thenextmile

In June, ATO records will release a special 15th Anniversary edition of Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville. Originally conceived as a response to The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Mainstreet, Phair’s Exile became something of a classic in its own right.

I’ve always said that I was born 10 years too late.  I think it all started in elementary school; I was the only 5th grader with a Cure tshirt.  I asked for Smiths CDs in 6th grade.  Sure, I liked Madonna and I admit to having owned a New Kids on the Block album, but I was always a decade behind.

In the summer of 1993, I was fifteen.  It was the summer of Liz Phair and her debut album Exile in Guyville.  She was the toast of the indie music scene, and I was listening to Distintigration.
It wasn’t until a year later when her second album, Whip Smart, hit airways and the single ‘Supernova’ became a Modern Rock hit that I discovered Liz Phair.  Despite being one of my favorite songs of 1995, I never bought a Liz Phair album until college.  My true Liz awakening didn’t happen until 1997 when I purchased Exile in Guyville.

As I sat in my apartment bedroom and hit play, it became clear.  Finally, there was an artist who I identified with.  The roughness and lowfi sound of ‘6′1,’ the opening track, blasted through the speakers with a harshness.  Her off-key singing and unique guitar playing mixed with blunt lyrics and low budget production was like a gift from the music gods.  While I can’t tell you much else about what I did that semester, I can descibe down to the nitty bitty detail what that first afternoon with Exile was like.

Liz’s delivery was flat.  It was straightforward and blunt.  But yet the lyrics of the album’s 18 songs are in no way victim’s anthems and they’re not demeaning tell-alls of a scorned lover.  The songs speak to both the feeling of power and the powerless.  They depict epiphanies and subsequent letdowns.  Together they create a journey of wanting more and wanting out.

Critics and fans wooed her.  She was the girl next door who finally came forward to say what many wanted to say but couldn’t.  While other indie artists were out clawing for a space in a music genre that was known for volume and rebellion, Liz was going for pure honesty with no glitz or glamour, no sugar coating, and no real map of the road ahead.

While fifteen years have come and gone since the release of Exile in Guyville, I’m sure that many of us over a certain age couldn’t escape this album no matter how hard we tried.  After all these years, no one can argue that in the mid-90’s, Exile wasn’t an anthem for both men and women in their twenties and thirties.  In the years since Exile’s release, Phair herself has gone from critic darling to a blip on the music radar.  But with it’s re-release, Exile in Guyville is bound to solidify itself as a rock classic and help Liz relcaim her indie roots.

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