Liz Phair talks to Rolling Stone about EiG
You can tell the reissue is close at hand: Liz is making the media circuit. (I’ll figure out a way to write about her for the Star or CBR if you call, publicist!)
This time up, it’s Rolling Stone, the magazine that first introduced me to her back in the 1990s, when I lived in Egypt.
It seems like the music you’ve made in the past few years doesn’t have much of a relationship to the music on Exile in Guyville. What’s your relationship to that record now?
It’s coming back around again, and I don’t think it’s an accident. For the first time in 15 years, I’m not on a major, and the forces around you are different. If you asked me to do this reissue five years ago, I don’t think I could have. For a while, Exile in Guyville was something that I was running away from. When I got bashed for my pop period, it was almost like that album belonged to critics and not me anymore. They used it against me, in a weird way. I couldn’t figure out how I felt about it or how I should feel about it. Now because I feel a tremendous sense of freedom for the first time in a long time, I said, “I’m going to find these people and bring that moment back.” If you told me five years ago that I was going to hunt down [Feel Good All Over label head] John Henderson, I would have laughed in your face. No fucking way! But I did. I found Steve Albini and all these people I had issues with in the past. It was so good for me. I was able to remember who I am — not just who I was. If you don’t ever deal with your past, you don’t even know half of who you are, and that’s what I was suffering under.
You’ve been critically attacked for most everything you’ve done since Exile in Guyville. How have you dealt with it?
It did bother me. I stopped reading press because I couldn’t write. I couldn’t deal with reading about what people thought about me all the time. But how could I escape it? Everyone was like, “You suck! You don’t just suck, you really suck!” They were so angry, and I couldn’t understand what made them so angry. I reserve fits of anger for people that I know who might have done something mean to me personally. I got into it with one writer who was like, “Do you know how personal that record was to everyone?” And I was like, “Do you know how personal it was to me?”
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