 A very posed shot* of a striking singer says two things.
It's emblematic of the music log as you'll find it from now on, where entries you may believe vanished in recent days haven't for the most part. They've simply moved.
I like the picture for several reasons. Most importantly, Liz Phair comes whole, as well as being a silhouette, a songwriter and a musician. A Chicago-born guitarist with a rock band, as it happens.
Not before listening four or five times to 'Somebody's Miracle', the commendable album Phair released last month, could I write much about it. If you like good rock with tight energy and some catchy "ready for radio" tunes that are possible chart-makers but few outstanding qualities, here you go.
The first part of the album can make for loud enjoyment, when you're in the mood, while Liz has a decent, assured centre-stage voice that remains always clear amid the multiple guitar work and the rest, but she's no stuntwoman for pyrotechnics.
Liz has become a woman who begins the album seeking a 'Leap of Innocence' in love and that's tough when you've made a lot of mistakes and want to sing later on about 'Why I Lie' as part of a generous selection of 14 tracks.
Despite an established career, she's far less famous this side of the Pond than in the United States, but got four stars for 'Somebody's Miracle' from her expatriate fellow American, the 'Unpaid Rock Critic', who admits to bias.
So shall I, before saying more: she's great, but I came to her late. Her previous album of 2003, titled just by her name, got a warm write-up called 'Being Phair in testing times in early September, ahead of the new one.
Not so among most US critics; they had wicked knives for such a "sell-out". So it's a pity few bothered to listen to Liz. 'Somebody's Miracle' wasn't theirs either, since at best it eases her back into favour. However, when people consistently go to the trouble of paying any attention to the person behind the "product" and write well about music, their sites get listed on mine, regardless of whether we agree.
If many take sides in pointless debates, they're welcome if they must: I leave it out. This is an exception -- particularly since "pop" is a word you'll rarely see here, any more than other terms, even when less meaningless, worthy of regard only in the right hands and usually in context, knowing how the music industry works, often years behind the times. The musicians here aren't, including one who finds the miracle of the title track isn't hers either.
It's a "modern fairy tale", so she sees and sings. People noticed that much. Here's a rare sample excerpt:
"First the good news: 'Somebody's Miracle' is more respectable than Phair's self-titled 2003 effort, an album that embarrassingly found her chasing a top 40 sound. (...)"
I can avoid attributing a piece of nonsense to Leah Weathersby, who signs a more extensive contribution elsewhere on the aptly named Monsters and Critics:
"Is Liz Phair apologizing? It would be easy to get that impression from the title track of 'Somebody's Miracle'. Suddenly the singer who was once known for her jaded lyrics and liberal use of the 'f' word is throwing around different kinds of 'f' words altogether. 'Faith?' 'Fairytale?' Once, a generation of young women turned to Phair to express their collective rage at emotionally unavailable men. Now it's all about frogs with princes inside, and her regret over fleeing relationships with a few good men. My, how times have changed."
Quite right, times have.
If you're a young woman seeking a voice for your "rage at emotionally unavailable men", there are several very smart, gifted wordsmiths who can help out and they are good musicians. One's called Liz Phair. She does it very well indeed on Exile in Guyville', a classic.
That was 12 years ago! People and their lives have a very annoying habit, it makes them unpredictable. They change, some more than others. When they're honest about it during rough years they can conclude life's tough, the world can be a very vicious place, things fall apart.
If you're interested in how Liz Phair was upfront about this in 2003, you'll find an understanding appreciation of it in what I wrote in September, with gratitude for the music she made of it and a hope she's since disappointed. She'd had enough and my hope was she'd soon completely pull through a time she put her guts into singing and sharing.
If you return to 1993 and listen properly to 'Fuck and Run' on 'Exile', you'll hear how a dozen years ago, when that was what it was about and she was caustic and cynical with the wry lyrics people still want from her in almost everything she does, fucking and running was already not always what she wanted.
Liz Phair's site has the generosity characteristic of numerous women singer-songwriters but is short on biography. Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote a decent Phair profile for MTV.
The closer you get to the present, however, the less detail you'll find on the Net, except in her lyrics, where "f" for faith is important. So what's it about?
"Once upon a time
I was so restless in love.
When things we're fine.
I'd change my mind just because.
Now I see how wrong and reckless I've been.
Each frog has a prince just waiting inside of him (...)"
That's a little hard to take at face value from a woman as aware as anyone that some of princes waiting inside frogs can turn out to be toads and rattle-snakes, male or female.
But the "fairy tale" is really a woman up against the familiar and only too human dilemma of how others can do what we sometimes feel we can't:
"I'm so far, so far away from it now
That it seems like I may never know how
People stay in love for half of their lives.
It's a secret they keep between the husbands and wives."
Lines about togetherness, partnership Liz goes on to explore, an "outsider" more than ever.
 Charlotte Martin, the other girl here, is the only casualty of the changes I made at the weekend. She's a good-looking woman, a point I'd scarcely bother to make six months into a log dedicated to female singer-songwriters. Their pictures make it for me, given the "niche" many people have encouraged me to help fill. You'll get even more of the remarkable Charlotte than you did once she's back. Her latest is sitting in an iTunes shopping basket and won't be for long, it'll be on the iPod.
She is not, however, 38, like Liz.
Recently I told a friend or two of the very fine line this log must abide by. You get more than reviews and no star ratings since the hit charts leave me indifferent and people come here not for the latest I'll occasionally cover but often in-depth stories about singers who freely give so much of themselves.
Who, then, am I to pry beyond those gifts into private lives unless I meet them and get a green light? I've not met Liz. There's talk of "rehab" on 'Somebody's Miracle.' People die. There are also songs like 'Stars and Planets', upbeat in outlook and too "commercial" for some. On a CD that's extremely intimate but to be taken as a whole, a new slice of life, it eases a tension I've decided to mention since the rest of the album booklet tells a story.
Pictures in colour are parts of Liz Phair: pieces of a body she put, naked if relatively modest, on the cover of the 2003 album. But to take her album in fragments is a mistake. Like bodies, it has its peaks and its flat points. As a whole, it works.
'Table for One' is among the most truthful songs -- with the wry Phair flair of old as in several others -- I know about secret boozing as it is: hell, guilt and something nobody can save you from until you do. The album shares truths about women I've known, probably you too. They're clever, articulate and very sexy with killer looks they use.
I don't any who've made an album about where that tends to get them with men, the "emotionally unavailable" kind. Liz sings of mistakes and regrets but my hopes for her aren't in tatters. I was asking a lot in two years of somebody who's "trusting you're there. It's like walking a tight rope into thin air." This is a very brave album likely to speak to many people since Liz has the self-awareness to know where she is; I'll avoid the disservice of analysis, probing, it's not for me or you to seek out how she got there.
She's moved on from the torment of two years ago that had her savaged by critics and split her fan base for combining heart-wrenching emotional honesty with a more mainstream sound so that highly insensitive people wrote how Liz was singing a "mid-life crisis" and how ageing is a part of it for a very sensuous woman.
Sure people get older but I'd reply like this:
"That mirror, Liz, you've given us on 'Somebody's Miracle' -- take a look in it anew at you. Stop being so hard on yourself."
I don't doubt my unpaid colleague in Spain is right. She's looking for a fulfilled and fulfilling good man, the right one for her. As for being sexy and upfront about it, my view's public enough! Women like Liz in their late 30s don't have to fret about their looks. She's still stunningly attractive and will stay that way!
The men are out there as well, the kind she wants. What it takes is "f" for faith and this, as she sings, doesn't come easy. It needs encouragement of a kind we all get from very few people: those who will hold in trust for us when we lose it ourselves.
This album ends with three songs that leave Liz and the listener with a cliff-hanger in the ways of love, for 'Lost Tonight' seeks it and the closing track surrenders to it. What's gone is the cynicism and bitterness. My sole regret -- it's a question of taste -- is that Liz is another singer whose more acoustic songs, less of the band and its support, are infrequent.
The wryness she'll keep. There's less of it than before. This isn't the album for too much of it: it's gift enough to work 'Somebody's Miracle' as singer-songwriters can. Liz has. I read somewhere that this could be heard as a "cheerful pop" album and that's utter nonsense. Music by people featured here is alchemy; taking what we feel and transforming it for us, the impossible to live with is something they help us move through and beyond.
Nice one, Liz. Rock on.
zzz
A few people will have observed entries sometimes reflect the course of my own life, as well as other criteria about who comes when.
You're right. Plenty happens by chance, nothing by accident. My iPod scroll finger works mysteriously when it finds a woman, sometimes ignoring my intentions.
I've learned to let it do this: who it finds is often one on the wavelength I am, a woman in silhouette. I can't say who'll be next. I don't know. All you get here is women who make music.
I've said it in the sidebar clearly enough. If I were to say I find Liz drop-dead gorgeous, that's the kind of remark you'd find in 'The Orchard', OK
______
*No credit, regrettably, unless one of several photographers listed for album artwork cares to step forward and say "That's mine".
12:45:57 AM link 
|
|
postbox