Divorce Song vs. Fuck and Run

those are the two whose sensibilities are closest to EIG.

hmmm, don't really get that

They are. Listen past the gloss and you get more story-songs about a woman, now approaching thirty, making do.

That's why I love WCSE. Where Whipsmart was a treading-water record, this one sounds like the natural sequel to Guyville.

i thought What Makes You Happy did that a lot better. i remember at the time that half the record was like exile part II and the other half was more like a AAA move, hence the uneven quality. also, didn't she labor over this for like 5 years with multiple producers? you can sorta hear the indecision.

how are you defining "AAA move" – sonically, philosophically? The whole thing sonically is an AAA, which almost twelve years later strikes me as revolutionary as Butch Vig's production for Nevermind. I remember arguing with fans at the time (mostly guys, of course) who thought the sonic spritz was a betrayal or something.

*is an AAA move

those are the two whose sensibilities are closest to EIG.

― ginny thomas and tonic (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, May 6, 2011 9:20 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hmmm, don't really get that

― buzza, Friday, May 6, 2011 9:25 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah, honestly, i dunno about that, either. both songs are distinct from EIG in the manner suggested by the allmusic review i quoted earlier: basically, they lack guyville's angsty, scab-picking immediacy. this places more emphasis on songwriting as craft and (perhaps) increases the sense of distance between artist and subject, artist and audience. i found fault with that review only in that it casts this difference as a failure to be "real", which seems silly, but i won't deny the existence of substantial differences in phair's creative POV on WCSE. when we want to praise this kind of thing, we describe it in terms of maturity and artistic sophistication...

See, I detected distance between artist and audience on EIG too! Those songs had the shape and resolutions of narratives: short stories, if you like.

some of the record sounds like brad wood, some of it sounds like scot litt. i vaguely remember hearing that she brought in wood kinda late because she wasn't sure about the new direction. lyrically/thematically the record has a lot of a "i'm a single mom in her thirties dealing with lyfe" feel, but not all of it.

I'll concede that, sure. But even the Brad Wood stuff sounds cleaner sonically.

See, I detected distance between artist and audience on EIG too! Those songs had the shape and resolutions of narratives: short stories, if you like.

― ginny thomas and tonic (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, May 6, 2011 9:41 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

i agree entirely, but guyville generates the impression that it isn't so much the product of dispassionate craft, but of immediate emotional/life experience. it's of a piece, wholly focused on this girl in this moment, and that perhaps leads us to imagine that its craft exists in service of "the truth" rather than "the story". WCSE is more wide-ranging and spends less time cultivating a cool image of its author.

...story-songs about a woman, now approaching thirty, making do.

...That's why I love WCSE.

― ginny thomas and tonic (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, May 6, 2011 9:30 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark

chopping your thoughts to bits, alfred, but

OTM, guyville comparisons aside, that's exactly what i like best about WCSE

Let's be clear: I've never bothered with "confessional" tags because I don't know what it means or how to judge the material! I've always assumed that artists lie and embroider. I ask rhetorically: what makes EIG's skeletal, electric rhythm strum more "confessional" than WCSE's full-bodied sound?

nothing, objectively. but i can stand back at some distance and observe my own reactions to art (and also/especially the reactions of others), and from that begin to draw conclusions about how the art generates its subtle effects. with that in mind, i know that a lot of people did and perhaps still do perceive and relate to something "cool" and "real" in EIG - whether or not that thing actually exists. to my mind, it's a combination of the consistent home-recording sonics, phair's authorial voice (vulnerable wiseass), and the close focus on a single 1st person story.

rhetorically, the much-discussed "lo-fi" production invokes the artless neophyte in her bedroom, recording alone with whatever's at hand because she's got to get this stuff out. less "confessional" than diaristic imo, but that's not important right now. that it's an obvious pose has always been part of that record's magic for me.

i mean, take "uncle alvarez" by way of contrast. there's no suggestion that it was recorded "at home", and authorial myth-building is sacrificed in favor of engagement with the stories of others. it's a discrete snapshot unrelated to any overarching, supposedly confessional narrative.

can's say the same of "polyester bride", of course, but even there, the expansive sonics and reduced cynicism undercut the portrait of the artist that EIG worked so hard to build.

or, yeah, what roger said...

and btw fwiw imo tbh WCSE does feel less immediate than Exile! the voice is woman in LA, not a girl in Chicago, and even in the midst of Johnny Feelgood obsession, there's a witnessing in place of Exile's experiencing. And you're OTM that part of this has to do with age. The standpoint is actually pretty close to what you get in mid-period Aimee Mann ("you've danced this dance enough to know better by now, but here you go again"), but where Mann would do resignation and agonbite of inwit, Phair goes for a kind of sympathetic facepalm. Which, when it works, hits as hard as e.g. "i want a boyfriend"...

I mean,

mom, i'm sending you this photograph
i swear this one is gonna last
and all those other bastards were only practice

just slays.

"Shitloads of Money" and "Girls School" point nicely towards the next album too, don't they?

(btw, roger, you're wanted in the Tom Petty poll I just started)

"runaway trains"

what's the poll?

I've given most of this a listen now, and so far I like the obviously good ones: Johnny Feelgood, Polyester Bride, Uncle Alvarez, Headache. "Perfect World" is good too. Aimee Mann comparison otm; Liz's Lovesexy?

Which Pitchfork writer can eat a bag of dicks? Stay tuned...

Can someone explain their love of "Uncle Alvarez"? It's one of the few on WCSE that I've never really warmed to, and it bugs me that I can't figure out why. Maybe it sounds a little too coffee-shop, musically, even though I think it's lyrically ace.

As for this poll...a few days before my 30th bday I had this weird urge to listen to EiG, perhaps subconsciously embracing music of adolescence. I started thinking that, pre-age 28, I would've said "Fuck and Run" no question, but now I think it's clearly "Divorce Song."

I haven't been able to stop listening to EiG since, and one thing that struck me is how much I love the sound of the guitars on it. Her playing was really particular and idiosyncratic; she sounds like she's playing almost-chords, there's something off-kilter and maybe inarticulate but also confident about her strums that plays off the words so well. It's kind of unexplainable, the effect those sounds have. They really do sound like my own post-college mid-twenties flailing about.

Maybe it sounds a little too coffee-shop, musically

i guess i don't see this as an inherently bad thing, and as you say, the lyrics are great (catchy tune, too)

I've seriously kept billy's post bookmarked for the better part of a year thinking I will eventually be able to say something to articulate why "Uncle Alvarez" is great. Great lyrics, coffee-shop yeah, but there's a real sympathy to it which I think is nice to find. The premise is a <i>little</i> cornball, like something you would come up with as an assignment for creative writing class, but the little moments pay off. "It's hard to believe you were once a beautiful dancer."

I keep telling myself to start downloading homemade YouTubes I love before they're pulled. The "Divorce Song" video I posted upthread is gone, there was a fantastic one for Yo La Tengo's "Satellite" that's gone, ditto one for Hot Chip's "The Warning."

i wish i'd saved that "divorce song" video too. i watched it so many times it feels inseparable from the song itself to me.

imagining an alternate reality where Liz became more mooncalf, hooked up w/ Isobel Sollenberger and decided to hitchhike cross country while also selling weed...

― schizophrenics think I'm hilarious (Drugs A. Money), Wednesday, May 4, 2011 2:59 PM (five years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

A number of years back, I was so excited to see 'Fuck and Run' on a karaoke playlist that I signed up without even thinking, and it wasn't until a verse or so in that I started to remember the lyrics in their entirety. I was flattered by the positive attention I inadvertently drew to my str8 self at the gay bar that night.