense. Amidst the aggressive, bare-chested ballsiness of hardcore and the greasy-haired, cardigan wearing men of burgeoning Seattle grunge, Phair had the gall to drop Exile in Guyville in 1993, a double-album that paralleled a female voice alongside the Rolling Stones‘ iconic Exile on Main St.

When she released Whip Smart a year later, Phair was riding a confident wave of lo-fi, DIY production acumen. The 1994 classic chronicles the stages of a relationship: meet the man, fall for him, get him, realize it’s not the idyllic love story you hoped for, leave him, go back, and the story begins again. 30 years later, Whip-Smart isn’t receiving the high-class treatment that Guyville and its ripple effects were honored with. Last year, a double-LP vinyl reissue of her debut album was followed by Phair’s live tour, in which she played the album in full (plus newer songs) throughout November and December.

Whip-Smart built upon Phair’s confidence in a studio (as opposed to the tape recorder she’d used to demo Guyville. There are multi-layered harmonies, a subtly slicker production and, while seemingly not intentional, there was a poppier hookiness to “Whip-Smart” tracks that attracted radio, MTV and even scored her a GRAMMY nomination. Like her debut, Phair brought Brad Wood back on board to co-produce, but the album is indubitably directed by her. From the dreamy “Nashville” to the anthemic breakup song “Go West,” the album is reflective and unflinchingly candid. Only “Jealousy” rip-roars from the speakers as a full-blown rocker—and befits such a chaotic emotional state. A lesson hard-learned, the final track on Whip-Smart, “May Queen,” counsels youngsters to watch out for, and steer clear of, “rock ’n’ roll Ken dolls.”

Like Exile in Guyville and its stories—a man who can’t be satisfied with one woman, or any woman, nor any amount of success and money in “6’1” (“I bet you’ve long since passed understanding what it takes to be satisfied”) or defending her innocence in a gossip-riddled, cliquey small town on “Never Said” (“All I know is I’m clean as a whistle baby, I didn’t let the cat out”)—Whip-Smart stands up all these decades later. Its musical vitality and lyrical honesty are as impactful today as they were then, whether it’s the homage to romance, or letting it go, or just the no frills production that has inspired vulnerable, flawed and fabulous artists like Courtney Barnett, Soccer Mommy, and Bully.

Phair arguably set herself a nearly insurmountable benchmark with Guyville—I mean, how do you top a double-album feminist, grunge-rock version of a Rolling Stones album? With the hooky, harmonic Whip-Smart, which turns 30 today, Phair did just that. Her “Whitechocolatespaceegg” remains a cult classic, and when she released Soberish in 2021, it was solid proof that she’d lost none of her candor, humor and melodic prowess.

Phair is on a writer’s retreat when she calls me one morning in late August 2023. She can’t reveal where she is, since she’s told her family and friends she’s out of contact for the next month while she completes her second memoir, a follow-up to 2019’s Horror Stories. Though she’s not 25 years old anymore, it’s obvious that the music and lyrics of Guyville still hold emotional relevance to her. “What’s scary is that, maybe, they are resonating more now than they have in a few decades,” she reflects. “I feel like I have come full circle in a way. Obviously, I’m not in the same place that I was as a person—but a lot of the stresses in life and the alienation, the rolling back of Roe Vs. Wade, and that experience of being in a man’s world…”

She takes a moment to clarify her thoughts and then, as is Phair’s superpower, she finds a beautiful and poignant metaphor that puts everything into perspective: “When people talk about ghost stories, the veil between two worlds is thin and permeable. I feel like the veil between Guyville and today is thinner. I can touch it, I can remember it and I can feel it.”

The morning of our interview, Phair is painting a poster artwork as part of her upcoming tour’s VIP package. Though she’s established a long career as an indie-come-mainstream rock queen, she’s still a visual artist at heart. Indeed, even as she stepped into the recording studio at 25, she still considered herself a painter and designer rather than a musician. It was liberating, she recalls. “It was a lark to me to record something,” she continues. “I could afford to be irreverent and go ‘let’s just do this.’ I’d been around musicians in college and I’d been a musician since I was young, but mainly my ego was tied up in visual art. So, I was nervous, vulnerable and scared to record but it didn’t block my producer brain. To me, it was an art project and I well knew how to do an art project.”

Phair threw herself into the unknown and took on lessons in producing, engineering and crafting an album from producer Brad Wood and lead guitarist Casey Rice while sticking to her guns as far as the concept—a call-and-response to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St—was concerned. I’d read interviews where Rice and Wood recalled that Phair was absolutely confident and forthright on how she wanted her album to sound. They hadn’t mentioned anything about nervousness. “I had that artist’s confidence, but I was definitely so self-conscious,” she counters. “They are maybe forgetting what it was like to get me to track a take. I was so quiet, I was very scared all the time to be—as we all are, to expose your own creation, the lyrics and to sing it in front of people, but I have a really strong determination.”

Phair is a natural performer. She mimics herself at 25, barely whispering responses as she listens back to a song she’s meant to be tracking. She is laugh-out-loud funny, and it is easy to see what Wood must have seen in her 30 years ago: a force to be reckoned with, and a lot of fun to hang out with. In fact, it was Wood who convinced Phair that Matador was the ideal label for her to approach about a record deal and she cold-called them, sent her Girly-Tapes cassettes and was duly faxed a contract for her debut album. The initial $5,000 budget was doubled when she proposed a double-album. When Phair says she’s determined, she backs it up with talent and chutzpah.

The resulting Exile in Guyville has been remastered twice now and the 30th anniversary reissue presented the 2018 remastered tracks along with one of the outtakes, “Miss Lucy,” which was replaced with “Flower” on the final tracklist. The remastered versions have stayed entirely true to the creative choices made on the original recording, and Phair has no regrets about what was cut and what made it. “I totally stand by my decisions. There is not a single song on any record that I would quibble with it being on the record,” she confirms. “I’m very, very, very dedicated to knowing that I want what’s on the record on there.”

If Phair had to change anything, she concedes that she’d “go back and change parts.” “Perhaps you don’t need an endless outro after all, and there are songs on many other albums that I’d tweak, but I’ve never put a song on an album that I didn’t want on there,” she furthers. To that end, she’s got a treasure trove of half-finished, discarded songs—or the remnants of songs—that she’s had the confidence to let go of. The ability to let go has been a process refined by maturity and a sharpening of her priorities, she tells me, before throwing out a final, poignant Phair-philosophy.

“I’d love to empty my closets of all the songs I have half-written or not finished for some reason; they’re all my babies,” she says. “It’s a mystery why some things work out and some don’t. The reason I’ve been as successful as I have been is that I know when to let it go. I can fight all the way to the end and be stubborn. In fact, the label was freaking out on Soberish when I was still changing things the night before. You gotta break some eggs to make an omelet! It’s a superpower, I think. If anything stops you from moving forward, it’s your enemy. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t slow down, but anything that stops you going forward—like fighting too much over what’s not coming together—you have to let it go.”

I concede that it has taken me decades to accept when my writing work isn’t going where I want it to, or I get rejections or refusals. ‘Oh, I’ve fucked up so many times!’ I tell Phair. “You’ve just summed up my whole career,” she asserts with a chuckle. “We don’t get to talk to each other enough about how we make things. I have a great willingness to enjoy the mess for the end product.”