You don’t survive 30 years in rock and roll without developing a strong bullsh*t detector, and Liz Phair’s is sharper than ever. The Exile in Guyville anniversary tour isn’t just a nostalgic victory lap—it’s a reclamation, a recontextualization, and a reminder that Phair’s lo-fi masterpiece wasn’t a fluke, it was a calculated act of rebellion masquerading as a bedroom confession.
“I went from thinking I was gonna make an album to impress like, half a dozen dudes in the scene,” she says, “to suddenly my parents having to deal with me being a national talking point.” She’s bringing that back to the stage, but this time with theatrical flair—literally. With the help of avant-garde theater director Kevin Newbury (best known for Kansas City Choir Boy with Courtney Love), Phair is adding immersive set pieces to help underline the album’s original mission: a feminist response to Exile on Main Street, told through a lens of raw intimacy and brutal self-awareness.
“We’re keeping it minimal and indie, but immersive,” she explains. “We bought old 1993 lighting rigs. This is still a rock show—but it’s plus.”
Plus, indeed. Phair has been mythologized, commodified, dismissed, canonized, and written off as “that dirty girl” all before brunch. “It was hard to be misunderstood,” she admits. “People took it as confessional—like I just got on the mic and said whatever the hell I thought. But it was very thought-out, very constructed.” What many critics mistook for messy emotional chaos was, in fact, art school precision hiding under thrift-store swagger.
She’s still dealing with that dissonance—between what was intended and what was assumed. “People expected it to sound like a Stones song,” she says. “But that would be ripping off the Stones. What I did was give voice to the girl in all of their songs. Or if there wasn’t a girl, I talked about something similar happening in my own music scene. I thought it was kind of sophisticated. Everyone else was like, ‘She’s just a dirty girl confessing.’”
And now, three decades later, she’s finally writing the book about that exact period. What started as a second memoir full of glamorous tales has taken a darker turn. “I was ready to write this book about all the highs of my career… but the pandemic just knocked me off my track. I didn’t have that in me. So I found that I could write about that time making Guyville. That dark, uncertain Wicker Park era.”
Don’t expect a Disneyfied rock bio. This is more Basquiat with a hangover than Behind the Music.
As for unreleased tracks, Phair’s not hoarding gold—she’s sparing us the mediocrity. “I’ve flirted with the idea of releasing some of it,” she says. “But most of it? Not quite good enough. They’re not bad, they’re just… run-of-the-mill.” When told that songs like “Wasted” and “You Have No Idea” still hold a strange, fan-favorite power, she laughs, “You’re being generous.”
Still, she’s not precious about reinvention—especially not live. “We don’t touch the recordings, but live, that’s where we amp it up. That’s where we can let the songs grow.” She cites “Never Said” as one that’s gotten the full live transformation treatment—big, bold, drum-heavy—Grohl-level, even.
“I wouldn’t say Guyville is my best album,” she says, “but it’s the one where I had nothing else to do but sit around high and reinvent myself. I had no responsibilities, no job, no distractions. That was a special bubble.”
Which brings us to now: post-Soberish, mid-memoir, deep into the tour, and—yes—writing a new album. “I’ve got two songs I’m certain of and maybe five I’m not sure about,” she says. “Not as fast as fans want, but I’m working on it.”
That’s the thing about Liz Phair. She’s still Liz Phair. Whether it’s 1993 or 2023, whether she’s playing a four-track in her bedroom or an immersive rock opera in a velvet-draped theater, she’s always had the same goal: make you feel something, and maybe piss off a few people in the process.
Mission still very much accomplished.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
