How To Like It.
You were never supposed to hear these songs. These songs lost me my management, my record deal and a lot of nights of sleep.
Yes, I rapped one of them. Im as surprised as you are. But here is the thing you need to know about these songs and the ones coming next: These are all me. Love them, or hate them, but dont mistake them for anything other than an entirely personal, un-tethered-from-the-machine, free for all view of the world, refracted through my own crazy lens.
This is my journey. Ill keep sending you postcards.
Liz is talking about 'Funstyle' - her latest release which surprised everyone.
My personal thoughts are that 'Funstyle' is a funny album. I'm glad she did it. And as I have told people, this woman made 'Exile in Guyville' which gives her a free-pass for forever. But that can also be a trap as she discusses in an interview.
Which leads me to ponder talent versus skill.
There are some industries where it is expected that the workers will spend a long time honing their skills before they reach the full-fledged professional level. Baseball players have their minor leagues and chefs are expected to work their way up from being a line cook. These are skillful endeavors where the best in the business usually do not emerge until they are 30-somethings.
Artists, inventors, and entrepreneurs usually have their best output in their early 20's. These are lines of work that reward raw remarkable talent.
In music you usually see increbible first albums. In college 'Liz's Exile in Guyville' seemed to me to be like Fugazi's '13 Songs' and Green Day's '1,039 Smoothed Out Slappy Hours'. Not only were these albums demonstrations of raw talent but it seemed that the artists, intent on creating something great and in their own vision, applied themselves in a way that a veteran would not and hence created some of the top albums of my lifetime.
Which makes someone like Neko Case so interesting. She clearly has talent, but in listening to her albums, from The Virgianin and Canadian Amp to Middle Cyclone you hear someone finding her voice and finding her confidence. Her rise to indie all-star is more like a baseball player working their way up the minor leagues than like an indie queen with a mythical demo tape who then gets signed for an album.
This difference makes it so that each Neko Case album is met with optimism that it will be better than the last one, and for Liz Phair and artists like her, their new releases are never able to escape the pessimism that critics and fans want every album to be that once a generation album.
If you find true love be happy. Enjoy it for what it is. Liz created a masterpiece. Appreciate it and move on. She has.
Interviews:
Liz Phair: 'I'm Not in Love. I'm Pretty Happy.'
And then it came time for me to write the next record, and I really couldn't. Because I was so crippled.
Liz Phair on How TV Scoring Saved Her Love of Music
