Liz Phair - Joe's Pub, New York City, 8-1-2005

I recently posted a Liz Phair stray tracks album. That reminded me of this acoustic concert. It's one of my favorite recordings by her. If you think she was a flash in the pan with her 1993 album "Exile in Guyville," hopefully this will correct that notion. 

Liz Phair's recording career started strong, but her 2003 album "Liz Phair" was criticized for having a "sell out" pop sound. The same was said of her 2005 album "Somebody's Miracle." This concert took place a couple of months before the release of "Somebody's Miracle," and prominently features songs from that and "Liz Phair." But in my opinion those songs sound great in the context of this concert. Since this is an acoustic concert, with just a second guitarist backing her up, those songs are totally transformed. Whatever problems those albums had must have been with over-production issues

It helps that the sound quality is fantastic. This is a soundboard, and probably the best recorded of all of her concert recordings (especially since she's never released an official live album). So if you're a Liz Phair fan, this is a must-have.

This album is 56 minutes long. You can hear in her banter that she wanted to play longer, but she had to obey some kind of curfew time limit.

01 talk (Liz Phair)
02 Table for One (Liz Phair)
03 talk (Liz Phair)
04 Polyester Bride (Liz Phair)
05 talk (Liz Phair)
06 Never Said (Liz Phair)
07 talk (Liz Phair)
08 If I Ever Pay You Back (Liz Phair)
09 Baby Got Going (Liz Phair)
10 talk (Liz Phair)
11 Extraordinary (Liz Phair)
12 talk (Liz Phair)
13 Uncle Alvarez (Liz Phair)
14 talk (Liz Phair)
15 Mesmerizing (Liz Phair)
16 talk (Liz Phair)
17 Somebody's Miracle (Liz Phair)
18 talk (Liz Phair)
19 Closer to You (Liz Phair)
20 talk (Liz Phair)
21 Everything to Me (Liz Phair)
22 talk (Liz Phair)
23 Divorce Song (Liz Phair)
24 talk (Liz Phair)
25 Supernova (Liz Phair)
26 talk (Liz Phair)
27 Fuck and Run (Liz Phair)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15524069/LizPh_2005_JoesPbNewYrkC__8-1-2005_atse.zip.html

The cover photo comes from this exact concert.

Liz Phair - Freak of Nature - Non-Album Tracks (1996-1998)

Here's the next in my series of non-album tracks for Liz Phair. That time period culminated in the release of her 1998 studio album "Whitechocolatespaceegg."

In my opinion, the vast majority of Phair's original songs are very good, but she's made mistakes about which songs to put on her albums and overly slick/ commercial production choices. As a result, it's often the case that the songs left off her albums are as good as the ones on her albums. I think that's largely the case here, although they don't fit together as well as typical albums do.

Five of the songs here are officially unreleased. One of them, "Oh My God - That's the Way I Like It," was played on TV at one point. The other four (tracks 4, 5, 6, and 8) are studio outtakes that sound very good. As for the rest, it's a typical mix of B-sides, bonus tracks, and soundtrack songs.

This album is 38 minutes long.

01 Oh My God - That's the Way I Like It (Liz Phair)
02 Rocket Boy [Edit] (Liz Phair)
03 Six-Dick Pimp (Liz Phair)
04 Bars of the Bed (Liz Phair)
05 Blood Keeper (Liz Phair)
06 Russian Girl (Liz Phair)
07 Stuck on an Island (Liz Phair)
08 Tell Me You Like Me (Liz Phair)
09 Erecting a Movie Star (Liz Phair with Shudder to Think)
10 Freak of Nature (Liz Phair)
11 Greased Lightning (Liz Phair)
12 Hurricane Cindy [Original Version] (Liz Phair)
13 White Bird of Texas (Liz Phair)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15514759/LizPh_1996-1998_FreakoNture_atse.zip.html

The cover is a promotional photo from 1998.

Liz Phair - Carnivore - Non-Album Tracks (1993-1995)

Back in early 2020, I posted an album containing all of Liz Phair's "Girlysound" demos from the early 1990s that weren't later put on other albums of hers. At that time, I said I would follow up with stray tracks collections from later in her career. With this blog, sometimes it takes me a long time, but I eventually plan on finishing stuff like that off. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, so if there's anything you want sooner rather than later, please let me know.

Liz Phair has had an up and down career, but in my opinion she's written a high percentage of very good songs. That's not well reflected on her albums though, with a few exceptions like her 1993 classic album "Exile in Guyville." On some albums, she bent to what the record companies wanted her to do, mainstreaming her sound and making her less interesting. By contrast, lots of her better songs have fallen through the cracks and not appeared on her studio albums at all.

This album gathers stray tracks from the early 1990s, when she was at the peak of her critical and commercial success. With a few exceptions, like "Turning Japanese" and "The Tra La La Song," the songs here are originals. Note though that sometimes she writes a song heavily based on an existing one, and "Wild Thing" is a case of that. Also note that "Beginning to See the Light" is not a cover of the Velvet Underground song by that name, even though she's a big fan of that band, but a totally different original.

Five of the 14 songs here are unreleased. Those five are either studio outtakes or in-person radio station performances, so their sound quality is as good as the others. The rest of the songs come from singles, bonus tracks, movie soundtracks, and various artists compilations. About half are solo acoustic and with a band. The song "Carnivore" was done both ways, so I put the acoustic version at the end, out of chronological order with the rest.

The album is 43 minutes long, not counting the bonus track.

Speaking of the bonus track, "You Have No Idea" is an interesting original song that unfortunately was only rarely played in concert. The one bootleg of it has rough sound quality, thus the bonus track status.

Phair doesn't have a big discography, but even so, I have two more albums of stray tracks from her that I plan on posting.

01 Carnivore (Liz Phair)
02 Say You (Liz Phair)
03 Ant in Alaska (Liz Phair)
04 Standing [Instrumental] (Liz Phair)
05 Wild Thing [Band Version] (Liz Phair)
06 Down (Liz Phair)
07 Wasted (Liz Phair)
08 Animal Girl (Liz Phair)
09 Turning Japanese (Liz Phair with Material Issue)
10 The Tra La La Song [One Banana, Two Banana] (Liz Phair with Material Issue)
11 Don't Have Time (Liz Phair)
12 I'll Get You High (Liz Phair)
13 Beginning to See the Light (Liz Phair)
14 Carnivore [Acoustic Version] (Liz Phair)

You Have No Idea (Liz Phair)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15262397/LizPh_1993-1995_Carnivre_atse.zip.html

I don't know when or where the cover photo was taken, but it looks to be early or mid-1990s from her appearance.

Liz Phair - XPNFEST Weekend, Manhattan Beach, CA, 7-26-2020

So far, I've only posted one Liz Phair album. I plan to continue moving forward through her career chronologically. But first, here's something relatively new, from July 2020.

What's Phair been up to doing the coronavirus pandemic? For a long time, there was no sign of any musical activity, She completely finished the recording of a new album, her first one in years, but its release has been postponed until 2021. She didn't do any home concerts at all that I could see, not even a single song.

Until this concert. She played a 22-minute set, just with her on acoustic guitar plus an extra guitarist. Most of the songs are originals from her earlier albums. However, she played "Good Side," a single release from last year that I think will be on her new album. She finished with "Soberish," a song she's never played in public before. It'll be the title cut of her new album. Both new songs sound quite good.

Because the show is so short, I've added two extra songs at the beginning. These actually come from very late 2019, before the pandemic. But you wouldn't know it wasn't from the same concert. They were recorded live for a radio station, with the exact same two guitar instrumentation.

I've also added an extra song at the end, from an even more recent single song home concert performance. It's a cover of the Tears for Fears hit "Everybody Wants to Rule the World." This has a full band backing, with the music sounding so much like the Tears for Fears version that it's a bit uncanny.

Even with the extra songs, this is still a short album, at 33 minutes. If she does one or two more short home concert performances, I'll add that to the end.

01 Divorce Song (Liz Phair)
02 Why Can't I (Liz Phair)
03 6'1 (Liz Phair)
04 talk (Liz Phair)
05 Mesmerizing (Liz Phair)
06 talk (Liz Phair)
07 Good Side (Liz Phair)
08 talk (Liz Phair)
09 Polyester Bride (Liz Phair)
10 talk (Liz Phair)
11 Explain It to Me (Liz Phair)
12 talk (Liz Phair)
13 Soberish (Liz Phair)
14 Everybody Wants to Rule the World (Liz Phair)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15262395/LizPh_2020_XPNFESTWeekndManhattnBeachCA__7-26-2020_atse.zip.html

I could have used a pretty decent screenshot from the main concert included here. But I prefer a screenshot I took from the radio station appearance that makes up the first two songs.

Liz Phair - Girly-Sound - The Best of What's Left (1991)

Liz Phair is mainly known for her 1993 album "Exile in Guyville." But she put out some dodgy albums in the 2000s, and then hardly put out any new music in the 2010s, so her popularity has gone down a lot. She has a new single out which is supposed to lead the way for a new album in 2020. I hope that sparks a career revival for her. Personally, I think she's done much more than just that 1993 album, and I plan on posting a few different things from her to make that case.

Starting with this. Before "Exile in Guyville," there were the 1991 "Girly-Sound" tapes. Basically, she made three self-produced cassette tapes of solo acoustic demos of her songs and shared them with friends. They were so good that they got spread around far and wide, and their success led to her getting the record contract for "Exile in Guyville." Allmusic.com has called them "one of the most popular and sought-after alternative rock bootlegs of all time."

For many, many years, the "Girly-Sound" tapes remained officially unreleased. But Phair used songs from them for later albums: "I go in there and rip stuff off - it's like a library." That's especially the case for "Exile in Guyville," which redoes 11 of the songs using a full band. There's a Wikipedia page on "Girly-Sound," and it has a handy chart showing which songs were later redone for which albums, which you can see here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girly_Sound

A lot of people want to listen to all of the "Girly-Sound" songs in their original versions. If that's the case for you, the whole thing was finally officially released in 2018, so you can just get that. But I've done something different for those who aren't such die-hard fans: I've removed all the songs that were redone later. On top of that, I've only selected the remaining songs that I liked. The "Girly-Sound" tapes were just a collection of all the songs Phair had at the time, and she has admitted that some of them weren't ready for prime time.

Here are the songs that weren't redone later which I felt weren't strong enough to include:

Glory
Canary
Don't Hold Your Breath
Miss Lucy
Elvis Song
One Less Thing
Easy Target
Love Song
Open Season

Maybe you're familiar with some of those and feel like they shouldn't have been left out. If you make a strong case, I might put some back in. But what I have here is strictly my own personal selection.

So that's what's left out. But I've also added a song, "Fuck or Die," that was part of the original "Girly-Sound" tapes but was left off the 2018 official release. I assume the reason it was left off is because parts of the song borrow heavily from Johnny Cash's "I Walk the Line," and there were difficulties in getting the legal rights. (She liberally borrows snippets of melodies from other people's songs for some of the other songs on the album.)

With a ton of songs removed and one song added, the end result is an album that's 49 minutes long, which is a good length for an album. The first song is with a full band, but the rest are acoustic. I've kept the song order the same as on the original tapes.

Again, this isn't for everyone. But if you want the "best of what's left" version, this makes for a pretty strong album.

01 White Babies (Liz Phair)
02 Dead Shark (Liz Phair)
03 In Love W Yself (Liz Phair)
04 Fuck or Die (Liz Phair)
05 Hello Sailor (Liz Phair)
06 Miss Mary Mack (Liz Phair)
07 Valentine (Liz Phair)
08 Batmobile (Liz Phair)
09 Slave (Liz Phair)
10 Suckerfish [Speed Racer] (Liz Phair)
11 California (Liz Phair)
12 South Dakota (Liz Phair)
13 Easy (Liz Phair)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16695506/LIZPHAR1991_GrlySundTheBstWhtsLeft_atse.zip.html

The "Girly-Sound" recordings were originally divided into three cassettes, as mentioned above, and each cassette had its own cover art, designed by Phair. Instead of using a photo of herself, she went in a weird artistic direction. I picked the cover I liked the best out of the three. I only made one change. She had the words "Girly-Sound" on it twice and her name not at all. So I pasted over one of the "Girly-Sound" mentions with her name. The bit I pasted in comes from another one of her early cassettes.