Phair was a self-invented rock star, a fan who crossed the line just by picking up a guitar and writing her own songs, flaunting her raw emotion, wiseass humor, fearless honesty and merciless eye for detail. Nobody had heard anything like Exile before. She also appears on the upcoming Nick Drake tribute The Endless Coloured Ways, which drops on July 7, singing the seductive Pink Moon classic, “Free Ride.” She’s also doing a 30th Anniversary tour this fall, hitting the road with her band to play the whole album and other hits. She’s celebrating the anniversary with a previously unreleased version of “Miss Lucy,” recorded during the Exile sessions but left off the album to make room for “Flower.” It’s a Girly-Sound gem based on the classic jump-rope rhyme, unearthed and remixed by Phair and Brad Wood. Long before the word “fuckboy” existed, Phair was ripping the whole species to shreds. “All I had done is play songs in my bedroom.” But 30 years later, Exile resonates more than ever, with classics like “Fuck and Run,” “Mesmerizing,” and “Divorce Song.” She gets real about heartbreak, sex, anger and independence, in her extremely non-rock-star Midwestern mumble. “I had never performed onstage before,” she added. “I had never recorded before,” Phair told Rolling Stone last year. She turned these songs into Exile in Guyville, one of the best rock albums ever made. It was so weird to hear this flat, nasal, every-girl voice sneering through a cloud of tape hiss, her voice on fire with sarcasm and lust, plucking her guitar, singing her abrasively witty one-liners like “I’ll fuck you and your girlfriend too.” Nobody had any idea who this “Girly-Sound” was. I first heard Liz Phair in early 1992, when a friend put “Flower” on a mix tape. She started putting out her songs on homemade cassettes, hiding behind the name “Girly-Sound.” But a funny thing happened: those tapes got passed around, because virtually everyone who heard this music taped it for their friends. And she was singing them into her four-track in her bedroom, just Liz and her guitar. But she had a secret that nobody knew: she was writing songs about the whole experience. It was a Guyville, where she was just another girl. Liz was just an ordinary twenty-something geek in the Chicago indie scene of Wicker Park, going out every night to see hipster bands, hanging out in dive bars, and getting her heart broken. It’s a massive moment in the history of the Weird Girl canon. Thirty years ago, Liz Phair released her indie-rock masterpiece Exile in Guyville, on June 22, 1993.
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