Liz Phair's 'Exile in Guyville': Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little loone fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music, and more. We're your two Midwestern micro scenes of Minutia. I'm Alex Heigel, I'm Jordan. Run Talk Jordan. Today we're talking about one of the load stars of the nineties indie rock boom, a defining record for both Chicago and the increasing ranks of women with guitars throughout the era. That's right, we're talking about Liz Fair's Exile and Guyville, which turns thirty years old in June. I wanted to introduce a bit where I started pronouncing it in French exile and giv you know I didn't. I never really had too much experience with this record growing up, because I kind of came of like investigating music age. When her allegedly misbegotten and now reclaimed as all things must be as brave and innovative, her pop attempt came and so I just saw her on MTV and VH one with that pop song. What is it called? Was he even called? Why Can't I but I kept seeing that cover and that name in like the Rolling Stone lists and the spin lists and everything, and I was just like, what is going on with this? But you know, I never really got around to it until I did like a big deep dive in kind of that Chicago, like the roots of like Chicago because I'm a huge Tortoise fan and I like Jesus Lizard and I like Steve Albini. So I was like doing a bunch of lists. There's like ten years ago. I was like reading about Chicago a bunch and I finally put this record on. I was like, well, Okay, I get it. I kind of like PJ. Harvey's Rid of Me, though better that record makes this one. It's like Black Sabbath versus The Beach Boys. Not that I'm pitting women against each other. I'm just saying that one's a little bit more on my I'm not so much into the kind of tweet mumbly jangly pop stuff, even though it's sexually explicit though it may be. I'm more like, give me the heinous guitar tones. Ah, what about you, Bud.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, I kind of came at this album from a similar place. I think I mentioned this numerous times on this show. But I was born in nineteen eighty seven, and I spent most of my childhood pretending that I was living somewhere between the late fifties and the mid sixties, So my engagement with any sort of pop culture from this era that I actually grew up in was pretty spotty. I started to get with the program in like the late two thousands as I was graduating college, and I'm fascinated by stuff that happened before I was born, But the stuff that actually happened, like in my childhood in the nineties is still kind of a blind spot for me. But the music that I know best from the nineties is courtesy of my father, which, despite my own boomer tendencies, my actual boomer dad never stopped listening to new music, which is something that I've always here. Now, Yeah, he's got really great taste of music, so big Dick Runtah, Big Dick runtag, Yes, incredible taste of music. While I was listening to Dion and the Belmonts and Ricky Nelson around the house, like no joke, he was playing like never Mind or something, so which was a fun little like Alex p Keaton role.

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Speaker 2: Reversal that my friends always got a big kick out of.

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Speaker 3: But my dad's favorite albums were almost without fail, usually by female singer songwriters, especially in like the really passionate, tempestuous, pissed off vein. Jack a Little Pill was a huge one around the house, so was Fiona Apple's title Torry Amas's Little Earthquakes. Amy Mann and Exile in Guyville definitely fit this vill and I remember hearing it around the house, sometimes not quite as much as Jackie Little Pill. But it really wasn't until the twentieth anniversary in twenty thirteen and the resulting title wave of retrospective pieces that I realized just how revered this album is, which led me to giving it a well deserved re examination and appreciating it for the groundbreaking work that it is.

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Speaker 2: It really is, And I mean there's there's so much of like there's so much contextualizing that always helps stuff and and helps me check when I'm not like impressed by something. And so I definitely hear how like in the music scene at the time, like hearing this record and like Blowjob Queen and been Rod and all that. It's just it is. It was like quietly revolutionary, and I'll try not to let my scene politics poison that well. But so from the actual geological location of Guyville in to the weed fueled lengths, Fhare went to mimic and or tweak the Rolling Stones Exile on Main Street as an influence to the seething backlash she faced when the record took off. Here's everything you didn't know about Exile in Guyville. Question go on geological location? Does that mean rocks? That is that a rock joke? Nope? That was yes, well I mean it is now I'm gonna only read one of my head air's here that I was marginally proud of. This is a subsection called exile in Chaivill because they call it Chai Town. Actually, I've heard Chicagan's hate that, so I'll maybe cut that. Jordan, Can we get Lori Lightfoot on the phones hated Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot to contextualize fairs record and the scene came from we need to set our site seven years prior to its nineteen ninety three release. In the magical year of nineteen eighty six, Welcome to the Heigel Scene Corner. ALF was on the airwaves Metallica's Kill Them All had just come out. Other things were surely happening. I'm sure we've been friends that were born year. I just I'll know them. Yeah. Uh. That was the year when the Near Northwest Arts Council or NNWAC, a Chicago nonprofit to support local artists, was formed in the not particularly bustling neighborhood of wicker Park, which, in the urban renewal trends immemorial, was characterized by a lot of unused industrial space, which like you know, soho when when the free jazzers and the minimalists took over all of their lofts in the nineteen sixties and you know Bushwick in the in the early ten to twenty tens. Two years later, that organization set up an office at the Flat Iron Arts Building at the intersection of Milwaukee North and Damon Avenues, and they started holding a series of exhibition and performances that began the classic life cycle of how should we say, underperforming, underutilized, under what's not raised? Help me out here more buildings than other resources? Oh how about that? Yeah, and started transforming the neighborhood of wicker Park into an artistic hotbed in her thirty three and third book on exile in Guyville, author Gina Arnold writes, when I knew it in the early nineteen nineties, wicker Park was one of those slightly dangerous edgy neighborhoods where lofts and practice spaces were cheap to rent, where young women didn't wander around alone at night without an escort, and sometimes even the escort was nervous. The storefronts were run down and the bars were all dives. There were coffee shops rather than cafes, and one bought one's clothing secondhand. This all begins to change as Nirvana's never Mind makes its merry way into the monoculture, and at this point there was a huge influx of money into Chicago as a recording legend, Chicago icon, and crank about town, Steve Albini told Pitchfork in twenty sixteen. He went on to say you can't overstate how much that changed everything. Independent labels and bands stopped being sidelines and became growing concerns. Speculators wrote absurd checks to bands on very little evidence, sometimes without a note of music. In the shops, labels sank fortunes into promotion, buying out venues and offering tickets for free paying headline bands for support slots and festival positions. Radio Payola guys made a mint buying airplay to break bands in different markets. Lawyers got involved, some specializing in the independent major interface, crafting complex documents that were more likely to expire unfulfilled than run to term. Bookers became booking agents and managers. Local booking agencies became international players. Money changed everything, and one of the things it changed was the expectation bands had. Some bands saw this insane inflation as their birthright. Local journalists, bought off with access and promotional spending, began to write about this freeding frenzy as though it were the renaissance of a music scene that had been percolating along nicely. Riglass.

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Speaker 3: The man's got away with words, He sure does. I'm going to get a business card printed up for you. This is crank about crank at large.

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Speaker 2: Chicago, like a lot of major metro hubs that weren't New York or LA, nurtured a thriving underground scene. In the nineteen eighties and nineties. There were number an enormous number of DIY labels in Chicago, and then a bunch of aggressively weird bands like Albini's projects, Big Black Shellac, Jesus Lizard, and then through the nineties this turns into there's also like a big jazz subject subculture where guys are getting into making what's called has been termed in retrospect like post rock, which is essentially when you get a bunch of guys who like jazz into a studio and they don't want to make a jazz record. The Tortoise is like the biggest band from like that kind of scene. There's another band called The Sea in the Cake. Jim O'Rourke, big Chicago guy, and he's just one of those musical polymaths. Of course, will go how can we forget Wilco, who would later adopt Chicago. You ever been to Chicago?

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Speaker 4: Yeah?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I like Chicago. My uncle lived there. Yeah, my aunt's that. My uncle's a longtime University Chicago professor. I did not know that long Yeah. I like Chicago. I just can't deal with it. It's too fucking cold man during the winter. That did off the lake breeze effect or whatever they call that. No, thank you. Even the legendary British Diy folk punkers the me Cons adopted Chicago as their base of operation in the early nineties. Guyville, actually, though is a nickname for wicker Park, which itself was also called Bucktown, came from the band Urge Overkill, who you will most likely remember from their Neil Diamond cover on the pulp fiction soundtrack Girl Naral Naral Naryl. That's Urge ever Kill. I've told, I'm told, they did other things. They have a song called Goodbye to Guyville that was released in nineteen ninety two. I feel like if they had just kept calling it Bucktown, that's got more snap. Maybe not wicker.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, Guyble's more evocative, though, I feel like it's true in a bad way.

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Speaker 2: Well, please tell us about that, Jordan. Yes. Yes.

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Speaker 3: During an appearance on the show All Things Considered, Liz Fair elaborated on the concept of Guyville.

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Speaker 2: She said, quote, it was a state.

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Speaker 3: Of mind and or neighborhood that I was living in Guyville, because it was definitely their sensibilities that had that aesthetic, you know what I mean. It was sort of guy things, comic books with really disfigured, screwed up people in them, the sort of like constant love of social aberration. You know what I mean, there's kind of guy mentality, you know, where men are men and women are learning.

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Speaker 2: Her soundbites are so funny to me because no one ever crops out all of her like asides, like you know what I mean, it's what right kind of It's like a no interviewer ever truncates Liz Fair's quotes.

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Speaker 3: And then ask about what she sees in Guyville. She said that all the guys have short cropped hair, John lennnglasses, flannel shirts unpretentiously worn, not as a grunge statement, and work boots. Guyville to me sounds like the thing that the scientists from the Simpsons says, what's that?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, Guyvil? Yeah, that been exiled? Who am I thinking of? Let's professor Frank? Which is just which is just Jerry Lewis.

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Speaker 3: Ha I never realized that, Yeah, I've.

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Speaker 2: Been exiled in Guyville. Right when I think about it, it seems dark, it seems cold, It seems exciting and lawless in a way. Fair were called of the scene to Chicago Magazine in twenty nineteen, like we were in a transitional neighborhood and a lot of us didn't have a lot of money, but we all got together anywhere we could and shared music interest, listened to each other recording in the studio. There was a lot of cross pollination with creative people in Chicago back then, and you actually had to go be with them to get that. There was no internet, so you couldn't check them out online. You had to go see them play. It forges personal relationships, for better or for worse. In November of nineteen ninety three, just a few months after Exile was released, Billboard published a cover story on wicker Park titled Chicago Cutting Edges New Capital, which predictably hastened the churn from arts Haven to Turist Destination a matter of weeks.

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Speaker 3: Yay.

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Speaker 2: Long time Chicago Tribune music critic Greg Kott, who will make many appearances in this episode, told The av Club in twenty seventeen, I don't think we've ever had an era where you can say, oh, what happened to Chicago music. There's an infrastructure here to support independent music that's artistically minded. It's not focused on that sort of commercial Let's get a song on the radio. Wave of major label signings that occurred in the early nineties. In some ways that was an aberration. It came and went almost as quickly as it arrived. We may never see that again, and in some ways I hope we don't, because I thought it did put this artificial layer on Chicago that in some ways was antithetical to what Chicago's artistic scene has been all about for so many years.

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Speaker 3: So that is the scene that gave rise to Liz Fair's groundbreaking album Exil and Guyville. Let's talk about Liz Fair the person at a glance. But Clark Fair was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in April nineteen sixty seven.

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Speaker 2: Adopted a birth.

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Speaker 3: By intellectual and affluent artsy parents who worked at high falutin places like Northwestern Memorial Hospital and the Arts Institute of Chicago. Liz Fair lived in Cincinnati until she was nine, when her family located to the Chicago suburb of Winnetka. Big Noise from Winnetka swing band song that my jazz band played in high school?

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Speaker 2: Anyway? Really anything?

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Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that's hilarious. It's my only point of reference. Now, my second point of reference of Winneka is Liz Fair. She attended Oberlin College, graduating in nineteen ninety with a BA in art history. She told The New York Times in nineteen ninety four, I decided to make a name for myself and become a fine artist. I had a modern art book assigned to me by a female professor. I started counting, and there were I think fifteen female artists before nineteen sixty. That was pretty frightening. But I figured that after nineteen sixty they were sure to be more. And there were just fifteen female artists after nineteen sixty, So in a book of twelve hundred pages, there were thirty female artists.

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Speaker 2: I just freaked out.

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Speaker 3: I walked around for days telling everyone I could, and they'd say, that's nice, Liz.

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Speaker 2: It was really pretty frightening for me.

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Speaker 3: And Liz indeed supported herself off her charcoal sketches for a time, and she said I hadn't even wanted to be a recording artist. This is her talking to Spinding the lead up to the release of Exile in Guyville. It was completely a side thing for me music. I was concentrating on being a fine artist and working on my drawing. But before settling at Chicago, Liz Fair made an aborted attempt at a music career in San Francisco, where she went broke after about a year in return home to live with her parents. Similar trajectory if I recall that Janis Joplin took She went to San Francisco in the early sixties to try to be a sort of a beat musician, and then got hooked on speed and moved back home with her parents and took a correspondence course to be a secretary, I believe, and then she got drawn back into San Francisco.

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Speaker 2: I think I have that right. I believe you list fair.

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Speaker 3: She began writing and recording songs into a four track tape machine in her bedroom, massing enough for three tapes. This title I don't know why this title is as bad as this is. I don't even know if I can say this right on the first attempt, Yo yo, buddy, yup yup, word to your mother.

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Speaker 2: Girls Girls, that's the first one, which is written in a disturbing transliteration of ebonics that I hate. Yeah.

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Speaker 3: The second tape is girls, Girls Girls. I can live at that, and the third is Sooty, Sooty. She passed these tapes around. There were friends in Chicago under the band name Girly Sound.

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Speaker 2: Which I like. I like that name. Yeah, yeah, little Touch of the Tina Fey thirty Rock for You. Oh sure.

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Speaker 4: Yeah.

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Speaker 3: The other players in the Exile and Main Street story, Nope. The other players in the Exile and Guy story is a guy named Brad Wood, who opened his studio Idful Music Corporation in wicker Park in nineteen eighty nine, and John Henderson, who operated an indie label called Feels Good.

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Speaker 2: All Over another really good name.

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Speaker 3: Lilliz Fair told Jessica Hopper for Spin Magazine's oral history on Guyville in twenty thirteen. I was living this completely post college flat broke, only cared about going out at night existence shirking my adult responsibilities. I was hanging out at Northwestern with frat guys. I just wanted to get out. John, the afore mentioned John Henderson, the indie label owner. John's apartment became one of my destinations. He introduced me to bands and spent a lot of time to teach me about good songwriting, which I definitely learned, but it was only half paying attention to and not taking super seriously. He had a room and said just move in here. It's super cheap, and we started working on this record and the songs on Guyville Liz told Pitchfork in two thousand and eight, quote a vocal period when I was on the edge. I was not living up to the expectation of my family. What I had been raised to do. I was certainly not doing. I was scamming my way through life, not really working, and I think I had.

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Speaker 2: Some self destructive tendencies. But it was also wild and fun.

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Speaker 3: Brad Wood, who you remember operated his studio Idful Music Corporation in wicker Park, told Spin. In the fall of nineteen ninety one, John Henderson, who ran the indie label Feels Good All Over, told me about this amazing songwriter named Liz that he was working with. He thought my recording studio might be the place to make her record.

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Speaker 2: But Farren Henderson had a falling out and she moved out of his place by December of nineteen ninety one and back in with her parents. Bradwood told Spin. After Liz moved back to her parents place in Evanston, I figured that was the end, but the potential of those songs kept nagging at me, and I called Liz. In January of nineteen ninety two. I drove up to Evanston, drove her back to wicker Park, and she and I recorded Can Run that night. It was a big success, and we even had time for a drink before I drove her back home. Hours of driving, things progressed at that snail's pace. Me driving forty five minutes to her parents, she and I driving back to the studio for forty five minutes, record for a few hours, maybe watch some PBS. Drive back to Evanston to drop Liz off, then finally drive back home to wicker Park. I saw a lot of Lake Shore Drive in nineteen ninety two. I love that they made time for PBS. You think they were watching Bob Ross.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, I just realized Evanston was a tom Alone Chicago.

00:19:23
Speaker 2: John Hughes, No, that's Wineka. That's where the houses.

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Speaker 3: I thought, Oh yeah, I was just thinking, yeah, Waneka has the home alone house. Who knows Liz Fair could have been the callister's neighbor. Think about that. You didn't do Jay, You should have?

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Speaker 2: I didn't I should. Yeah, you're right, I'm sorry. It'll never happen again. See that it doesn't. A few people from this scene have mentioned that Fair didn't have a ton of live experience performing solo or even playing with a band at this point. Patrick Monaghan, who founded Carrot Top Records in nineteen ninety three, recalled Pitchfork about seeing Fair for the first time at a small Polish bar not long before Exile in Guyville, describing her as a nervous performer, shy girl with an acoustic guitar. Greg Cott, the tribute critic, told The av Club, there was one of two disastrous Liz Fair gigs that I saw early on. She was clearly unprepared for the stage, so those kind of stick out, But the songs were really good.

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Speaker 3: This is kind of a through line in the Liz Fairs story. Live performance for her is not really her thing.

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Speaker 2: By the end of it, I mean, but by her own admission, Yeah, oh yeah, exactly so. Yeah, but no, I think a lot of it, a lot of it is gendered, and a lot of it is really gross. But like there, you know, I couldn't I found a really truly devastating summary of the evening that Greg Cott wrote, and then I wasn't able to find it again. But it was like she broke a string on her guitar and like the sound guy had to come and fix, like replace it for her, and then it was something like twenty three minutes later, to the relief of the audience and the performer, the like embarrassing display ended something like that. It was yeah, so, but you know who among us? Who among us? Exactly who among this guy? Particularly?

00:21:08
Speaker 3: Uh?

00:21:09
Speaker 2: You got you?

00:21:10
Speaker 3: You're a machine with that with that right hand, You're right, you're quite a strummer.

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Speaker 2: That's how he got his nickname. Is that true, Joe? Yeah? From his from his right hand attack so obvious. I thought it couldn't possibly be that. But Fair's unpolished approach found its match in brad Wood. He will get into some of his recording techniques later, which are really endearing and really wild. But he told the av Club, I think that was the first time where I worked with somebody who was writing really great lyrics and great songs, but also was not encumbered with a band. Working with Liz was the first time where I was doing things musically that I had been thinking about for a long time, or that I hadn't done since I was in college. With my cassette four track and a delay line and a couple of microphones, just goofing around as you meditate on that.

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Speaker 5: We'll be right back with more too much information after these messages.

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Speaker 3: Now, A big part of the narrative around Exile in Guyville is that Liz Fair crafted it as a track by track response repulst to the Rolling Stones debauched epic Exile on Main Street. She told Spin I was dating this guy, and I was living in this apartment where I was writing the songs for Guyville. It belonged to some friends who had vacated and they left behind these cassette tapes, and one was Exile on Main Street. I was listening to it and thinking about how to make a record, and I was fighting with this guy. He said, well, why don't you do that one? That's a double record, But he was kind of sarcastic about it, so I was like, Okay, I will. I listened to it over and over again, and it became my source of strength. My involvement with Exile was like an imaginary friend. Whatever Mick was saying, it was a conversation with him, or I was arguing with him, and it was kind of an amalgam of the men in my life. That's why I call the Guyville friends romantic interests, These teacher types telling me what I needed to know, what was cool or wasn't cool. I developed a very private relationship with this record, listening to it again and again and again. What are your thoughts on Excellent main Street?

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Speaker 2: Excellent main Street? One of the greatest records of all time. There's a couple skippers on there, not many for as as it is.

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Speaker 3: It's too dark for me. It's too the dark. I usually I don't look away from the darkness, but in this case I do it. X Nazi Basement I can't be yeah.

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Speaker 2: I mean, obviously there's that, but no, it's just that it's it's also like, you know, inasmuch as the richest rock band in the world could be accused of being DIY, it's pretty DIY. They recorded in a bit of basement in between drug binges. It's just and like the production is so good, the layering. I think it's the closest they ever really got to in the like kind of country soul stuff that the band did. I think it's a great companion. It's like the British version of the second band album. It's got so many of my favorite songs on there. It's torn and Freid is such a banger. It's got Nicky Hopkins come on, come on, Exile bing Bong, greatest album in the world, Greatest album in the world.

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Speaker 3: Baby, I'm more of a sticky fingers guy. You more of a satanic Majesty's request guy.

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Speaker 2: You day you have to say yeah? Is he kidding? After Math I'll go with after Math. Yeah, Black and Blue, Black, ghasts Heads, goats Head Soup actually has some bangers. Winter is incredible. One hundred years ago. They call me Lady Bones. I just love the production on those things. It's so like it just sounds like I mean, goats Head Soup literally sounds like soup. It's I think you're swirling in this seedy miasthma of like much like Exile and Gayville. And that's what they talked about with the production here. They were deliberately trying to be like, how do we make this like murky and weird? And they built all of it around just her guitar and voice and then added all the extraneous crap to it. Not extraneous, but like added all the weird percussion layers and sound loops and anyway, sorry, where we where were we?

00:25:29
Speaker 3: Oh?

00:25:29
Speaker 2: You were talking about Exile Main Street. Don't get me started on Exile main Street.

00:25:34
Speaker 3: Well, making an album that was a response to Exile main Street.

00:25:38
Speaker 2: This is fair to old writer Rob Joyner, who now writes about mma stuff. Really, I tried to. I wasn't a hundo verified on all the on this interview that I found everywhere, because he doesn't seem to have much of a digital footprint, but from because this was like archived on a blogger page. Do you remember Blogger?

00:25:58
Speaker 1: God?

00:25:59
Speaker 2: But huh yeah yeah. But from what I could tell, he now focuses extensively on covering mixed martial arts, which is the natural progression. Yeah, well it was fair, told Rob Joyner.

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Speaker 3: I thought it was a cool structural device, and I wanted to give myself something extra to think about. I come from an academic background, and I got off on going through my little warehouse of songs to find the ones I thought had the same feel or were of the same type. The more I listened to Exile on Main Street, the more I was perfectly appropriate. I began to organize my songs into correspondence with themes I've seen in Exile on Main Street. I made lists and lists of what Exile songs were three words or less, what kind of song was this, and made tons of sequence lists different orders of the songs I wanted to do. It was like writing a thesis, taking a song of mine and somehow putting it in a dialogue with a song on Exile on Main Street, both sonically and lyrically. I absolutely took it dead, seriously. I sat around with stacks, like hundreds of pieces of paper.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, after I was stoned a lot. I love that quote so much.

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Speaker 3: I was a twenty something, no job, I hung out playing guitar all day. I had all this education, I thought analytically, and someone had made a dare and she describes charting the sequencing of the records with symbols like asterisks or crosses that indicated like a poppier song or a slower one. She continued, I went nuts. I can't tell you. We would go into the studio and I'd be like, you have to have this big guitar solo three quarters of the way through, because that's what Excel on Main Street has, and the lyrics had to be an answer or my equivalent. I put so much into it and uninterrupted attention. It was like a doctoral thesis, and decades after the release of Exile in Guyville. Sometime around two thousand and five, she actually met Mick Jagger. This was around the time she was finishing up her album Somebody's Miracle in an La studio and nearby the Stones were having a listening party for their latest album, I think it was their last album of original material, A Bigger Bang in two thousand and five, and a producer, John Shanks Inner, deuced Liz to Mick Jagger, and she recalled, I can barely speak and Nick is just kind of standing there, not interested in me at all, like, yes, I've heard of you. This is her talking then the Chicago Tribune in twenty eighteen, and he basically forgave me for my using of their name to sort of make myself famous. It was not like, Wow, thanks for that awesome thing, that great album. It was kind of like, you're welcome.

00:28:24
Speaker 2: That sounds like what Mick Jagger would have done. There are a few more obvious links between the records. There's Flowers, with an allusion to the Stones track Dead Flowers, which does not appear on Ella Main Street. Mesmerizing is the name of the Liz Fair song as Marized is a lyric and rocks off from exile, and even Shatter. The song Shatter that could even be a reference to Shattered, which is on Some Girls. That's one where Mick Jagger raps it's my favorite. It's so bad. He's like, uh, what's the one part where he goes, uh, I'm shattered. My brain's in tatters. It's been splattered all over Manhattan like it's it's He's said so for being one of the most dynamic frontmen ever, he is so astoundingly bad at trying to do this this new fangled thing they call rappin'. Oh my god, it's so funny. It's worse than Blondie.

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Speaker 3: I don't want to puss that in. If it wasn't for the fact that that seems like sue bait, Oh yeah, they get our ass.

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Speaker 2: Fair told Details magazine in nineteen ninety four that while she was still attending Oberlin College, where she graduated from in nineteen ninety she tried to seduce a guy on one drunken night. I had this big crush on a younger man, and I was so frustrated. I felt like a man dealing with a young fawn of a girl. I'd been dancing around him in ways he wasn't even aware of and all I wanted to do, and all I wanted to do was get down and bone was this you fair did end up getting the guy in bed where he did nothing but fall asleep. Yeah, she said he just she said, he just snoozed there. It was ridiculous. Yeah, that's great, that's great. Uh So one of my favorite things about Exile is all the like extraneous noise in it. And they also really loved that when they were making Exile in Guyville, because brad Wood talked about deliberately going like yeah and whoa while he was doing drum tracks to sound like Mick Jagger, like whooping it up in the background of the of Exile where he was not present. That's always my favorite thing about that. There's that they just handed off this behemoth of a record to Mick and he finished it all out an ocean away. Was there for.

00:30:42
Speaker 3: Some of it, but he was mostly living I think in Paris when Keith was living in Nelcote in southern France.

00:30:48
Speaker 2: So yeah, but he was. He was there for some of it, for those basement sessions. But no, wa, he wasn't. He wasn't cool enough. Uh what was I gonna say, oh yeah, they added moroccas, shakers looped percussion because that was their way of trying to get at like all of the percussion on the Stone's rhythm tracks. Wood also used cardboard boxes and pillows that he would put contact mics on and play them through guitar effects pedals for percussion sounds. He got the percussion sounds on one of these tracks by just banging on a countertop with like marimba mallets. He told the av Club, Dance of the Seven Veils has a lot of that. I used an old sampler that I found in college and used samples I recorded of a mission of the music department, and I was recycling that stuff, pitching it and changing it and putting it on the record. In addition to all of that, you know, he played bass, He wrote and sang most of the harmonies on the record. As I mentioned earlier, he drummed. And there's another guy at the studio in Folt, Casey Rice, who played lead guitar, and Wood told Spin that came he devised a great way to set up two guitar amps facing each other with me in the middle with a telecaster turned way up and depending on which way I leaned would generate a different pitch. He was great at setting up controlled feedback situations. That's what Santana used to do. He would mark off where he would get all the different feedback parts. And that's how they did Heroes too. That all the ever that stuff that everyone thinks is like an ebo or like a tape delay, that's just like frip. They marked off where he would stand in the studio to get that feed that kind of self sustaining feedback drone. I didn't know that. Wow, Yeah, cool stuff. The record was tracked piece Mail would work backwards, structuring the drum patterns and bass lines around Fair's vocal phrases and guitar riffs, and then Casey Rice would add his lead guitar tracks. Would told Spin almost every song on Guyville started with Liz playing her guitar to a click track or drum machine or looped hand percussion. Drums were often added last, which is the opposite to how a lot of rock music is recorded ass backwards.

00:33:01
Speaker 3: But Liz Fair was not especially interested in all the technicalities of the studio trickery and gizmo stuff. She told Spin, the worst part would be when Bradwood would talk for a really long time about an amplifier and how it grew out of this and that, and I would just be like, oh God, I brought in my own little cheap PV amp and had my own way of setting it. It was kind of like the amp you would buy for a child who you didn't think was going to be good at.

00:33:30
Speaker 2: Music, and so you didn't want to invest in it.

00:33:32
Speaker 3: Like the worst possible amp. But it was my security blanket. I would not be taking off this amp with my settings and my guitar. So that is the music of exile in Guyville. Tell us about the words no, because I would like to instead also mention that the secret sauce on another iconic album is ATYPV guitar amp, and that is Strokes. Strokes debut record, a vocal sounds that has been attempted and copy be endlessly, And Gordon Raphael said that is in fact, Julian Casablancas is like eight watt PV practice amp that they would run his vocals through and then blend that with the clean sound.

00:34:10
Speaker 2: So shouts to PV man. You know PV gets a lot of hate, but here they are quietly popping up as iconic studio tools. Words of exile in Guieville. Uh Fairs explicit lyrics on and and and subtler lyrics on songs like I very well blowjob Queen, She says, I want to be your blow job queen. There's not a song. Let me take that again. It's not a song called blow job queen. Idiot she wants to She says, I want to be your blowjob queen in divorce song or in Oh it just made the mistake of just googling blowjob queen. That was that was not flower Yeah. Uh Fairs explicit lyrics and songs like can Run and Flower, which she states memorably I want to be your blowj queen, and Canary, which has its lines I jump when you circle the cherry, I sing like a good canary. I come when called. And there's my new notification when you text me. Well, then there's the even less subtle every time I see your face, I get all wet between my legs.

00:35:17
Speaker 5: Oh.

00:35:17
Speaker 2: Actually, yeah, there's my new text notification from you. Yeah. And it's really quietly revolutionary stuff, man, I mean, think about the climate of ninety two ninety three. You've got hair, Metal is on its last legs, you know, and then you've got dour. You know. Hear suit men from the Pacific Northwest, and then the hair comes this tiny five tube woman singing aggressively abo about sex. Yeah, I understand why it made such a bomb. I understand why it's why it's gone on to be so so groundbreaking. As a female, I don't think you're supposed to say the kind of things I wanted to say, or at least I had gotten myself into a position where I didn't feel comfortable saying to people's faces a lot of stuff I said on that record. Phair told NPR in two thousand and eight, I had been listening for ten years to records where guys talked explicitly about sex, and then all the women that came out with music, barring a few like Patti Smith and Chrissy Hind and other people, women were sort of shunted to the area of emotion. But I've always been pissed off, frankly that the whole myth that women aren't interested in sex. If you had thirty thousand years of really bad consequences for being interested in sex, you might hide it too, and I wanted to be like I want to QW hard, I want a bad like now, I'm.

00:36:37
Speaker 3: Really trying to think of any other women who saying I mean, obviously not this explicit, but like saying that sort of bluntly about sex.

00:36:47
Speaker 2: In the it would have been the early not this time. It would have been like the early blues musicians like Bessie Smith. They were singing really foul dude, uh Nina. One of my favorite Nina some Own songs is I Want a Little Sugar in my bowl, which is not subtle, but yeah, around this time, No.

00:37:13
Speaker 3: I can't really think of anybody on the same topic. Liz Fair later said, I felt like everywhere I turned people were denying my experience of my own sexuality. I was very interested in sex. I wasn't promiscuous, but I was as interested as any boy that I knew. Also, it was the era of AIDS, so I was highly conscious of health. I got tired of reading articles justifying social norms with these really limped studies about how animals behave. They hadn't studied the female brain enough at that point, and they were still trying to tell you that you didn't have a G spot and that women were less interested in sex, and I'm like, maybe because they married a guy for security and they're just not into him. Like there are other explanations.

00:37:52
Speaker 2: I felt like it was.

00:37:53
Speaker 3: Really important to want overtly and to lust, and to be able to own my own sexuality. I was scared to do it, but I felt like it was important to take the territory back for myself.

00:38:04
Speaker 2: Good for her. What do you think about all this? You're kind of a prude. Well, someone's gotta have these discussions. I'm just glad it's not name. Popular music has always been a vehicle for talking openly about sex, but often that's happened in very exaggerated terms. That's NPR Music's pop critic And Powers, who wrote an essay about exiling Guyville for the two thousand and eight box set The Brilliant Thing. Liz Fairdad was talk about sex in a normal tone, as if it were part of her normal life. I guess sort of. The tonal. The tonal, what makes it, what makes it so tonally interesting and so gripping, is that you know she is marrying that kind of slacker affect, and that kind of slacker like can't be arsed to enunciate or really get too bothered about things in uh in this really frank and explicit stuff. That's I just you know. I didn't put that together until now because I'm a dummy.

00:39:10
Speaker 3: All that said, Liz Fair told writer Rob Joyner that quote a lot of Guyvilla's bullsh total made up fantasy crap. That stuff didn't happen to me, and that's what made writing it interesting. I wasn't connecting with my friends. I wasn't connecting with relationships. I was in love with people who couldn't care less about me. I was yearning to be part of a scene. I wasn't opposing kind of mode, yearning to have things happened for me that weren't happening. So I wanted to make it seem real and convincing. I wrote the whole album for a couple people to see and know me. There wasn't one synopsis that will cover the record in terms of was it made in reaction to this scene?

00:39:47
Speaker 2: Was it made as a feminist statement? Was it made as a love.

00:39:50
Speaker 3: Record to try to talk someone into paying attention to me? This is her talking to the Village Voice in two thousand and eight. It was all of those things like is it true, Yes? Did I make it up?

00:40:00
Speaker 2: Yes?

00:40:00
Speaker 3: The problem is in the years and years of talking about this that what's true is a multiple thing.

00:40:06
Speaker 2: Sure, they needed more money to finish the record, and fair on Wood's advice called up Mattador Records, whose head Gerard Coslay, had happened to read a review of the Girly Sound Tapes in fanzine. And this is where I start to get really really bitter calling up calling it with just just calling up Matador and being like, hey, can you put on my record? And the guy just happens to read he happened to read a single review of your work in a self printed not even Rolling Stone, just like a zine, a regional zine. Yeah, And they sent her between three and five grand. It was enough to let her move into wicker Park and finish the record closer to the studio. I liked it a lot, Coslay told The New York Times in nineteen ninety four, and played it for everybody else. We don't usually sign people we haven't met or heard other records by or seene as performers. But I had a hunch and I called her back and said, Okay, the famous cover art for Exile and Guyville with its conspicuous nip slip? Can I say that it's kind of d listed? But sure? How about how about it's auspicious with its auspicious areola? Is that better anything? There no bad ideas in brainstorming. There's no bad ideas in brainstorming. That wasn't even the original concept for that cover. Apparently the concept art as we got it, it was something to Urge Overkill, which is the second way in which this record is indebted to a band. I have heard one song about from End. Are they good? Do you know anything else about them? I'm not super familiar, Fair told Vulture in two thousand and eight, I turned in a still from a friend of mine's student film for the cover of the CD. It was an orgy of barbies floating in a pool. Mattador was like, what the fuck is this? They called up Nash Cato o Verge Overkill and asked him to help. So he comes to me. He goes, Lizzy, listen, the record's great, but they're not digging this. Why don't you go into the photo booth, take off your shirt and leave on your necklaces? Gross? My words, not his, and then or hers, and then Fair continues, And before I went into the bathroom, he was like, oh, and remember to put lipstick on your nipples because I have very light pink nipples. And I figured it was some weird porno thing he knew about. Like, wow, that's why the nipples always look so good. Yeah, thoughts on that lighting's important. That's uh.

00:42:40
Speaker 3: I got on to say, I never noticed that there was the nip n yeah in the album cover.

00:42:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I mean I was always seeing it about like a one inch by two inches in like rolling Stone or spin. I don't think I saw it in a record store physically until years later. Anyway, I was, she said. I was always game to try fun and somewhat reckless things. And the last shot was just sort of wow, and that became the cover and that one little nipple showed, which was a big deal. Later on, over the years, various labels have cropped it out. I believe it has since been placed back in for the various reissues. So good for the nipple. We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more. Too much information. In just a moment, buzz around Fair's release started building from basically the second that advanced tapes of Guyville hit the streets, and she was already looking a little askance at it. She told the Chicago Reader in January of nineteen ninety three, I'm completely serious about success, but I also realized the pitfalls of that. You know, But what's going to happen to me? If everyone thinks it's hot shit? Am I ready for that? Am I prepared to achieve at the level I might have to? That's a very appreciate quote.

00:44:14
Speaker 3: And now we go back to Liz Fair's uneasy relationship with live performance. Some kind of shaky early gigs didn't really help the perception that Liz Fhair was a rich, ambitious girl from the suburbs who hadn't paid her dues. Greg Cott quoted the Chicago based Thrill Jockey Records head but Tina Richards in a nineteen ninety four Tribune article, is saying the only thing that's aggravating is that there are other female songwriters I love that couldn't understand why they're not getting the attention. Liz Fair is Barbara Manning, for one. To me, her lyrics are so sophisticated, but she's also not as aggressive about wanting to be successful. I don't see her ever putting her chest on a record cover, and even Liz Fair's former supporter feels good all over. Recordhead John Henderson bashed Fair to cot for quote talk about how male dominated the record businesses in her interviews, and then hiring established figures such as Will Botwin beer manager and Bob Blatton, the beer booking agent. I don't know who those names are, but I assume they're very powerful men.

00:45:14
Speaker 2: I mean, or at least they are men. Yeah. Yeah, And this is where the backlash is. This is this is honestly, I don't co sign this, but I do find this to be the really interesting stuff because the politics around like what would have been considered sellout and ambition were so they are so foreign to us these days. There's no way you would talk about any female artists like this today, or any artists who just wanted to get famous or wanted to sell records or like you know, had a like the nipple a nipple shot on their record, you know, like we talked about it, like I know, like Cardi b and Meghan the Stallion got like like got in trouble for wat but it certainly wasn't coming from their own like home team. You know, it was coming from it's always nowadays would be coming from like conservative media. This is like the Area Record labels like slamming her in the paper. That's crazy, just such an utterly different climate. And in the same Greg cut piece in the Tribune and Lis Fair defended herself essentially by saying, my critics saw me as the lucky daughter that the new daddies are gonna take and make and they ask, why do I deserve it? But it's not about deserving it. It's about the path of least resistance. I'm accessible enough in so many channels and you can sell me really well, which is very self aware. Yeah, it's funny her self awareness and like candor and everything either comes across. I can see why people were like turned off by her and like annoyed by it and thought that she was just kind of this Johnny come lately and very brash and getting a lot of unearned resources and hits and everything. But it is so funny the way that she is just very astute about the business and kind of her place in it. You know, Casey Rice, who played guitar on Excellent Guyville told Spin for their oral history, he said, I agreed in some respects it with the criticism of the backlash backlash, it did seem unfair in that regard. And then here's the real note of that quote. But when was the music business about being fair? So always you know, grain assault there. The record was a critical hit. It was number one album in the Year End Critics Poll and Spin and the influential Village Voice PAS and JOP Critics Poll and by Chicago Indie Standards a financial hit as well. By the spring of ninety four, it had sold over two hundred thousand units, peaking at one to ninety six on the Billboard. Two hundred was Mattador's most successful release at the time. In nineteen ninety eight, it was certified gold by the RIAA, which is five hundred thousand copies.

00:47:50
Speaker 5: Right.

00:47:52
Speaker 2: It was like a bomb went off. Bradwood told the av Club. There was everything before Exile and Guy Phil, and then there was life after that. Nothing has been the same since. Gerard Cousley, who's a head of Matador, told New York Times, if you had told me we were going to sell five thousand copies, I would have been satisfied. If it had been twenty or thirty thousand copies, I would have been pretty shocked. There was no precedent for it in my experience. The sales were generated by a lot of word of mouth and by Liz's hard.

00:48:19
Speaker 3: Work, and this herself reacted to the warm reception of Guyville by saying, quote, I don't really get what happened with Guyville.

00:48:26
Speaker 2: It was so normal. From my side of things.

00:48:28
Speaker 3: It was nothing remarkable other than the fact that I'd completed a big project. But I'd done that before. Being emotionally forthright was the most radical thing I did, and that was taken to mean something bigger in terms of women's roles in society and women's roles in music. I just wanted people who thought it was not worth talking to to listen to me. But Fair also recalled the Rob Joyner. Nobody in my neighborhood liked me. After the record came out. I'd walked in the bars and my friends would be debating, she dyes her hair blonde, she can't sing, she came from a suburbs. They were so furious with me because I didn't deserve the attention I was getting. They'd been slogging away in the city being indie for ten years, and I get out of school, throw this thing together in Boom. I'm the poster child for indie and she sang about this phenomenon and the song never said, but she wrote to be the album's big radio single. She put it as the fifth track on Exile in Guyville because that's where she felt the most crucial songs should go on every album. Case in point, on Exile on Main Street, that's where Tumbling Dice went, which was kind of a pseudo radio hit. Fair later said up never said. It was just kind of like about the music scene and how caddy it was. People were always getting upset about something that someone had said about their band or whatever the latest gossip was. It was a very very caddy, little incestuous scene. She added to The Book Club Chicago in twenty eighteen. There was also a lot of blowback when my record blew up, because I hadn't been the scene as long, I hadn't really paid my dues. In their minds, maybe it was the suburban thing where some were like, oh, rich girls getting all the attention. I think there was a sense that people felt they were waiting their turn longer. That was a little upsetting, as well as how they took the sexual songs on my record and amplified it, which I didn't have anything to do with. Lots of bands were talking about sex, but they picked mine up and turned it into like a Playboy centerfold thing. That was actually traumatic for me. I got a little anorexic during that period because I felt really exposed and didn't know what was going on. I wanted to impress the neighborhood, and then I got picked up by this national media thing and I got a little lost in there. How do you feel about all this about her kind of not knowing what.

00:50:37
Speaker 2: Was about the backlash? Just about this backlash. You've been part of it. You were part of our little micro scene in Brooklyn where people get mostly me, people get red asked about other people's success and paying your dues and so on and so forth. I mean, I understand that from an emotional standpoint, how galling that can be. But also if you have somebody coming along that makes a piece of art that resonates with people right away in that moment, I don't think it's something that should necessarily have to be earned. I think it's something that you made the right piece of art for the right moment. Yeah, I have aged into thinking that, but a small and secret part of me is still full of rage, such such rage because it I mean, yeah, yeah, I don't know, man, It's it's tough. It's it's really the whole major label feeding frenzy of like independent music in the nineties, did this of the nineties, did this to like everything scene? You know, they did it to in Berkeley, in San Francisco, they did it in Seattle, they did it in you know, Portland. They did it like they just parachuted in and a couple people, and it was never a rising tide lifts all boats, you know, the rising tide in the music industry. The rising tidle doesn't do for the other boats. So it's like, yeah, I I I understand the bitterness, and I understand. I just I think, if anything, she probably didn't help her case by like immediately abandoning like Chicago and going to become because she she moved into like film and television, composing and stuff and then going extremely pop. Like it's not that it's not just that she made a she parachuted into a scene and profited off from it. She abandoned it and never looked back, So I understand that. But you know, also, whatever, dude musicians getting paid? She she wrote songs people like that's it.

00:52:34
Speaker 3: You know, you either die an indie hero or you live long enough to become a producer.

00:52:42
Speaker 2: Oh okay, uh bar none. The most famous bit of hatred from this era comes from Steve Albini. Albini is probably more famous most famous for his work as a producer, engineer, stuff like Nirvana's In You to Row, Pixie Surfer Rosa, a million other things, but he was also sort of an Enphone Terrible of the Chicago underground for quite some time. It's funny that everyone is like, Steve is actually a really nice guy, and he's also actually really mellowed out since he did it. He actually wrote like a very long and heartfelt thing in mel magazine of all outlets, being like like gracefully and maturely and like apologizing for all of his like provocateurs that he did and really and owning it and being like, I'm sorry, I was really shuting me at the time. I'm like doing a bunch of work to to you know, correct that and I hope I can be forgiven for that stuff, so I find that really sweet. But he was also in a band called rape Man, and his band Big Black had songs about child abuse being slaughtered, and he was very famous for what what what a different generation would call his poisoned Ben. He would just constantly write these screeds to mostly the Chicago Reader because he really had a bone to pick with Bill Wyman the critic, not the Stones basis, but probably him too, and like maximum rock and roll, and he he wrote probably his most famous to in January of nineteen ninety four. The previous December, Bill Wyman had named Exile in Guyville to his Best of Year end lists along with Urge, Overkill and the Smashing Pumpkins and had written this defense of them, saying that the backlash to them from the underground scenes was not deserved. And Albini wrote him an open letter called three Pandering Sluts and their music press Stooge, and in it he takes aim at fair, Urge, Overkilled and the Smashing Pumpkins and they're quote calculated and overbearing hype barrage, and then some truly devastating lines he says these three are not alternative artists any more than their historical precursors. They are by of and for the mainstream. Liz Fair is Ricky Lee Jones more talked about than heard, a persona completely unrooted in substance, and a chore to listen to. Smashing Pumpkins are Ario Speedwagon, stylistically appropriate for the current college party scene, but ultimately insignificant and urge overkill. Are oingo boingo wieners in suits playing frat party rock, trying to tap a goofy trend that doesn't even exist. Obviously, history is pulling have proven him wrong about the Smashing Pumpkins, but damn that is a withering put down in his column, though he did concede that Fair and her album are probably the least defensive of the three you focused on in your column, which may explain why you think she is any good. Wyman later wrote of this back and particularly his relationship, his patronage or whatever, of her. In twenty sixteen, he wrote, I like gossip. The free flow of information is great for journalists, particularly back then when I was one of the few people who had a public outlet for it. But I gotta say a lot of it was heavily sexualized and felt hostile. One letter to the editor slamming Fair said, I was quote trying to get a whiff of Winnetka pussy. That was typical of the tone. The Chicago Headline Club, at its annual comedy show at the Park West, did a weird skit that implied we were sleeping together. A local journalist named Ben Kim was really vicious in trashing Affairs live shows, and then in response, she canceled an interview with another journalist who worked for the same outlet Kim did, even at a local level, it was just ugly.

00:56:46
Speaker 3: And this is maybe goes some way and explaining why. Liz Fairs started to sort of sour on her feelings for Exile and Guyville. By October nineteen ninety four, a little over a year after the album was released, she told The New York Times, I can't feel these songs anymore. I have to act like I feel them. It feels very scanny to me. It feels very much not a sincere element for my music. I can get really upset about this, she continued. If performing live is a livelihood, I'm never going to make any money in this business. They can try really hard to make a performer out of me, and I'll rise to the occasion. But I'm much happier making the art. And if this messes up my career, I can accept it. I can be poor again. Some people just take to performing and it feeds them, but it drains me. What feeds me is to have an actual project for my efforts. Where is it written in the good book that if you make records you have to play live. There's plenty of bands out there playing live.

00:57:38
Speaker 2: What are they me for.

00:57:40
Speaker 3: I don't think I can give it up for a couple of years, but there's no way I'm going to play this out. I may make albums for a really long time, but in terms of promoting them, that's totally finite. Again, very self aware, yeah, self assured and self aware.

00:57:54
Speaker 2: Her follow up records nineteen ninety four is Whip Smart Whip Smart and nineteen ninety eight's White Chocolate Space Egg All one word No. I reject that they didn't flop exactly, but nor did they quote unquote capitalize on the momentum from Guyville. Then, of course, in two thousand and three came Fair's self titled record She was open about the fact, and had been since nineteen ninety eight that she wanted to make money from her songs, and so she hired the songwriting and production team The Matrix, who had produced songs by Britney Spears, The Backstreet Boys, Ricky Martin, and of course, Avril Levine's deathless hit Complicated. Fairh told The Washington Post at this age, I wanted to feel more like an entrepreneur, not just a dumb artist. I wanted the work to reward ratio to be more recognizable. First half of that is a little clunky, the second half of that. I understand. She had been open about this the financial side of her career before. She sang it's nice to be light, but it's better by far to get paid on a song from nineteen ninety eight called loads of Money, The first single from the self titled record, Why Can't I, charted on the adult Top forty and Hot Adult Contemporary charts, and its music video landed fair in heavy rotation on vh one for the first time. It sold respectably, but not enough to earn her the few money she probably wanted for making such a blatantly commercial pivot. It took until twenty eighteen to even be certified gold. Oh fifteen years Wow. That said, I did take a look at the Spotify numbers today. Why can't I this single has thirty five point two million plays, all the Exile and Exil and Guyville, the exile in Guyville stuff. The top stream is can run with six point nine million, So like a.

00:59:51
Speaker 3: Soundtrack or something. I'm trying to figure out why that song so much higher than the rest.

00:59:55
Speaker 2: The numbers don't lie. It's probably on a bunch of like two thousands throwback playlists would be my bet.

01:00:01
Speaker 3: Well, Liz faced yet another backlack from fans of her earlier, more idiosyncratic work, though at least some aspects of her songwriting remained unchanged after this very divisive self titled pop album. There's a song on that album called HWC, which stands for you say white.

01:00:18
Speaker 2: Hot Hot white White. What do you think Liz Fair would be singing about? Not chick? I imagine? No? Oh, I want to be your blow jumps chit queen hot white Okay, don't you don't make me say it? No, I won't thank you.

01:00:46
Speaker 3: Another song on the record chastise as a younger lover by saying your record collection doesn't exist. You don't even know who Liz Fair is, which that's a great line.

01:00:56
Speaker 5: It is.

01:00:56
Speaker 2: It's funny because it's sort of a meta tweaking of like what she wrote about out Excelling Guyville, that she was surrounded by all of these guys talking down to her about music. So now she's like flipped it. That's either very clever or very grating, depending on where you stand. I like that, yeah, But critics for the self titled pop album were savage. New York Times critic meganal Work titled her review Liz Fair's Exile and Avrilville and complain that Fair quote gush is like a teenager having quote committed an embarrassing form of career suicide. Matt Lamy at Pitchfork gave the album a zero point zero, sniping It's sad that an artist's groundbreaking is Fair would be reduced to cheap publicity stunts and hyper commercialized teen pop, and Liz Fair would later come at megan'roork by saying in twenty nineteen, Megan ought to try wearing some hot clothes and having a good time. She might be happier.

01:01:55
Speaker 3: She was kinder to Matt LeMay at Pitchfork, the guy who gave her a zero point zero h He apologized for his quote condescending in cringey review, and Liz forgave him. She tweeted that she enjoyed his pan much more than others because it quote had some humor in it. I, for one, remember none of this controversy in two thousand and three when she went pop. This seems a really gooing electric type thing.

01:02:20
Speaker 2: I have no memory. Oh I remember, and I remember it on people talking about it on MTV and VH one. I think it was even landed in some of those because remember Jewel.

01:02:28
Speaker 3: Did it too, Yeah, Jewel, I remember much more from Yeah, much more of.

01:02:34
Speaker 2: Let me listen to this damn song. We're gonna do one of those YouTube react videos.

01:02:41
Speaker 4: Yes, you at night, gotta go friend us? Right, and I got someone waiting to.

01:03:05
Speaker 3: I think I always thought that was like Michelle Branch or Hillary Duff.

01:03:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember this song. Yeah, it's kind of a banger. I like it. I like it quite a bit, or like Ashley Simpson. Yeah, she sounds so young like. I don't know how they treated her vocals, Probably a lot of pitching. It's that it's the panned yeah radio effect delay that instantly marks it as a two thousands production. No, I can see why you would hate it if you like Excel and Guyville was part of your like like right on your shelf next to like Slater Kinney and PJ. Harvey and Tory Amos and Fion Apple, and then this comes out after five years, you'd be like, what the happened? But you know, conversations around selling out were very different even twenty years ago.

01:04:00
Speaker 3: Fair Way Wait, in interview a vice, fair explained of this song why can't I My hope was that someone would hear the song in the gym and buy the record and then start buying my albums and sort of half an awakening.

01:04:13
Speaker 2: That's a story sticking to it. Yeah, did she think that did? How did and how did that go for you? Liz? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I hate to I hate feeling like that. I'm coming off as negative to her as I am, But I understand I understand every in like a much less tolerant part of my life. I was Steve Albini and I yeah it rich girl coming in from the suburbs and joining your scene, walking away with two hundred thousand copies of a record sold and never coming back or making music that sounded like that. Again, Yeah, I get it, but I still find her very charming and funny and self aware and obviously a great songwriter. And you know she doesn't it seemed particularly damaged over it, although she did say in a twenty ten interview with Consequence of Sound, the interviewer asked if she felt trapped in a can't win situation between her critics and her fans, and she responded, I've given up on the win thing. Oh so, yeah, you know, we've spent a lot of time dwelling on all the gossip and all the backlash, but it's better to dwell on that original, pure spirit of the album. As Fair told Spin, it's that girl I was growing up, that girl having people say you can't do this, you aren't good enough to do this, you don't know what you're doing, and me getting enough rage in me to say I have as much of a voice as anyone, and even if I didn't have the education or the musical knowledge, it didn't stop me. Folks, thank you for listening. This has been too much information. I'm Alex Hagel and I'm Jordan Runtug. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtog. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

01:06:13
Speaker 5: The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan Runtog and Alex Heigel.

01:06:17
Speaker 1: With original music by step Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.

01:06:21
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01:06:23
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