“Table for One” about Phair’s brother
I saw Liz Phair on the Tavis Smiley Show this week (thanks to the wonders of TiVo), and it turns out her song, “Table for One,” isn’t autobiographical, but biographical:
Tavis: You like taking on really ambitious projects. I mean, “Exile in Guyville� huge, massive undertaking, response to the Stones. I mean, where do you come up with these ideas?
Phair: They’re really natural to me, and I never got to finish my Stevie Wonder project. And really, it’s kind of one of those sadnesses in my life where I would have liked to have finished that, but that was such an epic record. It was so much to undertake, and the more I got into it, the more it became this kind of, I was missing some of the really important songs like, “Isn’t She Lovely?â€? That was a really hard one to come up with. Something from my own life that would be sort of equivalent.
Like, I don’t try to imitate anyone. But it helps me make a record. ‘Cause I don’t really naturally know how to make records. So I kind of, I go to school. I take on an artist who’s phenomenal, and I try to go to their school. And that’s the way that I look at it. Like for me on this record, I have a song about my brother’s alcoholism called “Table for One,â€? and that was my Village Ghetto Land, because Village Ghetto Land to me is the most devastating song on the record.
It’s kind of bringing dignity to sort of the least appreciated part of life. It’s like shining a spotlight on the invisible and downtrodden. And I kind of tried to look at my own life, and see what was the most devastating thing that I witnessed, or that I thought went unsung in a weird way, and it was, for me, the loneliness that my brother would have felt and like the bottom, when he bottomed out.
He’s sober since then, but that’s sort of how I would do it. I would look at what he wrote about, and I’d think about what in my own life, you know, mirrors this sentiment.
She also waxed enthusiastic about her weekly podcast, Uplands, which is available through her site or via your podcasting software of choice.
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>
