Emerging from the indie-rock boys club of Chicago in the early 1990s, Liz Phair made her name with her 1993 masterpiece Exile in Guyville, a song-by-song response to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street. Exile in Guyville was a whip-smart double-album full of sharp melodies and blunt truths about female sexuality, longing, and power. It made her a star. This year, to celebrate Exile in Guyville’s 25th anniversary, Phair’s label Matador released Girly-Sound to Guyville, a collection of the home-recorded tapes that she made leading up to Guyville which offer a detailed look at the process and genius behind a feminist rock classic.
In this interview, Phair sits down with Pitchfork Contributing Editor Jenn Pelly at the Chicago Athletic Association to discuss her career and an upcoming memoir called Horror Stories.
Elia Einhorn: Welcome. I’m Elia Einhorn and this is In Sight Out, a series by Pitchfork that explores new perspectives on music, art, and culture. This edition of In Sight Out features a conversation between Pitchfork contributing editor Jenn Pelly and Liz Phair, and took place at the Chicago Athletic Association in downtown Chicago. It was recorded the day after Phair completed a recent U.S. tour.
Emerging from the indie rock boys club of Chicago in the early 1990s, Liz Phair made her name with her ’93 masterpiece, Exile In Guyville, a song-by-song response to the Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main Street. Exile In Guyville was a whip-smart double album full of sharp melodies and blunt truths about female sexuality, longing, and power. It made her a star. This year, Exile In Guyville turns 25. To celebrate, Phair’s label, Matador, released a collection of the home-recorded tapes that she made leading up to recording the album.
Released under the name Girly Sound, they offer a detailed look at the process and genius behind a feminist rock classic. Throughout her career, Phair has made audacious jumps between alternative rock and mainstream pop, achieving her biggest radio hit in 2003 with the single “Why Can’t I?” She is currently at work on new music, and a memoir called Horror Stories. Now, Jenn Pelly and Liz Phair are in conversation. Check it out.
Jenn Pelly: Thank you all for coming. We’re in Chicago, where you’re from. When was the last time you lived in Chicago?
Liz Phair: 1999. I lived in Lincoln Park on Geneva Terrace. I don’t know. I had a toddler son, and we would walk down to Sunshine Park and stuff and go to the zoo and do all that kind of stuff. It was freezing cold, he’d take his mittens off and I’d put them back on and then ladies would be like, “That baby needs mittens.” I’m like, “Yeah.”
Jenn Pelly: How does it feel like to be in Chicago now after living in Los Angeles for so many years?
Liz Phair: I actually come back very often, and I always have. I’m here about four or five times a year since I left. My parents still live in my childhood home up in Winnetka and my son grew up coming back and running around the neighborhood. I would say I have easily as good of a social life here as I do in Los Angeles. So I don’t feel like I left, but that was for the business. That was really for ... In L.A., I find, and you can come at me with this, but there’s a much bigger chunk of the economy for creative work. And so, you can move laterally. You don’t have to just be a musician, you can sort of move side to side. There’s a lot more money there for creative work.
Jenn Pelly: Do you have a favorite Chicago artist of all time?
Liz Phair: I’m thinking of Ed Paskey right now. I’m thinking of visual art, someone I interned for when I was still planning to be a visual artist and starting to work as an adult, and I interned for him. Favorite Chicago music artist, I’m going to go just randomly tonight because we did “Turning Japanese” last night and Material Issue was opening for us at the Metro. I’m going to say Material Issue today, because it was super meaningful to me to revisit that.
I stood up, I don’t know, some of you probably were there last night, but I stood up on stage and had to confess. Jim Ellison was the lead singer of this great, great trio, power pop trio, who were the people that I looked up to when I was in the Wicker Park music scene, and he passed away. He took his own life at a moment that felt impulsive, and the guilt that I’ve carried, I’ve never played the songs we recorded until last night. That’s the first time I ... and it was great. Mike was running around with his cymbals, and it was hilarious. It worked out wonderfully.
Jenn Pelly: If someone wanted to get into that band, do you have a starting point or record that people should check out?
Liz Phair: Oh, I’m terrible with names of records and stuff. There’s one, I mean, I think it’s a white background. The three of them, just check out Material Issue. They really only had two or three before Jim’s passing. They’re all good. They’re all good.
Jenn Pelly: So last night was the final day of your tour for the year?
Liz Phair: No.
Jenn Pelly: That’s enough for the year.
Liz Phair: No. No. No. No. No. No, not at all. I [inaudible] this morning and they’re already booking me on stuff for the summer without my knowledge. What's up with that?
Jenn Pelly: But for a little while.
Liz Phair: I know I have a week.
Jenn Pelly: I was wondering, who are the bands that you’re playing with right now, those people?
Liz Phair: Oh, the band members?
Jenn Pelly: Yeah.
Liz Phair: The musicians that I’m playing with? They are, I’m so very, very fond of them. Okay, I’ll name them first. Cody Perrin is the sort of lead guitarist, although Connor Sullivan, the other guitarist, could easily be the lead as well. I let them fight that out amongst themselves. I think Cody’s the humor in the band. He’s always like, “Yeah ...” He probably just chest-bumped Connor till he was the lead guitarist. Neal Daniels is the drummer. Every night at the end of set, Neal will fake us out about when he’s going to stop a song.
Drummers, they love to overplay. They’ll get their little tricky fills in there if they can possibly do it. So every night we’re all like, we lift up waiting to come down on the last chord and it’s not yet. Cody, especially, I think Connor wisely gave him the lead position because there’s a lot of noodling that he does at the end of “Why Can’t I?” And Neil just loves to drag that out. So Cody’s looking at me and we’re smiling at each other and he’s like, “Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.”
His fingers are shaking and probably the muscles are spasming and Neil is just in the back there like, “Yeah. Yeah.” Then Benjamin Sturley is bass and he’s sort of the Mensa candidate on the bus. He’s brilliant and he doesn’t say much, but when he starts talking you have to follow it. And it’s very rapid-fire and very, very high intellect. Yeah, they’re all characters. They’re an exceptional band. They all like each other, which is essential. I’ve shared a bathroom with eight men over the last six weeks. I can’t even ...
Jenn Pelly: Okay. I have two questions. How did it feel to be revisiting songs from Guyville while we’re watching the logic of Guyville play out on a national stage, and also to be doing that surrounded by men?
Liz Phair: Very good question. Excellent question. For a while, it didn’t involve the band. In fact, it got to a point where I think they felt weird that I wasn’t talking to them about it. I knew, and I talked to my management, and this is the truth. This is long before the 2016 election, this is like almost a full year. I said, “It doesn’t matter whether Hillary wins or loses, it’s going to be a woman moment. We need to do something about this or with this or think about this because, either way, this is a powerful female moment and I want to be in that and I want to participate in that.” I did not anticipate, as one doesn’t, how bad it was going to feel to go through what we’re going through right now. To be out on tour especially and watch Kavanaugh—it was really the Kavanaugh hearing and then that rushed confirmation.
That sort of, what do you call that? What’s the word when you just do something to say you’re doing it, but you’re not actually invested in it? That was a dark, dark night. And I would say that was the pit of the tour for me. The meet-and-greet lines, I would do 50-person meet and greets. We’d do a soundcheck party where I’d play a couple songs and then step down and meet them and take pictures. Women were coming up to me a couple of days before during the whole Dr. Ford’s testimony, shaking and crying and hugging me and thanking me for just being me and being out there. That’s a weird ... I didn’t feel like I’d done anything, I’m just playing my shows, but at the same time I knew exactly what they meant.
It’s a little hard to talk about because, all of these stories that we all carry, we have shame around them, they’re personal, they’re intimate, we don’t talk about it. I think it was the Friday when we knew he would be confirmed, and we knew it had just been a sort of a shame. I hope there’s not ... I’m not anti-Republican, I’m really not. I’m anti-scum and I’m not calling Kavanaugh scum. I’m not doing that. I’m saying we know who the scums are that are clear scum that are somehow what ... Okay. But that night, that dark night, and we’re backstage and the TV had been going, the news was on the bus and it was on backstage ... I think of them as my boys, because they’re like 20 years younger than me, the musicians. They were just getting quieter and quieter.
I went backstage and they looked at me like, “Are you going to talk about this ever? Are you going to say anything?” It just started coming out of me and I couldn’t stop. I think the most important thing ... First, the thing I said to them was, “You guys don’t need to change. You guys are good. This is a societal problem. It’s enormous. We’re all in the same soup. We feel the same forces and what needs to be changed is going to have to be person to person as we go up. Theres really no way to get it from the top down, but what you guys need to do, besides listen, which you hear all the time, you need to absorb the fact that you're looking at the women in your life thinking that there’s like three or four incidents that they carry shamefully in their chest.”
I looked at them and I got that face I get, that intensity, and I’m like, “There’s 250 per person. It’s our whole life and we absorb it and absorb it and the sponge is fucking full. It’s going to start just ...” It was such a moment to just look in their eyes and be like, “It’s hundreds and hundreds of daily, weekly ...” I’m like, “I can’t ...” When I go jogging in the very wealthy suburb of Manhattan Beach, I go home different ways so no one can know where I’m going. I get the Uber to ... There’s hundreds and hundreds. So coming out on tour and being me was weird because I’m me and then I’m also Liz Phair, which is a slightly different thing. And all of a sudden Liz Phair was needed and I was trying to be that, but I was also Elizabeth who’d been hurt a lot of times and had private stories.
So I was in this weird schism moment of trying to be this strong, empowered person, which onstage I do feel, while also needing a hug and needing to cry and needing to think about how many things I’ve stuffed deep down inside of me and how close it was in my life that even now as I write this memoir, there are things I will never tell, because I don’t want to hurt people. I guess I just have to leave it there. So those ...
Jenn Pelly: I was definitely intrigued when I saw that the title of your memoir will be Horror Stories, which I think says a lot about what you were talking about, about the stories that we all internalize and carry with us. Is there anything that you could share about what the book will entail or talk about?
Liz Phair: Yeah, I’d love to talk about it. Horror Stories as a title was kind of tongue-in-cheek because when I came up with that long before this, it was riffing on the horror genre that for a while we’ve all been obsessed with, horror, horror. And I think that’s kind of like, “Why? Why are we so into horror?” But some people are into it. But after Trump was elected and I felt this ... Can I start with a different story and get to that really quick? Because I need to make an analogy. My son hates my analogies, but I’m going to make it. I was walking with my son on the strand, which is this little walkway along the ocean near our house. And the shuttle was either entering or exiting the atmosphere.
I can’t remember, but there was a sonic boom that happened and it gave you that sudden scale perspective that just happens in an instant, kind of like an earthquake does. And you’re like, “Oh shit, the Earth is big.” Once the election happened and Trump was elected, I was like, “Oh shit, this is big.” And it was that same scale, so suddenly horror was much more un-fightable. At the same time as I went through it and felt intimidated and horrified and angry and helpless and all the things that I felt and watched everyone on social media feeling the same way and everyone that I was talking to feel the same way, I realized the only way was to break it down to the very intimate moment.
So my book, Horror Stories, is really about, I slow time down. I take you, kind of like my songs, right into the middle of a very intimate moment that was impactful in my life. I’ll give you an example. One time when I was with my son and friends and they were little kids in the Indiana dunes and we were way up high on a beautiful sunny day, the kids are frolicking. We’re like 200 feet above the shore. I don’t know if you guys have ever seen that. And you can see the people down on the beach and there was only a few people out that day. And there was a family down there or a father and two little kids. We watched this man backhand his five-year-old son off his feet, just backhand him into the water, just threw him like five feet in the air and land in the water.
It goes through you like a knife and you’re so high above either you can’t hear, can’t yell, can’t get there. It was almost over before it had begun, but it stuck in my soul. I wrote a horror story about that, about how the horror that we encounter, and we encounter so much and sometimes it doesn’t even have to do with us, and we have to somehow digest it and absorb it and move it through our systems. And sometimes we’d go to work and we saw something horrifying on the way to work and there’s no one to tell, but it stays. I find, at least with me, my memories tend to group together, and if I see something that reminds me of that, now that’s stuck to that memory. So when I write these horror stories, I’m unearthing several memories that are related. I’m also sort of shining the beauty and the love and the compassion that follow that sting pretty quickly. As my agent says, they turn the corner between horror and beauty repeatedly, very quickly.
Jenn Pelly: It was really interesting to read the essay that you wrote that came in the liner notes of the Girly Sound, so Guyville record. Is that also from the book that you’re writing, the piece?
Liz Phair: That’s not from Horror Stories, but that’s my writing style. That’s sort of my writing style. I seem to love moments where not much is happening. Like that kind of internal dialogue and painting that picture. I could have done something that said like, “Well, I moved to Wicker Park in 19-dah, dah, dah and I got an apartment here and I did that.” But I always find it more illuminating to just take a cross-section of time and really paint it, really paint it. I feel like the reader can fill in the rest just from that sort of snapshot of a life. That’s I guess my style. I guess I have a style.
Jenn Pelly: Does that feel similar to your way of writing songs too?
Liz Phair: It feels very similar. It really does. I feel like I’ve just been able to expand songwriting into prose and it took a solid 10 years. I’ve been telling people I was writing a book since 2008, and I wrote a whole fiction book that is just sitting there, that isn’t very good. I didn’t know. I had no idea. I thought since I wrote songs and I’m a writer, I thought it would be a lot easier than it was really going to be.
Jenn Pelly: What’s the plot of it?
Liz Phair: It was about a hapless guitar player, a sideman, who is torn, ultimately, between his ... He’s one of those people that uses his brain too much, so he’s extremely technically gifted and he’s going to college at sort of USC-type place. And he’s the big man on campus and then the son of an iconic punk rocker enrolls and sort of steals his thunder. This guy is sloppy, but he’s charismatic and brilliant and used to being on stage.
At first, my protagonist, Milo, thinks they’re going to be friends but then he realizes Gareth is twisting like, “Yeah, man. Yeah, totally cool, cool.” But it’s really just a giant sort of way to discuss my own interest in the dichotomy between technical skill and spontaneity, intellect, and heart. And so, I’m using two characters to play with that interesting topic to me.
Jenn Pelly: I would love to have read that at some point.
Liz Phair: It’s bad, it’s bad.
Jenn Pelly: Did you ever read poetry when you were younger or no?
Liz Phair: I did not, but our mutual friend, Sadie Dupuis, is quite the gifted poet.
Jenn Pelly: She is, yes.
Liz Phair: Yeah.
Jenn Pelly: She has a poetry book coming up this year.
Liz Phair: Yes, she does, in a couple of weeks. Speedy Ortiz was the band that opened up for me and the lead singer is a poet as well.
Jenn Pelly: Yeah. I wasn’t sure if you had written poetry because I feel like many of your lyrics read like poetry anyway. But I really wanted to ask specifically about some of the songs that are on the Girly Sound collection that came out. Some of them are still mysterious to me.
Liz Phair: Me too.
Jenn Pelly: Yeah. I’m really curious to learn more about one song in particular, “Elvis Song,” which is really funny to me. It feels like you’re talking about raising an eyebrow at some people’s interest in Elvis or obsession with Elvis. I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about where that was coming from.
Liz Phair: I remember my friend, Nina, really liked that song. To me it was, there was a period of time, must’ve been late ’80s or early ’90s, where people were obsessed with the idea that Elvis hadn’t really died and he was living somewhere. There was all these sightings of Elvis everywhere, and I was imagining his really ordinary, awful life. He had escaped fame just to wind up a sad, middle-aged dude doing nothing. Doing nothing, like being ... I tied it into a ghost story, because I’m obsessed with ghosts. I wasn’t sure in my own mind whether the Elvis I was writing about was dead or not.
It could have been his ghost shambling around, because no matter how spectacular the performer, when they’re home with their 800 gold toilets, they’re just a shambling, ordinary, sad-ish middle-aged dude. So it didn’t really matter whether he was dead or alive, I was just kind of loving the idea of the real Elvis and everyone talking about him and looking for him. You could use that while he was alive if you think about it, if you wanted to get all poetic and shit. You can say that about a performer like Elvis when he was alive. Somewhere in that mansion at 4 o’clock in the morning, he was just a dude and lonely and hungry, fried.
Jenn Pelly: That’s always interesting to me, because it felt similar to the whole concept of Exile In Guyville. It felt like this feminist re-contextualizing of pop history or rock history or something.
Liz Phair: Where’s the feminist part?
Jenn Pelly: I guess just the idea that, like in the song you talk about how this is everyone’s idea of fun, being at Graceland. Where you’re just tipping back the idea that this is important. You know?
Liz Phair: Yes, yes. 1,000%, like this sort of worshipful procession goes to touch the hallowed ground. I guess the way I look at things, the reason I write songs, is because of the thought ... I like complexity. I’m going to come out right now as saying, I’m a person who believes in complexity. I want us as a human race to move toward complexity. I'm tired of the ... Is that a word, didacticism? I’m tired of breaking things into good and bad, black and white, right or wrong. I need us to think in complex thoughts, and I love contrasts. I love the idea that there is worth in the British royal family and the pageantry is awesome and it’s history and it’s great and it goes back through time.
And then how hilariously weird and ridiculous it is that they’re just people like ... I love that, nothing makes me happier and more excited than to be thinking about the contrast of say, the real meaning that can be gotten to go touch where an artist who spoke to you, who maybe helped you through some hard times, to go to their mansion and think of them as lonely and bring them a flower and say, “Thank you.” I believe in that. And then, at the same time, it’s ludicrous and it’s a brilliant complex thought, which I really like.
Jenn Pelly: I feel like the move towards complexity or embracing ... Complexity also reminds me of just all of the sarcasm that’s in your music. When I was listening to the Girly Sound compilation, and listening to the version of “Girls, Girls, Girls” that is on there, it’s like six-and-a-half minutes long or something. When you got to the part where you're saying, when girls talk they don't talk politics or something like that, I thought it was really funny and clearly sarcastic. I guess I was wondering like, even early on when you were recording your first song, it’s like, I’m just curious what you wanted sarcasm to do or why it felt powerful to you to write that way.
Liz Phair: Sarcasm. I don’t know why my mother is popping into my mind right now. She’s not sarcastic. It’s so funny, because she’s ... The last thing she is, is sarcastic. I think she feels sided against when my father and I are having a little sarcasm moment, but she was a very strong ... For being as traditionally female as she is, she went to Wellesley and she has self-esteem and she has high standards. I think this is a roundabout way of saying, sarcasm to me was a way to ... I don’t think men listen to women. I don’t think they hear, I’m sorry. I am sorry, because I am not ... I don’t ever want to ... I find different ways to test a Raptor with the electronic fences, what gets heard. When I did the Girly Sound project and I was saying filthy things and then I would speed it up so it sounded like [singing], what would they hear?
Then sarcasm for me, men hear sarcasm. They like wit, they like when you play with them. So if you can play with them, they’re like ... They hear you. It was one of my earliest ways to feel like I could be heard while couching. Maybe I’m just that much smarter than they were and they wouldn’t realize till later that I’d actually dropped some wisdom for them. But they’d be listening because they heard the sarcasm, I think is what it was. I mean, but there was also probably youthful ... It’s a recipe. There was also a lot of youthful bravado, which I see my son doing, like ... You don’t have an identity yet. You haven’t earned anything yet. You haven’t really done anything yet. So to be sarcastic lets you talk about the things you think you know about without having to commit. So there was some of that too.
Jenn Pelly: Here you mentioned the fact that men don’t listen to women. Makes me wonder like—
Liz Phair: They don’t hear us.
Jenn Pelly: They don’t hear—
Liz Phair: It’s different.
Jenn Pelly: Don’t hear women. Do you remember the earliest instants in your life of wanting to be taken seriously and realizing you weren’t being taken seriously?
Liz Phair: 1,000%. It’s very, very clear. My uncle, my mother’s brother, I love to think about this because it’s like a world that’s gone by. I’ve gotten old enough that it’s like time travel to go into my own memory. But he was a lawyer and his wife had a fundraiser in Cincinnati and they liked to entertain and they entertained well. We would go over there often and it, for real, would be like a white linen tablecloth with 16, 17 people down it. Candelabras, I shit you not, this was like every month at least and certainly every holiday. And he had a booming voice, a booming, speaking voice. He would sort of start these discussions and the men would chime in and at some point in the meal ... Well, I grew up being this little, tiny girl with all-male cousins and a brother and then the family.
The women spoke, certainly, and we’d get into some things, but I can distinctly remember that I was required to sit and listen. That was part of my upbringing, is that you would sit and you’d wear your little dress and your little patent leather shoes and when the adults talk to you, you just sit there. So I spent a lot of time in the company of adults. If my parents had cocktail parties, I would get a tray and I’d have to like, “Hello, Dr. and Mrs. Hello, Dr. and Mrs.” And I’m like, “Yay, hi.” I just listened to adults a lot and was not able to speak to them because that wasn’t ... Doesn’t this sound like I’m talking about the 1800s to you right now? But this was real, this was my youth. I can remember sitting at one of, I called him Am, I think that's German for uncle. One of Am’s great dinners, and he was bellowing about something.
I wanted to say something and I just can remember being so small and so intimidated by these loud voices and these political discussions. They would really get into it. I mean, the wine was flowing and they were passionate about it and the women would say something funny. I just wanted to speak and I can just remember watching it like a game of catch. Like, “When can I say something? When can I say something?” And this silence happened and I said something like, “I think we should talk about pandas.” It was charming enough that someone picked up the thread and ... Then my little mind, they then riff on pandas for a while and everything went around and it became part of the evening. This great discussion that started with pandas. That was my first success. I was like, “Yeah, that worked.” I think he even said at the end, I think my mother tells a story. She’s like, I said something then like, “Well, that was a good discussion starter, wasn’t it?”
Jenn Pelly: So that was your first taste of having your voice heard in a situation where you felt like it otherwise would not be heard?
Liz Phair: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Jenn Pelly: I guess I'm curious, when you started finally to record songs and to share them with people, was it the same type of rush or how would you describe that feeling?
Liz Phair: Oh wow. We're having therapy right now because, the twin side, and this'll give you a taste of Horror Stories. This is how my mind works. It goes from that beautiful story to a dark one, because I can also remember, and I love my uncle, this is not to disparage him in any way and he's passed long ago. But I can also remember being equally small and maybe after that panda success, trying to get in on a discussion later. And he must have had a little bit too much to drink or something, I can remember him taking me in a sidebar ... They had a big kitchen and there was an area, a staging area part of the kitchen around another room. I don't know, you'd put the drink trays or something and there was cabinets. He came right in my face and he's like, "Don't interrupt."
He really scared the crap out of me. He was like, "Don't interrupt the adults when they are talking." I was just fucking terrified. That was the other little start that said like, "Yeah, I will. Yeah, I will. Don't tell me not to, you're not my dad." That right there can basically account for all of my courage in my career. Those two things, that two flip side, the front and back of that same coin is that little willful determination to ... I think when I came out in Guyville there was a real sense of liking the bands in Wicker Park, of wanting to be a part of those guys, of going to those shows by myself when I was terrified and smoking to try to look cool. Part of me was just a fan, and then there was another part of me that wanted to get in the discussion.
Then if I felt like, they were playing music and I'd put something on and they thought it was stupid or it was too radio or I didn't know what I was doing, that other little determined person was like, "No, no, I will get in on this conversation." So that tiny little whatever that is, it's almost like a coin. I can flip it back and forth, back and forth and it's still with me. It's still driving me today. That was the desire to be part of Guyville and at the same time feeling like they dismissed me and the determination to overcome that and be like, "Oh, okay, so making a record is super hard. Okay. Well, I went to the same college, I think I can handle this." That thing is my engine. That's my engine. It just goes back and forth ...
Jenn Pelly: There's one other song I wanted to ask you about from Girly Sound because I think it's funny, the Six Dick Pimps song. I was just wondering where that came from.
Liz Phair: I'm thinking about the lyrics, (singing). I was at Oberlin, I remember I was at Oberlin, which is a very progressive school in Ohio. It had sort of an inverted social hierarchy. Lesbians were at the top. I remember gender even back then being up for discussion. Gender is just sort of something that we've labeled. I think it was about the idea that the genders were inverted. That instead of it being the trope of a pimp with his women, that my boyfriend had been taken over by a dude pimp farm and I was the rescuer. I was the one, like Pretty Woman but the other way around. And I was going to ride in and show this pimp like, "Good luck. That's my dude that you're taking and I don't care." I love the line (singing), something like, "I don't care what shape he's in." (singing) I just love the idea that like, "Give him back to me, shredded, tired, gross, disgusting. I'm coming in, I'm riding in and I'm saving my boyfriend." That's what it was.
Jenn Pelly: You mentioned the influence of Oberlin in that moment. I wanted to ask you something about Oberlin. Well, I was there earlier in the year and when I got to the airport and someone from Oberlin came to pick me up to drive me to the college to do a talk, they were like, “Oh, do you want to see where Liz Phair lives?” I was like, “Sure.” They drove me past and they were like, “That’s where Liz Phair lives. We even know which bedroom she lived in.”
Liz Phair: Which bedroom was it, what did they tell you?
Jenn Pelly: They said, “Well, there it is.” Maybe the one under the stairs.
Liz Phair: Yeah, they’re right.
Jenn Pelly: I was like, “Oh, you know what, you guys should make a Liz Phair museum in the bedroom to make the experience of visiting the house even more fun.” And so I was wondering, if there was a Liz Phair museum, what would you contribute to it or what do you think would it be in it?
Liz Phair: This is going to sound like a humble brag, but the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame needed some stuff for the Women in Rock exhibit and I happen to have over the years accrued a certain amount of storage spaces. I thought, “Great, time to unearth the awesome shit that I’ve saved from my career.” I opened up these storage spaces one after another and there’s some furniture, there’s some legit stuff in there, but what I chose to save over the years are boxes and boxes of Christmas ornaments. It’s funny now, but I had a crying fit about it, because I’m like, “You idiot.” May I just turn this into the deepest, deepest, from the marrow of my bones, thank you, to fans who have saved and collected and put up websites and kept memorabilia?
Because without you, the reason you guys are sitting here are is because of my die-hard fans, and I firmly believe that. The reason you care at all and want to come hear me talk. I mean, I know the music is part of it, but I could have just been someone that wrote a good record a million years ago. It's these fans, these archivists, these unpaid, unacknowledged ... I mean, I acknowledge them, I give them free tickets for shows and stuff, but they kept everything alive and they turned it into ... I feel like there is an online Liz Phair museum. I feel like the Girly Sound, the Guyville re-issue was the fruit of that. I mean, we had to go talk to people, [Tae Won Yu], who is basically responsible for me having a career at all because he made so many copies of my Girly Sound tapes, surprised me and came to the Brooklyn show on this tour.
And it just, the room disappeared for me, and we were just looking at each other, because he never liked what I did. After Girly Sound, he never liked anything that I did. And I was in touch with him, but we would have discussions. He’s like, “No, no. No. Not for me.” And he looked at me, and this is huge, this is 35 years later or whatever it is. He looked at me, and he was kind of nervous because we’d put on a badass show. My band is badass, they were rip-roaring and I have all my moves now like I can do. Sadie was jealous. She’s like, “I just can’t do your rock and roll moves.” I’m like, “I know. I know.” It takes a lot of skill to sing, play, and move at the same time. You’d be very, very surprised how hard it is to stay in pitch, have breath, stay with the band.
It’s very taxing. Tae had just seen this, and he’s used to giving me shit, but he was a little ... He was like, he was a little nervous, and he said to me, he said, “I get it. I get it. It was fantastic.” He said, “I didn’t like the new music because I didn’t like what came around it. I didn’t like the stuff that was attached to it. I didn’t like where it existed in the cultural sphere, but when I saw you play them song after song after song,” he’s like, “I got it. It’s all you.” And he knew that Summer co-writes, he knew everything. He was looking me right in the face, and I felt like we were 19 again, and I was living in the Lower East Side in New York and we were going to go out that night on 11:00 to see some rock shows.
This tour and this summer has been a uniquely a full-circle experience. Maybe enough has happened in our country that people are deciding what matters to them and what doesn't matter to them, and they're bothering to say to the people that matter to them that they matter, and they’re letting the shit that doesn’t matter anymore go. It’s a refining moment, and I wouldn’t wish it upon us, but if we have it, it’s nice to know that those kinds of things can happen.
Jenn Pelly: I’m glad you mentioned Tae, because it was funny for me being someone who, Exile In Guyville was basically presented to me as Holy Grail when I was in high school. It was after the ’90s, and it was kind of like, “This is just—
Liz Phair: You’re going to learn this shit.
Jenn Pelly: “This is a classic record.” And so, learning about the history and hearing details like, “Oh, Liz Phair made these tapes that she sent to the guy from Come and the guy from Kicking Giant.” I was like, “Wow, that’s so interesting and seemingly random.” I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about why you sent those tapes to those two people in particular.
Liz Phair: Well, the guy from Come, Chris Brokaw, was someone who went to Oberlin. He was in the coolest band at Oberlin called Pay the Man, and I was in love with the drummer, so I would go see all their performances and try to telepathically stare at him, and I’d be like, “I know he just looked at me,” but their songs were ... I mean, everyone at Oberlin, because of the conservatory, I didn’t know that anyone else’s college experience was different. I was just talking to Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs after her performance at Ohana Fest. Huge thrill. Nolan was like, “She’s going to come over to your trailer.” I’m like, “What? What? What? What?” Like, “No, I should go there. I should go there.”
He’s like, “No, she’s coming over. She’s coming over.” I’m like, “What?” I was all nervous. But, Oberlin had like four or five bands per party that were just people that you went to class with who weren’t shy about getting up on stage, and maybe having had two rehearsals, it was just a thing. Any party, you could go to five off-campus parties and there’d be five bands playing at every single party and that was no big deal. It was people you knew and they’d just jump up there and they’d be terrible. Which is why I had the courage to do this, because I was like, “It’s okay. This is what we do. We’re punk.” Chris Brokaw and his band, Pay the Man, were fucking good. They were making stuff that felt like we should have paid for those shows and there they were playing in Barrows. They were at the ...
It would spill out of the building, your dorm would have Pay the Man playing there and it would just spill out of the doors, because people would stand outside the buildings to hear them. That’s how good they were. And Chris Brokaw started dating ... cut, fast forward to, he graduates, I take a little longer. I took sort of a, it was hard to stay in Ohio with a bunch of neurotic New Yorkers. So I went to Northwestern for a while, I went to the Art Institute of Chicago for a while, I interned in New York for a while. I took a little tour, I am really sorry mom and dad. I’m real sorry. Nick is sort of doing the same thing to me right now, so it’s all good. But Chris and I reconnected because, once I left Oberlin, I have to close my eyes because it’s been six weeks of tour and I’m trying to remember.
I moved to San Francisco with a bunch of my friends and we lived in this huge loft space in Soma. One of my roommates, Nora Maccoby, who’s a filmmaker, was dating Chris, or was about to date Chris or they had had a romantic moment. He came to visit her, and I was like, “Wow, the guy from Pay the Man is coming to our loft space and he’s going to be here.” They ended up not getting along right away, so he and I ended up hanging out for that weekend. And I’d been writing songs for a long time, but I was so afraid to play them. He’s like, “Make the tape for me, just make it for me. Just make one tape for me.” And because I know he ... I mean, I shouldn’t have been saying this, because I’m airing other people’s dirty laundry, but he was kind of embarrassed to come all the way to San Francisco and then not ... He’s with us, you’re supposed to be with her and it’s not working out. So I had that feeling of trade embarrassments.
Does that make sense? So I was like, “Okay, Chris, I will do that for you.” Since I made it for him, I shot one over to my friend Tae and then I credited Chris as starting my career. Chris is like, “No, it’s Tae. It was all Tae. I didn’t do shit. I just put that tape somewhere in the back of my closet.” But had Chris not had that experience that weekend, I am absolutely positive I’d be a visual artist and we wouldn’t be here and none of the music would have been heard by anybody.
Jenn Pelly: At that time, so Tae gets the tape and makes like 100 copies of it. Is that a normal thing for someone to do at the time? Or, did you expect that?
Liz Phair: No, I didn’t even know he was doing it. I had no idea. I had been recalled back to Winnetka and I was ... I had failed at life. That happened a couple times. I did not have an easy launch. I had a failure-to-launch a couple of times. I didn’t know he was doing it and, all of a sudden I would, this is another shameful story. I’ve told it before though, so I feel a little bit better. Suddenly I’m getting in the mail to my parents’ house letters about my tape, that they’d like a copy, and a $10 bill. I didn’t know what they were talking about and I didn’t want to make the tapes and I kept the money. I probably kept about $150 worth of people’s money, but I went downtown and watched shows, so it all works out. That’s a sponsorship. That’s a, what do they call that when you have a benefactor? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. GoFundMe.
Jenn Pelly: Put the money back into the local music economy. Someone got it. Yeah.
Liz Phair: That’s how I found out about riot grrrls and all that kind of stuff, because the fanzines, they sent me a letter and I read those and I listened to their songs, so that was cool.
Jenn Pelly: Yeah. It’s interesting, there’s so many, at least from my perspective, I feel like there’s a lot of similarities between what you were doing in the ’90s and what riot grrrl folks were doing, but it never seemed like the connection was totally made.
Liz Phair: Well, back then, geography mattered. There was no internet, so geography, they were all in Washington or New York and I was in Chicago. Physically, we didn’t see each other. We would write letters, actual longhand on loose-leaf paper with hearts and stickers and shit. I thought they were cool and they thought I was cool. That’s about the extent of it. It was like, Alison says I was mean to her in London, but I don’t remember. But yeah.
Jenn Pelly: Yeah. I was reading an interview that you did once where you talked about how you had all these dualities inside of you and one of them was the cerebral intellectual and then also the dumb blonde. Well, one, I related to that, but then also it was like, “Oh, Liz Phair was totally a member of the VGI,” which is this thing Kathleen Hanna coined, the Valley Girl Intelligentsia.
Liz Phair: I love it. Yeah. You’re a total Valley Girl Intelligentsia, 1,000%.
Jenn Pelly: Sign me up.
Liz Phair: You’re ground zero. Yeah.
Jenn Pelly: But another, maybe this is the last question I’ll ask before opening it up to the audience, but another thing that I read you say once that reminded me of the riot grrrl thing, is you were talking about this song “Flower” on Exile In Guyville, and you said—it's quoted a lot, it’s one of the more extreme lyrics on the record—you said you felt like it was a sledgehammer and that’s why you had to include it. I was wondering, where do you think we should be putting sledgehammers at now with our art?
Liz Phair: Sledgehammers aren’t working. Has anyone noticed that? They’re not working, and I have a theory. I don’t know if it's a good one or a bad one, but I have a theory. What we need to do in society I believe is to incorporate—incorporate, not supplant—the male way of doing things, incorporate a female way of doing things. I think, here’s a great story about that loft in Soma when Chris Brokaw came and started that thing. One of the parties that we had, we used to have big, huge ... I have lived a good life people, I have done things. We had these huge parties, live music and stuff and the loft space had a big, open roof deck. We were subletting it from artists who were in Europe doing something and they had these huge styrofoam, as tall as the wainscoting here.
Taller maybe, I don’t know. Styrofoam blocks the size and shape of smaller Stonehenge blocks. We thought for our party it would be cool to arrange a Stonehenge thing out on the roof deck, so people could stroll amongst these ... It wasn’t easy to balance, these were fairly light blocks. They were sturdy enough to stand on, but they were light. And so, we did all our little pie shapes like the lintel or whatever you do. And we spent all afternoon getting these things up, Nora and I mainly. Then at the party we noticed that the guys were leaving, and we’re like, “Where are all the guys that we thought were so hot? Where are they? What’s going on?” They were actually out on the roof deck and these mad men, and this just takes me right back to tour, these mad men had it in their idea that like, “Fuck Stonehenge, we’ve got to go up. We’ve got to build up as high as we can.”
These men who don’t know each other, that are just coming to a music party, are literally 30 feet in the air, helping each other get these fucking styrofoam blocks up on top of each other. They’re up there assisting and lifting and doing all this kind of stuff. I was like, verticality. Verticality, men do verticality. “I’m your boss, you’re my subordinate. You may be my boss later, but right now I’m your boss, you’re subordinate.” Military, all the stratification that’s vertical. What I think women do, at least instinctually, is we stand next to each other. We’re along a horizontal plane and we may pull each other this way or pull each other that way, we may let go or we may reach out and grab, but I think what ... We don’t need sledgehammers, we need to solidify. Look at me, I’m standing, I’m all impassioned.
We need to solidify and validate and encourage and nurture the female way of connecting and building. It's different, it will help everybody, it will heal a lot of stuff and I am apparently running for office. We need to use, the human animal needs to use both sides of itself, all sides of itself, but in particular this thing, we need to use it and now we need to use it. Build a solid foundation, reach out to each other, try not to let go of those things. If you need to pull this way, pull, pull, whatever you need to do. We need both.
Jenn Pelly: 100%. With that, does anyone have any questions?
Jeff: Hi, my name is Jeff. I just was wondering if you can share maybe one or two experiences when you were a part of the Lilith Fair tour?
Liz Phair: Oh, the Lilith Fair tour. You want something really meaningful and I’m going to give you the shenanigans. I was always late to the final song. Everyone was supposed to be part of ... First of all, it was the most beautifully well-run until Ohana. Ohana was a pretty damn well-run festival. Those beautifully-run festival backstage, all the guys were like, “We should just let women do all the festivals,” because it was just beautiful and nice and efficient.
Everything worked perfectly. It was beautifully done. I remember the Indigo Girls would always be looking for me, because they knew I’d come screeching in to the final song at the last second. They’re like, they’d look at me down the line, because they’d get all the artists, all the artists who’d perform that day had to show up for Sarah [McLachlan]’s final song and join in on whatever the sing along was. I don't even remember what it was. Everyone else was really gracious to me, but the Indigo Girls were like, “Get that shit together. It’s not that fucking hard, Liz.” That was pretty fun.
Speaker 5: Oh, great shows the past couple nights. I had a question about the project you were working on with Ryan Adams a couple of years ago. Do you ever see yourself revisiting that in a more positive political environment or is it shelved for good?
Liz Phair: Ryan is a genius and I really respect him and I love him as a person. I can’t follow the train, it goes all over the place. I think we just record differently, we have different ways of recording. He likes to record live, he does songs all the time. I think he was thinking that he could help bring the Guyville out in me, and in a way he did. He did help me a lot and we wrote some coolest songs together, but I do like to see my albums as a work of art and I have a way that I’ve been working for a long time. I like to take time with it. I like to put it away and revisit it.
I think our styles of recording are a little bit different, so when the political climate changed and I didn’t want to do the White Album anymore because it just felt too, it just didn’t have the gravitas that I was feeling at that moment, I think we just sort of let it ... We tried a couple of times to resurrect it, but I didn’t have a really great idea that had been our original conception. I think we just naturally ... He was on to more songs and touring. We may at some point. We’re still, obviously, friends and in touch, it’s just the tussle ended up with a balance where I was like, “I can’t come over that line.” And he’s like, “Well, I can’t come over that line.” It’s my album, I’d like to feel invested in how I make it.
Speaker 6: I was wondering, at what moment did you feel like you started developing and really understanding the grit that it takes to be someone in the music scene, especially the rock music scene that isn’t a cis male? Like channeling that feminine energy, what was that like then and how is it similar now when you develop that grit?
Liz Phair: I can give you advice, is that what you’re asking ...?
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Liz Phair: Basically? Back then I put ... It’s hard because now I have to live it, but I put on a sort of a certain amount of false bravado. I tried to seem tougher than I was. I still got my vulnerability across, but I faked it a little bit. I tried to be tough and ... What I would say to you now, what I think is, and maybe that’s because I’m older and I have accomplishments and I can say that, maybe that’s harder to do when you’re younger, but I would say, channel your femininity. If I could do anything right now, I would be pregnant and going out on a rock tour, because that to me sounds like the most badass thing I could possibly do. That’s epic. I’m looking for ways to be as female as is authentically possible while being visibly so.
You will be just like at the end of six weeks on a bus with a bunch of dudes, I want to go wear dresses. You will get affected. You will end up masculinized because, it’s just what happens. It takes a lot of guts, a lot of grit to get up there and do that. But if you can ... Pray to the goddess, try to find some femininity that you can hold on to in the midst of that. And don’t worry so much. There have been stages with crappy bands for time immemorial. Don’t worry so much. It’s scary when they’re staring at you, but they’re really just thinking about their own thoughts and they’re interested in ... You never know who’s going to be out there having a moment because you dared to do it.
Speaker 7: Hi. I was wondering if you retired your Musicmaster guitar, because I only noticed you playing a Strat.
Liz Phair: The DuoSonic was the real guitar. The DuoSonic was the main one, and that’s somewhere in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame right now. I feel bad about that, but not too bad. It got played, it went underwater. It’s done some things. The Musicmaster was sort of the alternative. Are you talking about the red one? That is at my, it’s in my son’s room right now. I was trying to get him interested in it and like, he’s not having it. It needs work. I still have it, but I’ve never, other than that DuoSonic ... Sadie, Speedy Ortiz, Sadie Dupuis, she’s a real gearhead. She cares a lot about what she’s playing.
I’m really not, I’m so content fixated that to this day is, this is awful. At the end of this tour, Nolan can attest, I still don’t plug in my own guitar. My guitar tech comes out, plugs it in and steps on the fricking tuner so that there’s sound. That’s how focused I am on you guys, what I’m singing, and what I’m playing, and everything else is just ... I know when I don’t like how something sounds and when I’m in the recording studio, don’t you dare try to fool me. I am razor sharp with the ears. I hear everything. I know exactly how many dBs you just turned it down. But equipment, I’ve never been an equipment person. So it’s in my son's room, if you want to come get it. He’s not playing it.
Speaker 8: Hi. My question ... First off, you rock. You are awesome. Badass. You were talking briefly about if you weren’t playing music that you would be a visual artist. I was just wondering if you make visual art. I’m a visual artist and my friend here is too, and I would like to know what kind of art you would make or if you continue to make art.
Liz Phair: I will always be a visual artist. In my personal life, I always will be. I still can draw I think fairly well and enjoy doing it. I don’t do it as often as I used to, but when I’m on ... I didn’t on this tour because I was a little busy, but I’ve done drawings for each tour that I’ve been on and contributed it to a little tour booklet or when I did the Grand Canyon, I did a great drawing of that. I’ll draw at the drop of a hat as long as you don’t interrupt me until I’m finished. That’s a big thing for me because it was what I did. It’s what I wanted to be my whole life. It’s still deeply in me. I get really fussy about the pictures that we post online, because the visual artist in me comes out and, even though there are pictures of me, I don’t see them as me.
I see them as pictures, and a lot of times when I communicate with my management, I just don’t feel like writing it out. I’ll take pictures or I’ll cut and paste stuff. I communicate visually, I think visually, I still draw. If you told me I couldn’t play music, I would be very sad, but not really super, super, super sad, because I would draw, paint, take pictures. I need to be creative pretty much at all times. Yeah, I love it. I think that the reason I play guitar the way I do is because I see the front, I mean, the neck as a visual lens. It’s like, “Oh, I need to be up high here.” It’s all visual to me. The sounds, what is that when you hear color? I have a bad case of that. My senses are all muddled together. I don't have that thing where I taste it. I don't taste orange, but definitely the visual and the oral and the emotional and the writing. It’s just one sea and maybe you’re in the Arctic or maybe you’re in the Caribbean. It’s all just one ocean to me.
Speaker 9: Hey there. The concept exists of having a song with someone, like your best friend. Like, “This is our song,” kind of thing. My song with one of my friends, Charlie, has always been “Girls’ Room.” I was wondering if you have, was there any little snippet of information of just the making of that song or the time and place that was made or any lyrical things or whatever?
Liz Phair: Do you mean the recording of it or what the story behind it is?
Speaker 9: I guess either. Both. Whichever you, yeah, remember or want to tell.
Liz Phair: The story’s better than the recording, because I think we just tossed it off. It wasn’t like we didn’t think really ... I remember I wanted the water effect, like [singing]. That’s like a “her, her, her” echo, but it’s also the feeling that I get when I’m around women as opposed to being around men. So that was like, in terms of production, the thing that I was most focused on. I wanted you to be spare and young as if I could’ve just played in my bedroom and I wanted that water effect to be pronounced in the “her, her.” But the cool thing about that is, it was written about ... My grandparents in Cincinnati had, it wasn't a farm, it was just a lot of land in Indian Hill in Cincinnati.
They had a barn and they kept horses there sometimes and next-door neighbor to them, these are big properties. The next door neighbor was across a creek and whatever, but they had five girls. My best friend Tiffany was over there, and they kept their horses I think for a while at my grandparents. Their father was an architect, so this house was rad. It was cantilevered and had that kind of ’60s color where a wall is orange and a wall is ... I don’t know. It was sort of that white, orange, I don’t want to say brown, because it wasn’t that. But like red, primary colors or secondary ... and they kept animals. They kept everything. They had a goat, which sucked to get from the door to the car because the goat would come and butt you under your ass every time you tried to get to the ...
I was terrified of that fucking goat. They had dogs, horses, goats, lizards, birds, cats, everything in this really magical ... And because it was all girls, it felt very magical to me. Whenever I was over there, they ranged in age from sort of older teen all the way down to my age. Well, Toren was the youngest. It was really about the experience of going to spend the night at Tiffany’s next door when I spent the weekend at my grandparents and just being immersed in this magical world where people were shrieking about like, “You took my razor.” Or we were getting dressed, just going to the epicenter of girlness. I have such good memories of that and I still think of that as one of the greatest pleasures in life, is just when you’re around just women and that’s its own little life.
It’s got its own little hallmarks and feeling. And so, this song, whenever I play it, I just played it at sound check last night just to myself because there was some technical difficulty and I just was like trying to remember it and I was strumming it very, very quietly. I don’t think the audience even heard. I sang the whole song and I was thinking like, “I hope I get to the end before they fix the problem.” It just takes me into that space, which is a very feminine, safe, organic, like watery, emotional. Just, I don’t know, that’s the best I can do for you.
Boa: Hi, I’m [Boa]. I used to play in a cover band for riot grrrl and I learned your song “Polyester Bride.” I was wondering what your inspiration was behind it.
Liz Phair: That’s a pretty literal song. I mean, I really did have a bartending friend named Henry. He’s from Chicago and I had a fake ID that I’d gotten at Northwestern. You go to Northwestern, go to a frat house and then they have a giant three-by-five card with all the information and then you just stick your head up against it and they take a picture and then you sign your name like this big and then they laminate it. They had a whole cottage industry going in Northwestern. I would go drink at the Heartland Café, because a lot of places would be like, “Yeah, good try. Thank you.” Henry just understood that we were just kids who needed to get out of the house.
The impetus behind that is, I was kind of a, you can imagine. I mean, I thought I was all that back then, and I’d be like ... Put a couple of drinks in me and I’d be telling you how great I was or whatever. This, that, the other thing. I remember sort of chewing his ear off one night at the bar talking about like, “Well, I don’t know if I should date this guy or that guy.” I think he just saw a spoiled, inexperienced, worthwhile person, but who needed to be checked a little bit and woken up a little bit. Whenever anyone sort of breaks through whatever your shtick is and calls you out on it, you remember that, because it’s embarrassing and it’s also impactful.
You feel a little bit like, “Aw, I just got slapped. He just slapped me a bit. Quit complaining. Look at your life, look at what you have. Stop acting like this idiot.” I tried to write a more poetic version of that, but that really actually happened. Henry just slapped me back into focus. Like, “You have a great life. Stop bitching and you’re not all that.” Really, what “Polyester Bride” means is, don’t accept the way society tells you to grow up, get married, do this kind of thing. Credit yourself with more than that, find someone you love, find someone that loves you, find someone ... Wait till you know who you are. Don’t just follow, and I didn’t do that, but it was sound advice and I hope that you’ll take it.
Elia Einhorn: Thank you. I think we have time for a few more.
Liz Phair: I’m done with tour, kids, so you can decide ... The apocalypse comes, I’ve got some crumb cake somewhere in my backpack upstairs.
Speaker 11: Hi. You did the short run of small club shows, where you did the Girly Sound to Guyville songs and then some of those songs in the set lists like “Ant in Alaska” and “Fuck or Die,” “Batmobile,” “Easy.” It seemed like those were maybe your first time playing those live. Either that or haven’t played them in a really long time, but do you see yourself revisiting those songs again and performing them live again anytime in the near future or do you feel like you got them out of your system at that time and are going to let them be for the time?
Liz Phair: I would like to film myself performing them because I was panicked. Those Girly Sound songs, first of all, I don’t remember what I played. I’m pretty prolific and I write a lot of songs. I had no idea what the guitar parts were. Luckily, I wasn’t a very good guitar player, so they were pretty simple it turns out. But what threw me off was, I used to change the pitch. Before I put out the Girly Sound cassettes on the four track, I’d speed them up or slow them down to make my voice sound more masculine, more feminine. And there was no rhyme or reason to what pitch I was going for, so they didn’t correspond to anything on a standard tuning that I could find. So at first I’m like, I remember we booked the tour and I called Joel Mark at Dexter, and I’m like, “I can’t do this. I don’t know what these songs are. I can’t play them.”
Once I figured out what was going, the best part of that tour for me, this sounds bad to say because there was great, great moments with the audiences, but going back and learning how to play my old songs and getting in touch with what I was doing with my hands, my actual hands, that was cool as shit. I would do this thing where I would learn one, then the next day I’d learn the next one, but I’d have to play the one that I learned the day before. Then the next one I learned the third one and I’d have to play the two that I’d learned the day before. I did that till I had a set lists’ worth of guitar songs I could play. Then I got this terrible flu and Connor, the second guitar player, was the same problem. He’s like, “What the fuck are you playing? I have no idea what this is.” He’s like, “Can you make me videos?” And so, I had to stand, we call them the bathroom tapes, because ... I don’t know why, I thought the acoustics in my bathroom were really good.
So with the flu, I’m in there showing, I’ve set the camera up and then I played the whole set to show him what my hands were doing. And he’s like, “Without those videos, I never could have done that tour,” because I just had to show him. But like, pray to God you guys never see those. They’re so embarrassing, but here’s the second part, so you get a second part. In the live setting, no matter what we advertised, and no matter how many ... Few fans really wanted Girly Sound, they just wanted Guyville. They really didn’t want to just hear Girly Sound. And so, toward the end of tour, the Girly Sound got fewer and fewer as we made the audience happier and happier going up to the Guyville, which—complexity, people, complexity—is okay. It’s fine, but what needs to happen is, Connor and I need to sit down and perform these and film it and that’s where they’ll live, and that’s how it will be.
Speaker 11: This is a followup to that. I’ve probably seen you every time you’ve played since ’93.
Liz Phair: Wow.
Speaker 11: Yeah, kind of an unhealthy thing, but the Empty Bottle show just really had a different vibe. It felt, I don’t even know how to explain it. I mean, I videoed some of it and you could actually hear it in the crowd. Everyone is just belting everything out and it felt like everyone felt really lucky and privileged to be in that room that night. I’m wondering for you what that night was like because, you could just sense it in the crowd. Everyone was like, “I can’t even believe this is happening.”
Liz Phair: I felt incredibly lucky and privileged to be there that night. I mean, to prepare this box set, which I think came up beautifully, I think, I mean, Matador gets all ... We all worked really hard on it and I was very detailed-oriented and they are very detailed-oriented. We were all very granular. People put their heart and soul into that, but it came out so beautifully. It looks like a piece ... It’s like a work of art. We were working on it a year before you guys ever even heard about it. And then to do the tour and all that stuff I just talked about, and then to end the tour in Guyville at the exact bars that I would have been going to feeling unheard, unseen, and not good enough, and just to be in that environment on the other side of my entire career was, I think everyone understood.
I think that there was a sense of, “I love it.” I call it, when the mail is delivered. Here’s a tangent really quick, but on this tour Chris [Coate] was the guitar tech and he’s a younger guy on the bus. Just wonderful, sweet guy. He would be the DJ after the shows when the bus got rolling and we wanted to play music, and that is a very tense position. These people are tired, they’ve just heard a lot of loud music. Everyone’s a music fan, they have tastes and you’re in a confined space. So what gets played, that’s like, I wouldn’t take that on. There’s no way I would DJ the after-show. But Chris played “I Want to Destroy You,” by the Soft Boys. I had heard it, but not for a really long time and I barely remembered.
I was like, “What is this song? What is this song? I love it, I love it.” He’s like, “It’s the Soft Boys. It’s the Soft Boys.” So I started listening to it all the time and it was helping me with my Trump-phobia. And then I tweeted about it, and then Robin replied. Then, lo and behold, he asked to come to the show in Nashville. I say, “Hey, do you want to maybe jump on stage?” And then I tell my boys, “Can we learn that song for tonight?” Then I say to Chris, who is the one that was deejaying, “Do you want to jump in on guitar?” He was like ... and it happened. That is art in life and that to me is my favorite thing when you can do a full circle thing and stick your landing like that and it’s organic and it just happens, to conceive of ...
I can remember being in New York on the Pumpkins tour and having the people at Matador say, like, “We want to do this, we want to do the Girly Sound box set thing.” And I’m like, “Why? It’s already out there. Why do you want to do that?” They’re like, “I think it’d be really interesting.” I’m like ... Then to have it all come all the way around and then, boom, here I am at the Empty Bottle. Having this moment, being the rock star that shows up in the tiny club, that was where I sat feeling completely inadequate and small, and everybody knows my words to these songs that were written about that exact place. That’s the mail being delivered. It’s my favorite thing. That’s good.
Speaker 12: Hi. I still remember when I was in college, the first time I heard Exile in Guyville. It was so life-changing for me and I’d never heard anything so relatable, especially sung by a woman, written by a woman. I didn’t know girls could say things like that out loud. It just was so amazing. I was at your show on Saturday night and you played your new song, I believe it’s called “The Game.”
Liz Phair: Yes.
Speaker 12: And you called it adulty, which I loved. But still of that song, I thought the same thing. It was very relatable, I could see that in my life and things like that. I wonder for you, now that you’re performing new songs that you’ve written and songs that you wrote back in the early ’90s, can you still relate to those old songs the way that you did, or do you have to relate to them in a fresh way, or do you still feel that nostalgic thing, or are you over that and it’s in a different place?
Liz Phair: I wish I didn’t relate to them as well as I do sometimes. I just started dating somebody and I was singing “Fuck and Run” and I was getting to the, “I want a boyfriend,” thing. Lately, I’ve been feeling like he’s more interested in sexting and stuff. And I’m like, “Can we do letters and sodas?” I was like, “Shit, here I am still. I’m going to spend another year alone.” I’m like, “Am I?” I wish I didn’t relate as well, but I guess it’s why they last, is because these are the problems that we will all go through again and again. I don’t think there is a safe place. I don't think life is safe.
Did I answer you? Because I’m about to go on a tangent again. I don’t think there’s a safe space in life. I use the sailing analogy. When I was younger, I used to sail a lot and we would take those sun fishes out. You learn to work with an invisible force that you can’t predict totally. You can’t see and you can’t go in a straight line. I think of life and these songs and these issues like that. For me, sailing is like life. Why can’t you stay on a winning streak, or why is this losing streak so long? All you can do in life to get to your destination, or get where you want to go, is you keep tacking.
You have the wind for a while and you can get a little bit further, but then you will inevitably lose it and you will laugh off there on the side. You’ve lost it, you’re not going anywhere. You’ve got to turn all the way around, tack again and find it again. “Oh my God, we’re going. We’re going. We’re going.” To me, I bet I’ll be in a nursing home feeling real sad because, like the guy that I just met who I should have met when I was 20, just kicked the bucket, and I’m like, “Well, that’s not fair.” I just feel like good songwriting and I feel like I have written a couple of good songs like will be applicable to all of us forever. Yay for that. Yay to music.
Speaker 13: Thank you. I just had a quick question. How did it all start? What was the first time you ever picked up a guitar? What led you to pick up a guitar and start playing for the first time ever? And, when did that light come on that, “I could actually make a career out of this”?
Liz Phair: Those $10 bills were really persuasive. It’s super simple. My mother enrolled me in piano lessons when I was very, very young. I didn’t like practicing and I had a pretty good ear. She always sang to me, every bedtime music was a part of our life. I would just fiddle around, so she’d think I was practicing, but I’d be making up my own little tunes. I hated recitals. I was terrified of performing and recitals, like abject terror. Then my friend, Ann, picked up a ... She started taking guitar lessons in eighth grade and I wanted to get out of recitals, because I hated them so much.
Mrs. Warren had already told my mother, she’s like, “She’s not really reading the music, she’s just listening. She asked me to play the song and then she listens and then she imitates what I play.” So Ann started playing guitar and I went to her guitar teacher, Mrs. [Gold-Ann Evanston]. Again, she was giving me like James Taylor and, who’s that guy like [singing]? I’m like ... Actually, I think I took classical first and I didn’t like that either. But she cut a deal with me, Mrs. Gold-Ann Evanston. She said, “Look, if you bring me in two new songs every week, I won’t tell your mom that you’re not taking guitar lessons.” That’s really when it started. Can I thank Jenn just really quickly.
Jenn Pelly: Thank you.
Liz Phair: Because, you don’t know this, but we were Twitter friends before you knew we were Twitter friends. One of the best things about the internet is that like young, smart women who are a couple, I would say, you’re a good generation or so below my age group. One of my favorite things about this moment, in music and in just culture, is getting to know the super talented, intelligent young women who don’t come from my era, but they inspire me. I feel like my career resurgence that’s going on right now owes a lot to the inspiration that I get from your generation and what you guys are doing. So that’s a thanks to you.
Jenn Pelly: Thank you. Thank you, guys, for coming. Thanks for sharing all this stuff.
Ellie Einhorn: This has been In Sight Out, a series of podcasts from Pitchfork that explore new perspectives on music, art, and culture. This episode is recorded by Angel Jimenez and edited by Mark Yoshizumi. In Sight Out’s executive producer is Seth Dodson. Big thanks to the Chicago Athletic Association for hosting this event.
