Phair interviews John Cusack, Ira Glass, Steve Albini, Matador dudes for accompanying DVD



Yes, everything you've heard about Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville being one of the greatest albums of all time is true. The songs really do hit that hard. The lyrics really are that good. And the perspective of a smart woman navigating her way through the indie rock scene really is that necessary, even today.

Fifteen years after its Matador Records release in 1993, Exile in Guyville is getting the reissue celebration it deserves. On June 24, ATO Records will beef up the album with four bonus tracks from the original Guyville sessions as well as an accompanying DVD.

The bonus tracks: the solo cut "Ant in Alaska", a song inspired by the Troggs' "Wild Thing", the full band cut "Say You", and an untitled solo instrumental. "Ant in Alaska" and "Wild Thing" have both been previously attributed to Phair's notorious pre-Guyville "Girly Sound" demos.

The DVD: Guyville Redux, a documentary about the making of the album, with a focus on the indie scene in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago, out of which Phair sprung in the early 90s. In the documentary, Phair herself interviews a series of luminaries connected to the scene, including radio/TV personality Ira Glass, actor John Cusack (whose role in High Fidelity pretty much epitomized the kind of guy Phair disses on Exile in Guyville), Steve Albini, Matador's Gerard Cosloy and Chris Lombardi, Guyville producer Brad Wood, members of Urge Overkill, and John Henderson of Chicago label Feel Good All Over.

And who do we have to thank for all of this Liz Phair goodness? Why, Dave Matthews, of course! Matthews is one of the co-founders of ATO Records, which in addition to putting out the reissue has signed Phair for a new studio album due in the fall. (Yes, she is no longer on Capitol Records.) AND Dave introduces the Guyville Redux DVD.

So between this, My Morning Jacket, and Radiohead, is it finally time to stop hating Dave Matthews?

Liz Phair - Fuck and Run (live 1995)

Yippee!!!!!

This is exciting!

You know- it's a good thing this was announced today and not tomorrow otherwise I'd think it was a very cruel April Fool's Day joke. This is friggin' awesome.

thanks tipping point.




r.e.m. are releasing a new album tomorrow. many thought at first it was some sort of joke. oh well.

OUTFUCKINGSTANDING!!! Dave Matthews, you're alright! ATO Records huh, sounds like Liz will have MUCH more freedom to experiment musically, can't wait to hear "Say You"--- brand new EIG studio song!!!! Liz has come back from the dead!! Fucking awesome! Thanks for the good news W&A! On a more somber note, with Liz now OFFICIALLY off the Crapitol roster, the days of this forum are obviously numbered, see at Girlysound.com!

We've established that "Ant in Alaska" and "Go On Ahead" share a similar chord pattern but they are 2 very different songs. I guess we can thank Wikipedia for being a great source of misinformation. That Girly Sound entry is maddening.

HOLY SHIT!!!!
reading this just made me so happy
this is amazing
and very exciting
ahhhhhh

Just looking up some info on ATO Records. A VERY highly respected INDIE label. A nice roster of artists including megaband Radiohead. I would assume that DMB is also on the roster due to Dave Matthews himself being a co-founder. Indie label --- great news, I think, for Liz. Hopefully no more major label pressure for radio friendly songs from these guys. Let's all just hope that Liz takes "full advantage" of this situation and produces a little less polished more indie sounding music that I know she still has in her. The EIG reissue should do wonders for re-energizing her career and if she follows that up with a solid 6th album, she just might re-establish her indie queen reputation as well as her fanbase, here's hoping anyway. Best of all, Liz will probably start touring her ass off again and I may actually get the chance to catch a show! Good luck Liz baby!

Hmmm... I'm still sus about the TippingPoint.

i'll see if i can get more info from brad about these two tracks.... the instrumental and say you.

=)

This is great.

holy shit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
i never thought i'd see the day something so incredibly awesome would happen!!!!!!!
can't wait

"Say You" is a cover of the rocksteady classic by Ken Boothe. Liz became enamored of this song, which she heard following my repeated plays of another song on the same album, Roy Shirley's "Hold Them." I had an arrangement worked out in my head of the latter song, which I think would have sounded nice with Liz's vocals. The song itself is a bit rough, and Roy Shirley - quite like Liz - has a rather inexact approach to pitch. It was my 'plan' to have Liz cover this song, and so my friend Tony and I worked out a musical approach which would have been really great - funny and sexy and quite a bit different than a lot of other things, but something which would have served as a nice foil. But Liz decided to cover the Ken Boothe song instead. Being fanatical reggae purists, this didn't make a whole lot of sense to Tony and me, since the the harmonies alone would be tough to ace, but an attempt was made with Tony on bass and Brad on drums. I don't like it much and I'm surprised to see it reissued!

The instrumental is a song I came up with. There never were any lyrics, and I suspect the tune itself was cribbed from a song I learned somewhere, but didn't write! So it's an "adaptation." I have it on cassette and will listen to it again and see for sure.

Similarly, the versions of "Ant In Alaska" and "Wild Thing" are "Guyville" versions and wholly different to the Girlysound ones. I never understood why "Ant In Alaska" wasn't released; it was mostly finished when I abandoned my role in "Guyville," and (although I haven't listened to it in years) I seem to remember liking it. I played bass (which I don't play, actually) on "Wild Thing" and recall that we did this as a "warm-up" rather than a real recording. It's probably not as good as the "Girlysound" version, but that's what you get when you stick me on bass circa 1992!

This absolutely fantastic news! I'm so excited!

me too
lol

Thank you, Mr. Henderson. Were there other tracks that didn't make the cut?

Please drop the "Mr.!"

Some stuff turned up on the next record, from what I can remember. I had nothing to do with that album, aside from whatever others remnants may have turned up on it - I "played" guitar on "Chopsticks," for example, which was actually the first thing recorded during the "Guyville" sessions. Somewhere I have the notes for "Guyville," and my main recollection is that we had about a zillion backing tracks with very rough (but unfinished) vocal tracks, as Liz's voice tended to give out after a few takes back then. Some of these were finished after I left; others may not have been. I'll check. So there may be some backing tracks or alternate backing tracks which were in the can, but probably nothing really worthy. Liz didn't like to idle in the studio and was impatient to finish the record and claimed to me recently that she mapped it all out pretty solidly after I left, so I'd doubt there's anything finished that hasn't been released.

How convenient for you and all of us that you joined today, jeremy.

interesting....any idea for song titles for the next record johnhenderson??

thanks for the info mr henderson...... did they interview you for dvd? if they didn't i don't know that we will be getting the full picture...i AIM with brad and he mentioned this thing re-issue+dvd to me about a month and a half or so ago when it was coalescing together. I told him they should do one of those 33 and a 3rd books on EIG..... i've always been interested in your role in the early guyville sessions but have never been able to find any contact info for you......i've interviewed Brad Wood, Casey Rice, Tae Won Yu, and Chris Brokaw for my site on liz, Wild and Unwise. Would you be interested in doing an interview for my site.....or maybe just answering some Q's here in the forum? I would love to have you elaborate on how the early versions of Guyville were shaped....

John, do you happen to remember what the third Girly Sound tape was called and how many songs were on it? Complete copies of the first 2 tapes didn't surface until a few years ago - the title track and entire second side of the "Girls Girls Girls" tape were virtually unknown and a revelation to most fans who were only familiar with an incomplete 2 disc compilation of songs that had been circulating for years - and information about the third tape remains scarce.

actually, i was the first one to post about it. so your welcome.





um, ato records is a major label. it's a division of rca records and is distributed through red distribution, which is owned by sony. sony is one of the biggest major labels around. so no liz phair has not gone indie. it's almost hard to go truly indie unless you do it yourself as almost all of the indie labels are major in some way.

true
doesn't really matter if liz goes indie or not, as long as her label doesn't fuck up with her process.

Seriously, that's what you are worried about?

No kidding? I figured that idleness would be like godliness in Guyville. But then I suppose she felt shitloads of pressure to make a great record. Fascinating info, man.

Oh, ok, sorry dude, my facts were not correct, just saw ATO's Myspace page list the label as indie so I guess I was just wishfully thinking Liz may in fact get alot more artistic freedom than she had on Capitol and that album 6 may in fact sound a bit more old school Liz. I obviously was oblivious to the actual business structure behind ATO Records, their connection to RCA, Sony, etc.... Thank you for the clarification. Also sorry I didn't credit you with this breaking news, I just saw that Wooden had started this thread and incorrectly gave credit to him. The truth is, I really don't give a shit if ATO is in fact indie, major, or some jackass with a tape recorder, or if Osama Bin Laden broke this news, I'm just happy that Liz is back.

Ok, this is all awesome, but hate to say I told you so

Also, what's with the holier-than-though bullshit of keeping vital information to one's self? Is it really that gratifying knowing top secret things everyone else doesn't? And robnashville, what exactly are you doing with these interviews considering your website hasn't been updated since 2006? Really just curious as your site truly is a great read, not being nasty. There's too much of that on here anyway, which is why I'm assuming most people don't post anymore. Now that tippingpoint has clearly been identified as Liz, do any of you who got all weird and personal feel badly that you probably turned off Liz from ever posting here again?

Lastly, anyone else wondering why girly sound isn't included? Perhaps a separate release?

=D =D =D best day ever

Right On! The ATO Records press release says the dvd is completed and is a full 60 minutes. Excellent!

Oh happy day!!!

Yes, Liz interviewed me for the DVD. It seemed like a good interview to me (we laughed a lot), but it lasted hours and since the DVD is (evidently) sixty minutes, there's a lot that won't be seen. Liz and I walked around Wicker Park for a while in the bitter cold and visited our old street and reminisced about making the record and burst into hysterics periodically, as it all seems pretty funny now. I quite like that Liz did a DVD and was brave enough to get the full picture from various sources. Pre-editing, anyway!

I don't mind answering questions, though I've more or less been silent for 17 years, except for an interview with Greg Kot, which was more a bit of a prank on Liz than anything else . . . I have enjoyed seeing people trying to scrap together a story from a few deliberately stilted quotes, so it seems a shame to ruin that pleasure. But oh well.

The third Liz Phair tape, yeah, I've got that. I just found it this week, weirdly enough. I actually remixed all three tapes when Liz and I were flatmates, with substantially better results (for the most part, and from what I can recall - I haven't listened to them in years and years) if only due to fewer generations of reproduction and the odd discovery of a missing track here and there. The third tape had some otherwise unheard songs, plus there are some other recordings about, I reckon - I recall a great tape of Liz performing "live" on the back doorstep in preparation for her debut live performance and things like that - a lot of tunes that ended up on "Whip-Smart" but with different lyrics and some different arrangements. I've never made tapes for anyone of any of it, so as versions at least, it's all unreleased. Which may be how it remains, as I'm too lazy trying to sort it out eighty bajillion cassettes. And I don't have a cassette player anyway.

And robnashville, what exactly are you doing with these interviews considering your website hasn't been updated since 2006?

they are all there on the front page,.... they should be pretty easy to find, i never said they were done like last week......that site has been there for about 10 years.... the interviews have been done as i have been able to contact folks.... true it is rarely updated, but can't say there have been a lot of knew facts coming to the surface recently.....

Also, what's with the holier-than-though bullshit of keeping vital information to one's self?
i was told that in confidence, so i wasn't at liberty to go blabbin, you betray someone's confidence and they tend to tell you to go fuck off.....actually doing as i asked allowed me to maintain brad as a source for us to talk with in the future....like the stuff i asked for ken so he could put it on his website....

"03-31-08: EXCLUSIVE: BRAD WOOD CHIMES IN ON THE GUYVILLE REISSUE
Brad Wood speaks:

[The Guyville reissue was] remastered by JJ Golden @ Golden Mastering, 4 extra songs were mixed by me. I think the remaster sounds great: a little louder on cd, a bit warmer, but retains the spindly feel of the original issue.

The multi-tracks were found 5 years ago. We had them transferred from analog to digital 2 weeks ago, when the extra songs were discovered. There are more than the 4, but many of those are from the early Whip-smart sessions and don't qualify as EIG-era.

Honestly, a lot of it is "work versions". There must be 6 versions of "Whip-smart", from EIG to mid-1994. 3 versions of "Nashville". None of these have vocals, just bare bones arrangement ideas.

No vocals, lots of mistakes... "

Ok, good point. I apologize!

Hey John - Thanks for all the cool info. When did these interviews take place in Wicker Park for the DVD?

Changed a lot since '93, eh?

Sounds good to me

thanks john. congratulations for having the third girly sound tape too. that's like the holy grail in liz land. lol.

That was my first inclination. I'm very very very happy that this is legit. New album in the fall, eh? Whether that remains true or not, it's good about new Liz things.

why wouldn't it?

Because sometimes album release dates get pushed back?

cool! i would love to hear it some day

I'm hearing that her first single will be a cover of "Umbrella".

No shit. Well, John, if you're suddenly in need of a kidney, or weapons grade plutonium, or anything else for that matter... then I'd be willing to trade, and do my part to make the world a better place.

Free tape three!

Yes, it's very different. I remember not being able to get taxis from (say) Lincoln Park or someplace to there when I first moved there. Liz's interview with me took place about four weeks ago. It seemed like she was doing them all in just a period of few weeks, so as far as I know, they're all very recent. She interviewed me and a friend of hers in Wicker Park and then Steve Albini a couple of days later, but a lot of the interviews took place in LA and NYC.

Why am I so suspect of all this new info?

because you're insane?

Because you're a Liz fan. After going so long without ANY new information, this all seems like a bit much. Don't worry, I'm remaining cautiously skeptical/optimistic as well.

phairphreak has become one of those little lab rats. he's learned not to go there. he's scared to be electrocuted.
i just realized. with the release, the publications, the internet sites will review the sh-t out of guyville. let's see if they start behaving shitty, downgrading the masterpiece 15 years later. it'd be interesting what their take will be on the album.
i can already imagine one of the male writers of pitchfork calling it tame and has lost its edge. those jerks!

I understand your concern. Some will slag it simply to elicit controversy. I look forward to the comments.

That's why I don't even bother with music reviews. Reviewers are so fickle.