Where Do I Go? What Do I Do? Who Can I Tell About It?

Happy birthday to Liz Phair, born 17th April 1967.

 

I'm not going to pretend I know much about Liz's music at all. A friend of mine in Brisbane used to send me mixtapes with music that I otherwise wouldn't have picked up: Smashing Pumpkins, Spiderbait, Foo Fighters, Regurgitator, Rage Against The Machine, you get the idea.

 

Tucked away on one early compilation in the mid-90s was Liz Phair, my introduction to her music and astonishing debut Exit In Guyville, 18 songs of blistering, brutal honesty.  

 

 

A couple of years before the release of Exit In Guyville on Matador, Liz had recorded a trio of cassettes as Girly-Sound, 12-13 songs on each, which did the rounds and established Liz as a singer/songwriter to be reckoned with.

This is the Girly-Sound version of Fuck And Run, the song that my friend introduced me to all those years ago.

 

 

The Girly-Sound cassettes were restored and remastered for a 25th anniversary release of Exit In Guyville in 2018. I've only just discovered this whilst writing the post, but it's an incentive to track a copy down and upgrade from my CD, purchased secondhand many, many moons ago.

Liz followed up Exit In Guyville in 1994 with Whip-Smart. Whilst a few of the Girly-Sound songs were refreshed and re-recorded for this album, it's mostly all-new songs. I haven't heard Whip-Smart and am only familiar with a couple of songs, including this one.

 

And that's kind of where the trail went cold for me, although Liz continued to record and release music through the 1990s and early 2000s.

After 2010's Funstyle, there was no more until the Exit In Guyville anniversary release in 2018 and live dates stirred those creative juices and an album emerged in 2021.

I've only heard the singles from Soberish: Spanish Doors, which opens this post and provides it's title, The Game and Hey Lou. The latter is a take on Lou Reed from the perspective of his partner Laurie Anderson and accompanied by an eye-catching video. I clearly missed a trick by not including this one when I accidentally posted a mini-run of music videos featuring puppets with large heads a few weeks ago.

 

If nothing else, Liz's birthday celebration has been a helpful reminder that I really should listen to Soberish in it's entirety and investigate her back catalogue. Suggestions and recommendations from the blogging community will be gratefully received.

To close, I also found this rather wonderful performance by Liz and band of somebody else's song, namely Bitter Sweet Symphony by The Verve, from a concert in Los Angeles, October 2022. 

 

Liz is joined onstage by Lisa Loeb, who I only know from that one song from 1994's Reality Bites movie. In the subsequent three decades, Lisa appears to have had a pretty full-on and varied career whilst also seemingly to have achieved all this whilst in cryogenic suspension. 

It's a lovely raucous version of the song, although my ringing ears struggled to make out Lisa's singing and playing at all, and I'm glad I stumbled across it.

 

Have a good one, Liz, looking forward to (re)discovering your music. Better late than never!