Liz Phair remembers very well the outrage caused by her desicion to embrace Matrix-produced pop on her self-titled 2003 album. "I would put on the record and just be like, 'It's perfectly pleasant. It ain't gonna hurt you!'" she says. "I think everybody's a little too tight-assed in the music world about staying in their camp."
For the tenatively titled Somebody's Miracle, which she recorded in February with producer John Alagia, Phair says she's scuffed up the shiny finish -- a bit. "I wouldn't say it sounds like old Liz Phair but it's definately more band-driven than pop. The last record had a lot more shebang in the production; this has a lot more emphasis on the songs."
These songs are heavy with relationship themes. On the title track, Phair watches a couple on the street in "their own little universe". "Stop By" is about a middle-aged woman in love with a man who's holding back. "Table for One" was written from the perspective of Phair's brother, when he was a teenage alcoholic.
The new album picks up where Liz Phair left off -- with Phair, 38, infatuated with youthful men. "Lazy Dreamer" is about my boyfriend, who's younger than I am", she says. "Sometimes he reminds me of a teenager. Some men have that boyishness; they're like puppies."
[From page 30]
Spin 100 Greatest Albums 1985-2005
15
LIZ PHAIR
Exile in Guyville
Matador, 1993
When indie-minded label execs went searching for America, Liz Phair told them, "You're looking at it, babe." An upwardly mobile slacker who taught herself to play guitar, the 5'2" Midwesterner stood for something unmistakably patriotic: the idea that an artist who defended her DIY ideals never had to apologize for wanting to make shitloads of money. In fact, she boldly cashed her first Matador check at the expense of those who popularized that dream: Guyville was a song-by-song response to the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St. and a direct missive against the Chicago scenesters who treated her like a band girlfriend. "My record was a literal deconstruction of the male rock paradigm," Phair says. "Plus, I could barely play guitar or sing, which was very fetching back then."
Guyville's untrained musicianship and antistructuralist arrangements sounded like a form of social protest, and Phair's lack of techie-speak chops became a creative advantage in the studio. "Since Liz was a painter, she would use visuals to describe the sound she wanted," recalls producer Brad Wood. "The main guitar on 'Mesmerizing' was supposed to sound dark brown." With short-circuiting amp buzz and muddy strumming doodled in the margins of each song, Guyville was a commercial success that sounded as if it came from a psychological underground -- from the id of a "blowjob queen" whose idea of gender equality was a man who would "circle the cherry" in return. The album was, in other words, one big secret unearthed onto alt-rock's expanding Main Street, made all the more subversive by the Rolling Stones never acknowledging its existence. Says Phair: "I think they think I did something bad." --- MELISSA MAERZ