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Liz Phair triumphantly returns to 'Guyville' at Palace Theatre

November 20, 2023

Liz Phair performed at Palace Theatre in St. Paul on Friday, Nov. 17, 2023.Dan Fuller

“There’s a summer camp in Minnesota that still has my name on the rafters,” Liz Phair said Friday evening at Palace Theatre. “I know your state very well.” The singer knows her fans and their desires well, too. “There's no question in my mind that performances are collaborative with the audience. That's just what I know from thousands of times of doing it,” Phair said when talking to the Current’s Jill Riley recently. “But this feels really special, because [after] 30 years, it just feels like a full-circle moment.”

The special circumstance Phair was referencing is the Guyville tour, in which she performs the entirety of her 1993 debut album Exile in Guyville, along with a few other fan favorites. (Phair released the album Soberish in 2021, but didn’t play any tracks from it.) This year marks the 30th anniversary of Phair’s blunt declarations of frustration, rebellion, and sexuality that she recorded on Tascam four-track cassettes in her early 20s.

The powerfully confrontational album was a track-for-track response to the Rolling Stones’ 1972 album, Exile On Main Street. Phair wanted to use the “best record ever made,” which she considered the Stones’ album to be, as a blueprint for her first professional record. She explained to Riley, “I thought, ‘Why not write myself into the girl parts? So if he's singing about a woman, why don't I give her a story?’”

Phair would go on to release a pop-oriented self-titled album a decade later. The stark detour from an angsty 20-something to a more radio-friendly sound was met with some harsh criticism from reviewers and fans of her original work. I wasn’t alive when Phair released Guyville. So my introduction to Phair was hearing her lone Top 40 hit, “Why Can’t I?” on pop radio stations as a child. I didn’t get to hear the singer’s legacy debut until the late 2010s. Yet the room filled with mostly Gen-Xers (along with some younger femme people) felt like a community with a shared appreciation of her intimate, unfiltered storytelling.

Woman singing into microphone — Blondshell at Palace Threatre on November 17, 2023
Sara Fish for MPR

Before Phair graced the theater with a live rendition of her underground ascent, opener Sabrina Mae Teitelbaum, who performs as Blondshell, took the stage. Teitelbaum is just beginning her career, and like Phair did, appears to be experiencing a significant rise in attention upon her debut: She followed this year’s release of a self-titled album with a performance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and her image has appeared on Spotify's billboard in Times Square.

As she sang about tumultuous romantic relationships with a serious, confident demeanor, it was easy to imagine Teitelbaum performing next to ’90s alt-rock stars like Fiona Apple and PJ Harvey. She sounded a lot like young Phair herself, especially when bluntly singing in monotone, “He wears a front-facing cap / The sex is almost always bad / I don’t care cause I’m in love” on “Sepsis.” When she covered the punk track “Deceptacon” by Le Tigre, the band formed by Bikini Kill founder Kathleen Hanna, many in the crowd recognized the ’90s-era tune and sang along.

For the headlining set, Phair walked on stage smiling and maintained a grin and lighthearted energy most of the evening. She appeared to genuinely enjoy performing, as if looking at her younger self purely lovingly and without shame. Singing stories written by a woman less than half her age didn’t infantilize Phair, but rather highlighted her growth and emotional maturity.

Liz Phair performs at Palace Theatre — Liz Phair performed at Palace Theatre in St. Paul on Friday, Nov. 17, 2023.
Dan Fuller

The songwriting on Guyville is poetic and profane; tender and cold. The words, like the album cover — Phair’s profile photo, including part of her nipple — project uncensored, middle finger energy. The blunt lyrics come in monotone, mid-range vocals, backed by minimalist production.

Phair’s most explicit lyrics were the ones fans sang along to most. On “Dance of the Seven Veils,” the crowd shouted “I only ask because I'm a real c*nt in spring / You can rent me by the hour.” One of the most popular tracks,“F*ck and Run,” included the haunting lyrics, “I'm gonna spend my whole life alone / It's f*ck and run, f*ck and run / Even when I was seventeen,” which unraveled into the unnerving final line, “F*ck and run, f*ck and run / Even when I was twelve.”

The sonically deadpan vocals on “Flowers” found Phair cheekily grinning as she sang, “I want to f*ck you like a dog / I’ll take you home and make you like it.” The artist stepped back from the mic stand to laugh and shrug after concluding with, “Everything you ever wanted / Everything you ever thought of / Is everything I'll do to you / I'll f*ck you till your d*ck is blue.”

With overtly sexual lyrics that were almost unheard of at the time of Guyville’s release, people often refer to Phair as an empowering, feminist icon. On the 25th anniversary of the album, The New York Times spoke with Phair about her discomfort with the “feminist spokesperson” label. She said: “I do get uncomfortable with the label because I feel like there are people that could be far more eloquent about it, historically so.”

The Times asked, “What do you hope people will take away from ‘Guyville’ this time around?” Phair responded: “I want more women to log on to history. I’ve always wanted that. As [expletive] as this moment is in American culture, there’s something that I find very exciting and positive about it…”

Liz Phair

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If women today log on to history to look at the United States in 1993, they’d see a time when mainstream feminist ethos lacked recognition in the significance of intersectionality. But they’d also see a time before Roe v. Wade — the Supreme Court's 1973 decision that the right to privacy implied in the 14th Amendment protected abortion as a fundamental right — was overturned.

The future of women’s rights — especially reproductive rights for everyone — seems much less exciting and much more politically uncertain now than in 1993; more uncertain now than on the 25th anniversary of Guyville. Yet, for the 80 minutes Phair spent celebrating work that feels relevant 30 years later, anxiety subsided a bit.

On stage, Phair reflected on the time when she wrote Guyville. “Back when you’re young, you’re trying so hard to make your dreams come true, and you’re basically toiling away in darkness, uncertainty, and rejection. You go out, like I did, you do crazy sh*t that you don't ever want anyone to know about, looking for love,” she said. “And you live and you die by the social scene. And all you got back then is each other. And then you grow up and you move beyond it and you find security and acceptance. But you realize that was actually a magical place that’s never going to happen again — a liminal space between youth and adulthood — some of the best times of your life.”

The audience cheered “Yes!” and “Thank you!” as if agreeing with Phair when thinking about their own pasts. As someone currently in the liminal life space Phair was when she released Guyville, being surrounded by people who were seemingly nostalgic for an era of their lives when they experienced the most uncertainty felt deeply comforting.

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