She's a little less indie now, but singer Liz Phair is back
By Evelyn McDonnell
Knight Ridder News Service
It has been 10 years since Liz Phair first ruffled the prudish world of independent rock with the frank sexual confessions of her debut album, the critically acclaimed "Exile in Guyville." Maturity has not brought discretion. The singer, now 36, is still speaking her mind, and it's still, in part, a refreshingly dirty mind, cradled as it is in the blonde skull of an upper-middle-class suburbanite.
Associated Press
But what may be most interesting about "Liz Phair," her fourth album, is not its "Sex and the City" moments, such as "H.W.C.," the ode to virility. Instead, it's the tracks that could be theme songs for the Oxygen channel.
Liz Phair's new album, her first in five years, still employs sexually frank lyrics, but adds pop- and country-style material about motherhood and feminism.
Opening song "Extraordinary" is a self-empowerment anthem for working mothers: "So I still take the trash out / Does that make me too normal for you?" In "Little Digger," a boy discovers his mother in bed with a man who is not his father.
He lines up his trucks, except for one, on the bed to show the man and says, "This one you can't have / I got it from my dad."
"I couldn't play that without crying the first six months," Phair says in a phone interview.
Phair has made a career out of laying herself bare with autobiographical tunes, but this time around, instead of writing from the perspective of a slacker chick trying to navigate the male codes of indie rock, Phair is a divorced working mom.
"When I first wrote 'Little Digger,' I thought it was a country song," she says. "I like to listen to country; that's another one of my dirty little secrets. They have more story in the lyrics."
"Phair" is Phair's first album in five years. Three years ago, after she divorced the father of her 6-year-old son, she moved from the indie heartland of Chicago to its commercial nemesis, Los Angeles.
There she worked on "Phair" with such pop hitmakers as the songwriting and production team The Matrix.
Many of her old fans see these careerist moves as betrayals of her indie cred. Phair just sees them as work — as some of her most fruitful work to date.
"In L.A., I felt like I could be a normal working adult and keep work as part of my normal daily life," she says. "It's easier for me to do what I do and be a mom out there."
Working with The Matrix, a trio that includes former recording artist Lauren Christy, pushed Phair in new directions.
"The Matrix gave me really amazing vocals, melodies that I wouldn't have thought of on my own that are phenomenal to me," Phair says.
"Lauren, because she's my age and a mom and was a pop star, it could have been a total clash; instead it was a really exciting and exhilarating collaboration. We really understood each other. Mostly, I'd collaborated with men until then. She pushed me vocally to do stuff I didn't know I could."
Phair, 36, has sometimes been criticized for the continuing sexual content of her lyrics.
"The moves that seemed sexy when a girl got carded can feel distasteful in adulthood," a Blender magazine critic wrote. It's criticisms like that and what she sees as the music press' resemblance to skin-obsessed men's magazines such as Maxim that make Phair even more of a feminist than she was in the '90s.
"When I was working with The Matrix, Lauren and I would flip through magazines and we'd both be like, 'Look at this, how many clothes can she take off? Who can be more the slut?' We all want to look sexy; we're old, we want to look hot. But you took a look at the overall trend and you realize there are other forces at work in why you think that's sexy."
She and actor Robin Tunney have considered penning a feminist handbook for girls. "A lot of young women take freedoms and advances for granted and don't know what was fought for. We're taking things for granted as a gender that you can't take for granted. They weren't there 100 years ago and they could be gone 100 years from now."
Is this the same Phair who ingratiated herself with male critics and fans by singing about her oral skills and posing on the cover of Rolling Stone in a slip?
"I am now an adult, and I look at young women and I feel protective," Phair says. "I want young women to feel powerful and in control and make decisions based on what is really good for them because they know themselves well enough to feel what is good for them. I spent lot of my early days doing things so that guys would like me. I want women to feel not damaged inside; I want them to feel strong."
