Exile in Guyville is the debut studio album by the American singer-songwriter Liz Phair, released on June 22, 1993, by Matador Records. It was recorded at Idful Music Corporation in Chicago between 1992 and 1993 and produced by Phair and Brad Wood.
Exile in Guyville was certified gold in 1998. Rolling Stone included it in all three of its lists of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time", and it was named among the best albums of the 1990s by Pitchfork and Robert Christgau.
Background
In the summer of 1991, Phair wrote and recorded songs on audio cassette tapes, which she circulated in Chicago using the moniker Girly-Sound. Initially, she sent out only two tapes, one to Tae Won Yu from the band Kicking Giant, and the other to Chris Brokaw of the bands Come and Codeine. The recipients of the Girly-Sound tapes circulated copies with other early fans.
Packaging
In 2008, Phair stated the cover was originally "an orgy of Barbies floating in a pool", a concept that Matador rejected, stating that such artwork would not sell. The final cover design is a photo of Phair topless in a photo booth, When asked during an interview with Noah Adams on his radio show All Things Considered about the concept, she elaborated: "It was a state of mind and / or neighborhood that I was living in. Guyville, because it was definitely their sensibilities that held the aesthetic, you know what I mean? It was sort of guy things - comic books with really disfigured, screwed-up people in them, this sort of like constant love of social aberration. You know what I mean? This kind of guy mentality, you know, where men are men and women are learning." Asked about what she sees in Guyville, Phair said that "All the guys have short, cropped hair, John Lennon glasses, flannel shirts, unpretentiously worn, not as a grunge statement. Work boots."
Phair has also stated that most songs on the album were not about her. She commented, "That stuff didn't happen to me, and that's what made writing it interesting. I wasn't connecting with my friends. I wasn't connecting with relationships. I was in love with people who couldn't care less about me. I was yearning to be part of a scene. I was in a posing kind of mode, yearning to have things happen for me that weren't happening. So I wanted to make it seem real and convincing. I wrote the whole album for a couple people to see and know me."
Phair commented in interviews that the album was a song-by-song reply to the Rolling Stones' 1972 album Exile on Main St. Some critics contend that the album is not a clear or obvious song-by-song response,
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| rev7score = 9.6/10 <br />10/10
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Exile in Guyville received acclaim. It was the No. 1 album in the year-end critics poll in Spin and the Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics poll.
It was also a moderate commercial success. The videos for "Never Said" and "Stratford-On-Guy" received airplay on MTV. By mid-1994, it had sold over 200,000 copies, reaching number 196 on the Billboard 200, and was Matador's most successful release at the time. In 1998, it was certified gold.
Phair said: "I don't really get what happened with Guyville. It was so normal, from my side of things. It was nothing remarkable, other than the fact that I'd completed a big project, but I'd done that before... Being emotionally forthright was the most radical thing I did. And that was taken to mean something bigger in terms of women's roles in society and women's roles in music... I just wanted people who thought I was not worth talking to, to listen to me." The sudden success of the album also generated a somewhat negative response from Chicago's indie music scene. Phair commented, "It's odd... Guyville was such a part of indie. But at the same time... I was kind of at war with indie when I made that record." Another problem that arose from her success was also dealing with her stage fright.
Spin named Exile in Guyvile the 15th-greatest album released between 1985 and 2005. In 2001, VH1 named it the 96th-greatest album of all time. Rolling Stone ranked it number 328 in its 2003 list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time", 327 in its 2012 list, and number 56 in its 2020 list. In 1999, Pitchfork named it the fifth-best album of the 1990s, and the 30th-best in its 2003 list. Robert Christgau named it among the 10 best albums of the 1990s.
In 2013, The New Yorkers Bill Wyman named Exile in Guyville "patently one of the strongest rock albums ever made" and "arguably the quintessential example" of indie rock. PopMatters David Chiu wrote that Exile lay bedroom pop music's groundwork. He noted that several indie bands and musicians had gained their "musical DNA" from the record, such as Frankie Cosmos and Jay Som.
Accolades
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|NME
|Albums of The Year: 1993
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|Pazz & Jop
|1993 Pazz & Jop Critics Poll
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|Paste
|The Best Albums of The 1990s
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|Pitchfork
|The Best Albums of The 1990s
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|Rolling Stone
|The Greatest Concept Albums of All Time
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|Rolling Stone
|The Best Albums of the 1990s
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|Rolling Stone
|The Greatest Albums of All Time
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|Slant
|The Best Albums of 1993
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|Spin
|The Best Albums of 1993
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Reissues
15th Anniversary Edition (2008)
In 2008, Phair signed to ATO Records and released a 15th-anniversary reissue of Exile in Guyville on June 14. It includes three previously unreleased tracks ("Ant in Alaska", a cover of Lynn Taitt's "Say You" and an instrumental listed on the disc as "Standing") and a DVD documentary.
Girly-Sound to Guyville (2018)
On May 4, 2018, Matador reissued Exile in Guyville for its 25th anniversary. There was a remastered reissue on CD, 2LP & digital (18 files), but also a box set titled Girly-Sound to Guyville consisting of the original album remastered and Phair's three Girly-Sound demo tapes, available as a 3CD set and as a 7LP box set including a download coupon for 56 files. Moreover, the three original tapes were also reissued on cassette and digital. This marked the first time that the full set of demo tapes had been officially released. Absent from the reissue are the two Girly-Sound demos "Shatter" and "Fuck or Die", as Phair was unable to get clearance for samples used in the songs.
On June 22, 2023, Phair released an outtake from the album titled "Miss Lucy". The song was intended to appear on the album; however, it was ultimately replaced with "Flower".
Track listing
Personnel
As per the liner notes of the 2008 reissue:
- Liz Phair – guitar, vocals, piano , hand claps
- Casey Rice – lead guitar , cymbal , background vocals, hand clapping
- Brad Wood – bass and drums , organ , synthesizer, , percussion, bongos , tambourine and shaker , maracas and hand claps , background vocals, vocals , drones and feedback , "sick guitar" , guitar
- Tony Marlotti – bass , vocals
- John Casey – harmonica
- Tutti Jackson – backing vocals
Charts
{| class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center"
|+ Chart performance for Exile in Guyville
! scope="col"| Chart
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! scope="row"| US Cash Box Top 200
|63
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!scope="row"|UK Album Sales (OCC)
| 87
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Certifications
Release history
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! scope="col" | Date
! scope="col" | Edition(s)
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! scope="row" | United States
| May 17, 1993
| Standard
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| Matador
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! scope="row" | United States
| June 24, 2008
| Deluxe
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| ATO
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! scope="row" | Various
| May 4, 2018
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| Matador
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References
External links
- Exile in Guyville: The Oral History
- Liz Phair Reissues Exile in Guyville, Signs to ATO
- October 6, 2008 NPR Live Performance in Los Angeles of 'Exile in Guyville'