Liz Phair
Exile in Guyville


Liz Phair had no band, no scene, no buzz. She was just a cool Chicago girl who liked attention, didn’t give a rat’s ovaries about folk music and wanted to rock like the guys did—the world was crawling with these girls in 1993, yet as an audience they were, shall we say, underserviced. Because Phair was also some kind of genius, she made the jump from fan to performer like it was no sweat. “Wild and unwise/I wanna be mesmerizing, too,” she sang, and people were quickly mesmerized. It was shocking to hear her invade the gray-sweater world of indie rock with lurid sentiments like, “I want to be your blowjob queen,” sung in a flat, geeky, matter-of-fact deadpan.

Her masterpiece, Exile in Guyville, remains full of surprises—so funny, so sly, so fragile, with Phair’s dry, bemused Peppermint Patty mumble making listeners strain to hear candid confessions in lyrics that turn out to be outrageous jokes or cryptic riddles. “Divorce Song” and “Fuck and Run” are grim views of post-college relationships, but “Johnny Sunshine”—what the hell is up with that song? What did the boy in “Mesmerizing” whisper in her ear, and why did he throw an egg? Just how big is that “Glory” guy’s tongue, anyway?

She gives no answers on this 15th-­anniversary edition. Instead, there are four unreleased tracks (none consequential) and a hilariously inept making-of documentary DVD that Phair directed. It’s like one of those VH1 Classic Albums shows, except without live footage or video clips from the early days. She interviews a random batch of business associates (new label boss Dave Matthews), Chicago celebs (John Cusack, Steve Albini, Ira Glass) and a small cast of so-that’s-where-they-are-now ’90s rockers—way to stay upright on a couch, drummer from Urge Overkill!

The funniest scene comes when she confesses that she wrote the album about her obsessive crush on a local scenester, Urge Overkill guitarist Nash Kato. He calls her Lizzy, admits he had no idea what her last name was at the time and gives her an awkwardly sweet “congratulations, baby” hug at the end—he’s like Harry Dean Stanton to her Molly Ringwald, except for the whole blowjob-queen thing. He also reveals how he inspired the racy nipple-peak cover photo by talking her into taking off her shirt at a local bar with a photo booth. Aaaawwww …

Phair’s killer one-liners always get the lion’s share of the attention, but it’s the melodies and arrangements that keep this album vibrant. Her chatty suburban­-Illinois vocals are bracingly blunt—you quickly know this woman didn’t hang around New York, London or L.A., which is one of the reasons people felt they’d been waiting all their lives to hear her. Producer Brad Wood knew how to turn Phair’s wispy voice into recorded music; he tricked out her songs with watery guitar, snappy drums and spare bits of bongo or maracas, never letting the music crowd her. “I couldn’t sing back then,” she tells Wood in the documentary, and it’s like, well, exactly—he’s still the only producer she’s worked with who let her mumble rather than trying to make her over-sing in a rock voice she doesn’t have.

For a significant chunk of her audience, and not just her female audience, part of the appeal of Exile in Guyville has always been the fantasy of being one of Liz’s girls, dishing about boys and bands and movie stars and religion. So it’s strange to learn that Liz didn’t have any girls. From the documentary, it looks like the characters she invented in her songs were the only friends she had. Sad—but it does give a vivid picture of the loneliness that pervades the album, which is part of why the songs hit so hard, even now. Kurt Cobain at least had a band to talk to, but the girl who sang Exile in Guyville still sounds like an exile, looking for somewhere she might belong, and making that place come true by imagining it so clearly.

Download “Mesmerizing,” “Flower,” “Gunshy”