Liz Phair article in New York Magazine

New York Magazine has an article about Liz titled “Miss Independent,” which is probably the first time a big-time magazine has used a song sung by Kelly Clarkson as an allusion that way.

Refreshingly, it looks like the backlash against Liz is now facing its own backlash. While I don’t think her last album was necessarily her best, it also has a lot more depth to it than most critics seemed to catch. The big single off the album, “Why Can’t I?” is not, in fact, a generic love song. It’s a song about two people starting an affair.

Get a load of me, get a load of you
Walkin’ down the street, and I hardly know you
It’s just like we were meant to be

Holding hands with you, and we’re out at night
Got a girlfriend, you say it isn’t right
And I’ve got someone waiting too

This is, this is just the beginning
We’re already wet, and we’re gonna go swimming

And “Little Digger,” “Rock Me” and “H.W.C.” all push other buttons for various reasons, of course. Is it as edgy as her debut? No, of course not. Of course, she’s also not a college student any more, either. Life goes on and (most) people grow and change over time.

And when, in 2003, she released Liz Phair, an album produced in part by the Matrix—the team that brought you Avril Lavigne—and the music sounded stripped of the depth and innovation that made us fall in love with her in the first place, many of us responded like sour, sidelined spouses. Interviewing Phair for Spin, for instance, Chuck Klosterman moaned, “Early in your career you were one of the few people who really talked about sex honestly and insightfully. [Now it’s] more sensationalistic and maybe a little less sincere.� Phair wouldn’t back down. “I think this record is depressing to you because it makes you feel that you’ve lost part of your own childhood,� she told him. And she was almost certainly right.

“I think people liked that I stood up for myself and said, ‘Fuck it, I’m doing this.’ They were like, ‘That’s the old Liz Phair,’ � she says now. If Phair is proud of the defiance with which she met her embittered fans and unapologetic about her play for mainstream-pop success, she is also very clear on what her last album was and was not. “I just needed not to be the victim anymore. I was coming out of a really bad relationship�—which ended in divorce—“and I made an album that would drag my sorry ass out of the mess I was in,� she says. “I was literally holding onto my own record, waterskiing out of the place I was in.�

In early October, Phair will release Somebody’s Miracle, her fifth album. “This was more a labor of love,� she says. “This was like a soul record.� And it shows. If you broke up with Liz Phair before (because you felt like you just didn’t know her anymore), you are going to desperately want to get back together with her now. “I sweated that thing so hard. I fought my ass off to make it that way,� she says. “I really wanted to give something . . . I tell my badnesses so you can feel put-together.�

It’s a gift we remember from Guyville. Gone is the unconvincing peppiness of her last album; Phair is once again offering something weirder and more stirring and more confessional. On “Table for One,� she sings about a drinking problem, but more, really, about the existential reality of aloneness. “I want to die alone with my sympathy beside me / I want to bring down all those demons who drank with me / feasting gleefully on my desperation,� she sings. Not that Somebody’s Miracle is a glum album. The flip side of the lonely isolation of “Table for One� is one of the best lone-wolf anthems to come along in years, “Got My Own Thing,� a rocking ode to what it’s like to be finished proving yourself. The chorus is quintessential old-school Phair: “Ooh, boy, I’d love to help / give you enough rope to hang yourself / I hope you’re swinging this way too.�

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