Liz Phair
GIRLY SOUND FOREVER
After an 11-year absence, LIZ PHAIR has returned to reclaim her title of fearless songwriting superstar. But how has a song about Lou Reed, a country-rap crossover hit and her own trailblazing debut helped prepare her to re-enter the fray? “I’ve had to pick myself up from being dead many times,” she tells Erin Osmon
“I have determination and grit”: Liz Phair in 2021
Photo by ESZTER+DAVID
LIZ PHAIR has spent the pandemic at her home in Manhattan Beach – an upmarket seaside community in Southern California. “I don’t think I have self-care,” Phair reflects on this protracted period of isolation. “I have determination and grit!” Speaking to Uncut from a lime-green room adorned with hot-pink curtains, pink artwork and pink balloons, Phair explains that she has spent lockdown in the company of her adult son, Nick – who has reactive airway disease – which means she has remained on a “very protective spectrum” compared with many people she knows. “My friends have been gallivanting everywhere,” she explains with evident frustration. “I can’t even talk about it.” Most days, she explains, she and Nick have disinfected their groceries and refused to permit guests inside the house. “More than anything I have a sense of being really lucky to be able to stay home,” she says. “Self-care is like, ‘Wow, I can look out my window at the ocean.’ That makes me enormously more fortunate than a lot of people.”
Another unavoidable consequence of the pandemic is a delay in the release of Soberish – her seventh studio album and first since 2010. A typically candid collection of songs, the album continues the kinetic and playful ruminations on love, relationships, sex and womanhood
Phair has been exploring since the start of her career. As a taster, in February she released “Hey Lou” – an imaginary dinner table conversation between Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson that brought into focus her gifts for wry, observational lyrics and hook-laden choruses.
Soberish
also reunites Phair with Brad Wood – the producer and engineer who helped transform Phair’s bedroom recordings into her 1993 debut
Exile In Guyville.
“I came in with a mandate,” Phair explains. “I want to do something that’s evocative of our past, that uses some of the same sounds, but in an entirely new way.” It made sense, Phair continues, to return her roots with Wood – and not just for comfort’s sake. “I also wanted to reclaim our position as pioneers,” she says. “So I challenged us to make music that people might take a minute to adjust to.”
After …Guyville marked Phair as a feminist trailblazer – whose candid, profanity-strewn anthems helped normalise female sexuality, anger and longing in mainstream channels – she navigated the alt.rock explosion to become one of its most unique and potent voices. Yet, following a number of unexpected career twists in the years since, Phair paused her music career. She focused on life as a single mother and pivoted to sound design for television – work, she acknowledges, that helped inform the alternately intricate and airy quality of Soberish. “I knew after my television composition work that I was more interested in complexity, but I also wanted it to be evocative of Guyville, to have the air and spaces somehow,” she says.