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Exiles in rockville
Liz Phair and Fiona Apple
BY MATT ASHARE
Related Links

Liz Phair's official Web site

Matt Ashare watches Liz Phair at the Paradise.

Liz Phair's "Extraordinary" strikes a cord in Franklin Soults' ear.

Clea Simon on her love of Liz Phair.

Fiona Apple's official Web site

Back in August, Liz Phair came through town on what could be described as a goodwill tour. During a two-night stand at the Paradise, she found time to meet with people like me — the critics — in a PR campaign designed to woo the press in advance of Somebody’s Miracle (Capitol), her new CD. And not just the press: on stage she appeared shoeless, stripped-down both musically and literally, with just an acoustic guitar and a skirt that showed more than enough leg to make the boys up front blush. The set itself was a return to Guyville — to many of the songs that had made her the reigning queen of indie-rock back in ’93. The effect was much the same as spending an hour chatting with her at the 90 Tremont Hotel bar: she flirted with and seduced the crowd with her down-to-earth chatter, her naked songs, and just enough leg. Earlier that day, the setting may have been different, but I’d been subjected to the same charm offensive: she spoke thoughtfully about everything from motherhood to songwriting to the power of MySpace, where you can now sign up to be one of Phair’s friends. I was smitten. It would have been difficult to come away from the interview or the show any other way. And smitten is what Phair needed in the wake of her failed stab at a Top 40 breakthrough with her previous album, 2003’s Liz Phair (Capitol) — a disc that longtime champions of the indie Phair of Guyville took to be nothing short of a stab in the back. (She’ll be back this Friday, at Avalon, with a full band.)

At around the same time, another drama was unfolding around another controversial artist, Fiona Apple. After a six-year absence, Apple had reunited with producer Jon Brion, the architect behind her breakthrough debut, 1996’s Tidal (Epic), and recorded Extraordinary Machine, an ambitious new album. Apple, best known as the scantily clad 19-year-old waif crawling around a bathroom floor in the video for her first single ("Criminal") and then commenting "This world is bullshit" when she won an MTV VMA, never struck me as an artist with a rabid cult following. But fans came out of the woodwork to protest when word leaked that Dr. Dre’s right-hand-man Mike Elizando had been hired to rework Extraordinary Machine — especially after the disc itself, or the unmastered Brion album, was leaked online. Whether Epic, concerned about the commercial potential of EM, forced Apple’s hand, is irrelevant. To judge from Apple’s continued friendship with Brion — the DualDisc EM includes Apple playfully performing a live acoustic set with him — the ensuing demands for the release of EM didn’t damage the Apple/Brion bond. And, on October 4, a "new" EM, sounding very much like the old, hit the streets.

To be sure, Apple and Phair are very different artists. Apple rode the post-Tori Women-in-Rock boom of the Lilith Fair ’90s to the top of the charts with the help of a video that showed more than just a little leg. Arguments about whether her angst-ridden confessions from the piano were just Tori-lite, and about whether this waifish, Kate Moss–thin teen was a positive role model for young women abounded. Phair, on the other hand, was one of the great underground triumphs of the alternative ’90s: her 1993 debut Exile In Guyville was at once an indictment of a male-centric Chicago indie scene and a song-by-song answer to the Stones’s Exile on Main St., though you wouldn’t have known it if she hadn’t told you. Rather than moving millions of units, it turned Phair into an overnight indie heroine: she injected some much-needed sex and a heavy dose of female attitude into indieville with songs like "Fuck and Run" and became a critic’s darling. Her lyrics may have opened the door for artists like Alanis Morissette to sing about blow jobs and bitterness. Nobody questioned Phair’s integrity; everyone seemed to wonder about Apple’s. The songs were almost beside the point.

Ten years after Guyville, having released a couple of decent albums in the interim, Phair pissed off her old fans by reinventing herself as Top 40 fodder on the slicked-up Liz Phair, an album that included — gasp! — material co-written with the song-doctoring Matrix. And, as Phair made the mainstream rounds to chat with everyone from the gals on The View to Leno and Letterman, every interviewer — even the Today Show crew — remembered to use words like "indie" and "mainstream." The comedy of errors reached its zenith when Bob Costas, of all people, called Phair out for "abandoning" her "indie roots." The EPK DVD that came along with advances of Somebody’s Miracle has an amusing montage of these media encounters. The underlying message is obvious: anyone who ascribes to "Liz Phair abandoned her indie roots on Liz Phair" is no better than Bob Costas and probably has no business writing music criticism. When I interviewed Phair back in August, she was more politic. Liz Phair, she contends, was an experiment — an opportunity for her to rub shoulders with pop stars and get a feel for that side of the biz — just another step in her evolution as an artist. "I’m not the Liz Phair of Guyville anymore," she explained. "I don’t want to disown that album; it was great. But I was in a totally different place when I wrote those songs. And I’m not the kind of person who’s happy staying in one place. I need to explore."

As unlikely as it may seem, "explore" is a better fit for Apple’s new album than Phair’s, which sounds like a retrenchment for a singer-songwriter who simply wants to be accepted for who she is — a strong, smart, talented artist with a penchant for straightforward guitar pop endowed with catchy choruses, a quirky hook or two, and confessional lyrics drawn from introspection and experience. When, in the opening track, she sings "I saw John/He looked so sad/I want you to know that I feel bad/For not making our dream come true/We had so many dreams me and you," you know there’s a John out there somewhere.

As in so many of Phair’s best songs, a driving backbeat, ringing guitars, and a sunny vocal melody set up a dark punch line in "Leap of Innocence" — "I had so many friends in rehab/A couple who practically died" is one line that interrupts the good, clean vibe of a song that might otherwise be too sentimental. That, in a nutshell, is Somebody’s Miracle. It’s not the return to Guyville some may have hoped for. But Phair’s a single mom living in California, not a struggling Chicago songwriter. "We all shine, shine, shine" may not sound right coming from the same woman who wrote "Fuck and Run," but there’s a dark side to "Stars and Planets." Yeah, there probably isn’t a song here that the producers of The O.C. or Veronica Mars wouldn’t kill for. Strip away the production, though, and there are more than a couple of tracks— "Got My Own Thing" and the Stonesy "Why I Lie" — that would be right at home in Guyville.

The O.C.’s not going have much luck with Fiona Apple. She’s matured into something resembling a jazz singer. Her voice has deepened and the adventurous arrangements on Extraordinary Machine make the most of her growing vocal talents. The disc opens with spare orchestral backing (no drums or guitar, just pizzicato strings and a bell that rings from time to time) that leaves lots of room for that voice to roam. Drums and piano finally kick in on track two, without a trace of the hip-hop Elizando might have brought to the proceedings. There are electronic drums on "Tymps," but mostly Elizando has streamlined the arrangements in a way that accentuates Apple’s quirks. If Epic thought he’d pry a more commercial album out of her, they were mistaken. But, then, that’s what Apple shares with Phair — an urge to explore, and the confidence to make the kind of music she wants to make regardless of the implications, commercial or otherwise. They’re both exiles of a sort, one cursed with having to live up to Guyville, another doing her best to live down the success of Tidal.

Liz Phair + Matt Pond PA | Avalon, 15 Lansdowne St, Boston | October 14 | 617.228.6000 | Fiona Apple | Orpheum Theatre, 1 Hamilton Pl, Boston | December 7 | on sale Saturday at 10 am | 617.931.2000.


Issue Date: October 14 - 20, 2005
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