Thirty years ago Liz Phair released the indie rock masterpiece Exile in Guyvillegoing to enrich the canon of weird girls. Liz was a normal 20-year-old nerd from the Wicker Park indie scene in Chicago. She went out every night to see hipster bands, frequented bars, collected disappointments in love. In that sort of City of men, a Guyville in fact, she was one of many, but she had a secret that no one knew: when she came home, she wrote songs about what happened to her and recorded them with her four-track, in the bedroom, with the guitar.
She then began publishing self-produced cassette tapes hidden behind the pseudonym Girly-Sound. And there a curious thing happened: the tapes started passing from hand to hand, whoever heard them dubbed them for friends. That’s how I discovered Liz Phair in early 1992 when a friend put me up Flower in a cassette. It was strange to hear this flat, nasal voice, like an ordinary girl who, immersed in the rustle created by her tape, sang lyrics full of sarcasm and lust: “I’ll fuck you and your girlfriend too”. No one had any idea who Girly-Sound was, but we were all curious.
Those songs have become Exile in Guyville, one of the best rock albums ever released. “I’ve never been in a recording studio in my life,” Phair recalled last year. “And I’ve never performed on stage before. I’d just played some songs in my bedroom.” Thirty years later, Exile is always fortissimo thanks to classics like Fuck and Run, Mesmerizing And Divorce Song. Phair sings about the disappointments of love, sex, anger and independence, with a midwestern anti-rockstar mumble. Phair was tearing apart the “fuckboy” category before the term was even invented.
Phair celebrated the anniversary by releasing an unedited version of Miss Lucy recorded during the sessions Exilebut dropped from the album to make room for Flower. It’s a little Girly-Sound gem built on a nursery rhyme that Phair and Brad Wood have recovered and remixed. This autumn the artist will also be on tour to celebrate the anniversary: with his band, he will play the entire album and other hits of his. He also participates in the tribute to Nick Drake, The Endless Colored Waysto be released on July 7th, re-reading Free Ridea classic taken from Pink Moon.
It had never felt anything like it Exile. A self-proclaimed rock star, Phair was a fan who had crossed her boundaries by picking up a guitar to write her own songs and express her truest emotions with sarcasm, honesty and a ruthless eye for detail. Part of the feminist rock trend of the 90s (in 1993 the beautiful records by PJ Harvey, Breeders, Bratmobile, Helium, Bikini Kill, L7 were released), Exile it was conceived as a song-by-song response to the Rolling Stones’ 1972 classic Exile on Main St. But in the end it sounds original: it’s her, without filters, who gets furious living her twenty years. “It’s the age of disillusionment and anger,” Phair told me, “and I believe in Guyville there’s a lot. If you’re not pissed off in your 20s, it means you don’t care what’s going on around you.”
Guyville has become more important than ever in the last decade. Like the protagonists of these songs, too Exile she was a twenty-year-old with an intense and crazy life. No one noticed when Phair released a special 15th anniversary edition of the album in 2008. She also shot a documentary about the album, Guyville Redux, but nobody watched it. Fifteen years ago, there wasn’t much interest in rebels with guitars (other times).
Meanwhile the album has been reborn, reaching out to a new generation of fans. Phair’s label Matador released the box in 2019 Girly Sound to Guyvillewhich collects the legendary tapes of Girly sound dating back to 1991. Millennial and Gen Z fans understand Phair more than anyone else. For those who make music Exile represents a standard of emotional realism to be aspired to.
Phair was convinced that no one would ever listen to her songs and that’s why she felt free to address such personal topics. “There I really sing from the most intimate and private corner of my room,” Phair explains. «I think this is one of the magic ingredients of Guyville: I was absolutely sure that I would never go on stage. I was like, ‘I’ll never do that, I really don’t want to, what a bad idea that would be.’ People dream of performing live in front of an audience, but this album was written from the perspective of someone who wanted it to remain a secret.”
For Liz, and the Guyville-goers she sang about, the boom in her little DIY project came as a shock. «I thought few people would hear the record», she says, «maybe, in the craziest hypothesis, 1500 people, you know? I felt safe knowing my family and friends would never hear the songs. I was convinced that I would talk to like-minded people instead of saying, “How screwed up this Midwestern girl is, you wouldn’t believe it!”. Which is what some of my cousins claimed. They said, “Jesus, Elizabeth’s freaked out!” It felt like my life was being blown up by a record and that obviously didn’t sit well with me.”
The funniest joke in the 2008 documentary is made by Nash Kato of Urge Overkill, the biggest rock star of the Wicker Park scene, as well as one of the inspirers of the record (Guyville was the title of an Urge Overkill song and Kato cut the cover photo, taken in a passport photo booth). At the time he had barely any idea who this Liz was: ‘Does she write songs? Do you have a surname?”
Exile it sold 200,000 copies, despite being released on an independent label: an exceptional case for the time. Radio and MTV ignored it, except for a few passages of Never Said to 120 Minutes. But, surprisingly, the record became a worldwide success, because it touched a raw nerve for so many people. For many of us it was the album we’ve been waiting for forever. As Phair explains, “I’ve been waiting a lifetime to say these things.”
He enjoys role-playing, enjoying his Mick Jagger cosplay and ranging from romantic love to the coldest and most calculating lust. In Girls! Girls! Girls! she is a sexual predator who takes advantage of every man she meets. But the song comes next Fuck and Run, where he confesses: “I want all that old stupid stuff, the letters and the sodas.” «I wanted to show the contradiction, I wanted to outline a typology of complex woman. It’s weird stuff, but I took it very seriously at the time.”
One of those impressed by the original Girly-Sound tapes is Brad Wood, a local producer who played drums in the legendary Chicago band Shrimp Boat. He helped Phair create an album that in the hands of any other producer would have been a disaster. When they engraved Exile in his studio, the two have chosen the path of simplicity. No bands: Phair, Wood and guitarist/engineer Casey Rice played almost everything. No one has ever been able to reproduce the nervous and dry sound of Exile. “Credit goes to Brad,” Phair says. “He taught me a lot about minimalism.”
The music revolves around Phair’s thin vocals and out-of-the-box guitar. In Fuck and Run or Mesmerizing there is not even bass. Wood was inspired by Colossal Youth by the Young Marble Giants, the 1980 British post-punk classic, but also a Laser Guided Melodies of the Spiritualized. Phair, then, is so praised as a storyteller and underrated as a guitarist. “I think he finally has more credit now,” Wood told me. “It took a while, but I’ve always said she’s brilliant, on guitar. In over 30 years of activity I have never recorded anyone else who has an approach to the instrument like hers. Her chords are built in a way that she’s closer to Glenn Branca than Joni Mitchell.”
Another key addition to the sound is his flat midwestern voice. “My poor mum gave me some singing lessons recently,” Phair says. “I have a nasal and singsong timbre and there’s nothing more to do now. Everyone likes you, but I hate it when I hear from you.’
Since its release in the summer of 1993, Exile it was the target of controversy and, as it became a cultural phenomenon, it aroused increasingly bad and misogynistic reactions. «I had no one by my side», recalls Phair, «I didn’t have a manager, nor a svengali. I was free, I wasn’t owned by any man, and it was strange.” Guyville residents did not appreciate the message. “I was rebelling against ingrained expectations, speaking, indeed shouting into the wind, standing on the edge of the precipice. In a way, it was what I thought of doing when I was on stage, even if there were people in front of me. “I will try to ignore you, while I talk to the wind”».
There’s a well-known photo, taken by Marty Perez, of Phair in his early days. She’s on a Chicago club stage, frowning male faces in front of her. She comes alive as soon as photography is mentioned. “That was just the wind I was shouting against. Those were the faces I saw every day and every time I wanted to say something in music. They are the faces I see every time I want to do something different in my career. That stuff didn’t end up with Guyville, no. Once the record was finished, I realized it was just the beginning. I built an entire career with those faces in front of me».
And yet today, in 2023, Exile in Guyville is a record more appreciated and loved than ever. To Phair’s surprise, the album inspired a whole new generation of songwriters, from Soccer Mommy’s Sophie Allison to Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis. Phair was the first heroine of Snail Mail’s Lindsey Jordan. In high school she even started a tribute band called the Lizard Phair.
“I envy their confidence and awareness,” admits Phair. “It always happens to me, when I look at millennials and Generation Z and I see young artists as I was: they are so complete. They have a real spirit of autonomy that I lacked».
“I remember when I discovered the record,” Marisa Dabice of Mannequin Pussy told me last year. “It was just about what I was feeling. It was one of those moments where you feel like someone has found your inner voice and put your emotions into song. There are things on that record that I’ve never heard a woman express before, except in my own head.”
Phair always hoped that Exile became an inspiration to other women to tell their own stories. “This is an appeal to all girls who are able to fight,” he said in the first article published about her on Rolling Stone, in 1993. “Go out and get busy. There aren’t enough female voices in popular culture. It’s a fucking crime.” Her wish is finally coming true.
Phair could have squeezed the Guyville formula to infinity, but he kept changing, making music that reflected the various stages of his life. Whip Smart is on the podium with Exilethanks to gems that have always been underestimated such as May Queen, Crater Lake and the title track. Whitechocolatespacegg 1998’s album tends to speak to new parents, while 2003’s self-titled album is for those going through a divorce. She has written an autobiography entitled Horror Stories. He also worked again with Wood to achieve the excellent Soberish (2021), the one with the jaunty tune Bad Kitty. But Exile remains the core of his legend for having set a new standard of bravery and emotional honesty that has remained unchanged ever since. Here because Exile is an album that has been making people feel less alone for 30 years.
From Rolling Stone US.
