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Post by petrolino on Jun 15, 2019 20:32:29 GMT
Beck* 
New Project
Singer-songwriter \ multi-instrumentalist Beck is the son of prolific Canadian composer David Campbell and visual artist Bibbe Hansen who was part of Andy Warhol's Factory and a member of the band, The Whippets. Beck's granfather is artist Al Hansen, a pioneer in the avant-garde Fluxus movement who taught his grandson tricks of the trade. Beck performed in small venues and coffeehouses when he was a teenager. He fired up a lo-fi punk art collective while living in New York, staying with Paleface (a protege of Daniel Johnston) at the time. He returned home to Los Angeles, California, where he cut the hit single 'Loser' which became a fixture on MTV's heavy turntable rotation. His third album 'Mellow Gold' (1994) was boosted by the success of this single but it's adoption as a slacker anthem angered the hard-working militant.
Beck's released 13 albums to date. He's noted for having regularly assisted struggling artists and engaged in many artistic collaborations, including the musical venture Record Club which showcases impromptu, 24-hour cover pieces of entire albums and the Song Reader project which expresses musical ideas through a combination of art and sheet music.
Beck's currently preparing for the release of his 14th official album, 'Hyperspace' (2019).
'There are times when I see an idea that is so good, so fresh, so amazing that I:
* Become immediately proud to be human.
* Stand up to let the energy of the idea fill my body.
* Tell everyone I know about it.
Now is one of those times.
Beck (Beck Hansen) is famous for his underground, anti-folk, alternative, dreamy-yet-hook-driven music. His first biggie was "Loser" way back in 1994. But his ability to understand and reach his audience just went cosmic. He released a new album, but it's not a record or a CD or a series of MP3 files. Something way better.
{From the promo site: "In the wake of Modern Guilt and The Information, Beck’s latest album comes in an almost-forgotten form—twenty songs existing only as individual pieces of sheet music, never before released or recorded."}
Sheet music. Nothing but sheet music.
Think about the implications of that idea in this modern age of digital information, content creation, sharing, and social communities. It's More Than An Album. It's An Invitation.
Beck fans the world over will be drawn to the "invitation" this sheet music presents. Go ahead, grab your guitar, find a friend who plays keys, get your brother to play drums, and then turn GarageBand on and record these Beck songs. And record them the way you want to record them. Be inspired by the imagery in the packaging, be inspired by the compositions, but generate your own takes. The idea of an unproduced album is beautiful for this reason alone, and is likely the primary driver. But I'm just getting started.
The music that Beck fans create will not rest on their hard drives gathering pixel dust. Because it's Beck doing the inviting, the musicians who accept his invitation will be supremely motivated to share their interpretations of Beck's twenty songs. We will see Facebook albums, YouTube videos, web sites Tweeted. Anyone who takes a stab at producing these songs will pick up where Beck left off and promote the album for free. These songs will be everywhere. Touring bands may find new life if they can bill their act as "THE" interpretation of Beck's album. It's endless.'
- Will Burns, CMO Network (article published at Forbes)
Beck
'Spaced Cowboy' ~ Sly & The Family Stone
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Projects
'Golden Feelings' (1993) / 'Stereopathetic Soulmanure' (1994) / 'One Foot In The Grave' (1994)
Beck, Dan Murphy, Dave Pirner & Liz Phair
"Beck cherishes a memory of a time he shared a concert bill with Nirvana, three years before Nevermind came out. While the singer didn’t remember who the headliner was at the show, he can clearly recall Kurt Cobain – it was the moment he became a fan. “I have a memory of them coming out and he had his middle finger up, was giving his middle finger to the audience,” he said. “I’d seen a lot of punk shows and I’d seen a lot of bands when I was younger where the shows were pretty aggressive or confrontational, but there was something completely different about this. I remember he had a smile on his face, there was a kind of playfulness, but it was also a little menacing, and I remember the minute they started playing, the entire audience erupted in a way I hadn’t seen before. . . . They had the audience from the first note. Even if they had never become successful, I would still remember that. It made a big impression. I remember at the time thinking, ‘What is this? Something’s going on here,’ and I was a fan after that.”
- Kory Grow, Rolling Stone
'Static 1' - Beck
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'Mellow Gold' (1994)
Beck & Bjork
“When I do ‘Loser’ now,” says Beck Hansen of his big hit record, “I should go, ‘I’m a schmoozer, baby, so why don’t you rock me?'”
If he’s a schmoozer, Beck, 23, is definitely an alternative schmoozer. The baby-faced singer – who goes by his first name professionally and whose “Loser,” a quirky, winning anthem of downward mobility, has become an unexpected pop smash – is sitting in a dimly lit Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles, attempting, in his own charming and eccentric way, to shed a little light on who he is. That is, by striking a mock rock-star pose and gleefully parodying his own surreal, hip-hop-inflected breakthrough hit so that it better reflects his current chart-topping status.
“If all this ridiculous stuff keeps on happening to me,” he says, shaking his head, “I’m really going to have to change those lyrics.”
- David Wild, Rolling Stone
“'Loser' was a return to naturalism after parts of the Eighties and Seventies that were a bit more theatrical and orchestrated. It got interpreted as a lack of ambition. I was around so many of those artists at the time – and they were the most dedicated and hard-working craftsmen I have ever met. You don’t just write 'Exile In Guyville' [by Liz Phair] or [Radiohead’s] 'OK Computer' or those Björk records out of nowhere. But that was the image that was thrown. It was an external image, not created by the artists. It was a way of marginalising a young generation that were saying, ‘We are not going to wear your fucking big puffy hair.’”
- Beck
'Loser' - Beck
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'Odelay' (1996)
Beck & Bruce Springsteen
"Enter: The Dust Brothers, who either met Beck at Geffen or when he showed up at their house in 1994, depending on which Dust Brother you ask. E.Z. Mike (Mike Simpson) and King Gizmo (John King) made a name for themselves in the late 1980s, producing eight tracks off Tone Lōc’s 'Lōc-ed After Dark' (including “Wild Thing”) and two tracks off Young MC’s debut, 'Stone Cold Rhythm'. But it was the duo’s sample-heavy work on the Beastie Boys’ 'Paul’s Boutique' that led Beck to recruit them for his next project. (For the record, the Dust Brothers also produced the other Hanson's “MMMBop.”) The pairing seemed strange from the outside, considering Beck’s strong roots in folk music, but the Dust Brothers had been for the Beasties what Beck now needed: someone to take him beyond his biggest hit. “Even though we had had some cool stuff come out, we were a clever and insightful choice for him to make,” King said.
After the release of the Beastie Boys’ 'License to Ill' and their breakthrough single, “Fight for Your Right to Party,” few imagined a follow-up that could compare. “I’m sure people thought the Beasties were a one-hit wonder, but I knew better,” King told us recently. “‘Fight for Your Right to Party’ was one of their worst songs.’” Then came 'Paul’s Boutique', a landmark album in hip-hop history (we named it the third-best album of the ‘80s). Just as the Dust Brothers helped the Beastie Boys break from their party-boy reputation, they also allowed Beck to move beyond the ten words that defined him at that point: “I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?”
In 1994, the three set up shop in King and Simpson’s Silver Lake home. “The way things would usually go down is we would just play him some records,” King said. “We would play something that would make us all laugh. A lot of times, it wasn’t planned. He would be the one to be like ‘Let’s make a song out of this’ or ‘Can we loop that?’”
Beck’s penchant for surprise met King and Simpson’s wide-ranging tastes in Odelay’s first single “Where It’s At,” a delightfully disjointed rap-rock track that features samples that frankly, have no business being next to each other. “We would listen to stuff and either sample it or get inspired by it,” King said. “It was usually pretty ridiculous stuff. We’d be like, ‘God, it’s so not cool’ that it made us laugh. And then we’d try to make a song that was as not cool as the sample we heard.” For “Where It’s At,” this meant Lee Dorsey’s “Get Out of My Life, Woman” and dialogue from an obscure sex-ed album, among other oddities.
While 'Mellow Gold' featured a cross-pollination of genres like folk and psychedelia, 'Odelay' attempted to marry those sounds (and others including jazz, blues, country, and the era's alt-rock) to hip-hop textures and rhythms. “Hip-hop was very important to him,” Kates said. “Representing his version of that was very important.” Songs like “Novacane” and “High 5 (Rock the Catskills)” feature Beck’s monotone raps with inscrutable bars like, “Cyanide ride down the turnpike / After hours on the miracle mic.” These lines, matched with layers of loops and samples, created an album that would more readily connect to the Beasties and OG hip-hop like Grandmaster Flash than Beck’s more straightforward counterparts in alt-rock. “Odelay, to me, is hip-hop,” King said. “We were applying our techniques that we learned trying to emulate Boogie Down Productions. The way that we collaged it together was just like how we would make rap music.”
Though 'Paul’s Boutique' is clearly more of a rap record than 'Odelay', the link between the two is undeniable, from the shared Minimoog sounds to the samples from Sly and the Family Stone and DJ Grand Wizard Theodore. King and Simpson are the first to admit to these kinds of connections. “I think that they really both are collages,” Simpson said. “Rap music had been sampling for years, but never in that dense, sort of genre-bending way.”
'Odelay' contained samples, but not as many as 'Paul’s Boutique', whose closer alone, “B-Boy Bouillabaisse,” contains 25 of them. According to Simpson, Beck was much more interested in playing the music himself. “It was the first time that we got to work with someone who could play every instrument, and so often we'd be playing records for Beck and then he would grab an instrument and either start playing that riff or riffing off that riff.” The result was a much more musical record. Rather than sampling Them’s “I Can Only Give You Everything” on “Devils Haircut,” Beck played the guitar riff himself. While Adam Yauch played bass throughout 'Paul’s Boutique', Beck tried his hand at almost every instrument. “He could just pick up a sitar or a French horn and make something cool out of it,” Simpson said."
- Anna Oseran, Pitchfork
"I thought Odelay might be the last time I got a chance to make a record. I was acutely aware that I was thought of as a one-hit wonder.”
- Beck, Rolling Stone
'Novacane' - Beck
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'Mutations' (1998)
Allen Ginsberg & Beck
"Mutations wound up being Beck’s follow-up to the critically-acclaimed Odelay, even though he never intended for it to be. Dropping all of the samples and drum machines in favor of a live band and a warm, cozy production from Nigel Godrich, Beck’s country and folk influences take center stage. The lyrics, still packed with wacked-out, surreal imagery, are more pointed than ever; for the first time we have an album where most of the songs seem to have a clear interpretation. Underneath all of his bizarre lyrical images are some genuinely sad pieces of music, in particular the bitter “Nobody’s Fault But My Own” and the world-weary “We Live Again.”
- Austin Trunick, Under The Radar
"In the summer of 2009, I planned a trip to see my brother on the tropical paradise of Jeju Island off of the coast of South Korea. My preparations for the trip included consulting with doctors to make sure I had enough sedatives to survive a 20 hour plane trip, scouting Seoul's train lines to make sure my post landing rail-ride wasn't a total disaster, stocking up on melatonin for jet lag, and loading my IPod with music I had never heard before. I figured there was no way to better pass the time. How did I know what to listen to? Simple. I just looked up MOJO Magazine's album of the year from approximately 1994-2002. I've always had good luck with their recommendations. In an era when my Internet situation was tenuous at best, they made some great discoveries for me (My Morning Jacket, Reigning Sound, and Broadcast to name a few) all without the luxury of having a listen beforehand. That era was in my coming-of-age wheelhouse, but I figured great things had slipped by, as they always do. I found some great stuff (Super Fury Animal's Rings Around the Sun, for instance). What most surprised and delighted me was Beck's Mutations.
Beck's artistic coming of age coincided almost exactly with mine but I had never heard the album as a whole or any song from it. This was surprising because if you watched MTV or listened to the radio in the Nineties, Beck was almost inescapable. However, Mutations happens to be sandwiched between Odelay and Sea Change, which are seen by most critics as Beck's true masterpieces. Although I had heard and liked Sea Change before my trip, I had seen Beck pre-Sea Change as somewhat of a novelty act. I remember my college roommate repeatedly trying to school me about Beck's Midnite Vultures. I found the album too funny to be taken seriously and probably went back to my room and listened to Roger Water's Amused to Death for the 200th time. Those with closed minds are bound to have to make up for lost time.
The album is surreal and I was in a surreal place. Landing in Seoul was only the first part of my ridiculous journey. I still had another 10 hours of travel. There I was: walking around like a zombie from lack of sleep, trying to calculate what time it was at home, and being scared shitless by the anime billboards that are ubiquitous on throughout Seoul. I found the track “We Live Again" far more comforting than any Korean face I encountered. I listened to it over and over again. It was oddly new and familiar and comforting (I only noticed realized later that its beginning sounds remarkably like Louis Armstrong's “What a Wonderful World").
Mutations lyrics were a revelation for me. I never thought Beck's lyrics would remind me of mid-sixties Dylan in their and surrealness , but then I heard Beck causally drop lines like: 'The misers wind their minds, like clocks that grind, their gears on and on...'
Beck's reinventions have now become as commonplace as the sun rising. However, trying to reconcile the '90's Beck that I remembered with Mutations was hard. Mutations is mostly what I consider psychedelia, but not in the traditional sense. I often viewed the rambling soundscapes of psychedelia as interesting but somewhat of a crutch for those who were not lyrically inclined. Having a case of writers block? Throw in a three minute guitar solo. Done. Beck's version of the genre is condensed and more powerful by degrees. Constant listenings on my trip convinced me that Beck was no longer "getting busy with the cheese whiz" and I'd better buckle up.
It has often been said the Mutations is a “dark album", but that stamp may have more to do with the hip-hop inspired collages of his earlier work. I think the word "dark" when speaking of Beck tends to mean "not as funny as the song 'Debra.'" However, it is full of apocalyptic visions. Generally the album focuses on the subjects of death and decay. "O Maria," "Cold Brains" and "We Live Again are notable for their bleakness. On "O Maria," Beck utters "everbody knows that death creeps in slow til you feel safe in his arms."
- Kevin Cenedella, Perfect Sound Forever
'Where It's At' - Beck
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'Midnite Vultures' (1999)
George Clinton, Beck, Wyclef Jean & Stevie Wonder
"What on God’s wide creation would persuade the proprietor of a country music website to take the time and effort to compose a dissertation on some album by a pasty-skinned genre bender released over 15 years ago that has little to nothing to do with country music and doesn’t even comprise one of the more popular titles from his catalog?
I’ll tell you why, because Beck’s 1999 album Midnite Vultures is the perfect parody, the consummate rickrolling, the timeless tear down of the ridiculous disco country EDM hip-hop mush that is quickly becoming the prevailing style of “country” music today, and does so with such acuteness and alacrity, it can inspire shivers. That’s right. If you were looking for the perfect parody album of what you hear coming out of your country radio today, this would be it. How is that even possible you ask? Did Beck have the clairvoyance to peer into the future? Well of course he didn’t. He just made a record that’s timeless, while today’s country music is making mistakes that are classic.
Scanning through the output of Beck’s twenty-plus year career, few would pick Midnite Vultures out of the choir as either their favorite, or the most influential. Such distinctions are usually reserved for his mishmashed break out Mellow Gold from 1994, or his commercial high mark Odelay with the Dust Brothers in 1996, or his more subdued efforts such as Sea Change from 2002, or Morning Phase, which was the surprise Best Album winner at the Grammy Awards in 2014.
But stuck in between all of these projects may have been Beck’s most expansive and expressive work ever. Slathering itself head to toe in oversexed, ultra-shallow subversion, and then stacking upon itself layer after ridiculous and cumbersome layer of technological grotesqueness, Beck constructs an anti-masterpiece that is as brilliant as it is entertaining, original as it is redundant and parody, and enjoyable as much for its irony as its artistry.
In Midnite Vultures, Beck procures all of the most obvious audio markers of the seedy club scene where self-awareness suffers, shallowness is rewarded, and sexually transmitted diseases travel like wildfire. Or like Beck says in the song “Milk & Honey,” “I can smell the V.D. in the club tonight.”
- Trigger, Saving Country Music.com
"Today, Nov. 23, marks the 15th anniversary of Beck's seventh studio album Midnite Vultures, which abandoned nearly all the singer's folk influences in favor of deliriously psychedelic funk, hip-hop and R&B. It is Beck's most fun album and arguably his best — at least I would argue that ..."
- Joey DeGroot, Music Times
"One would assume that Midnite Vultures would be a difficult listen, or at the very least, an unenjoyable one. Somehow, by some sort of miracle, Midnite Vultures is anything but. What it is though, is Beck’s best album. If you’re still not quite following me then let me explain. Midnite Vultures is either one massive joke, conjured up by Beck to toot his sense of humour or… it’s a genuinely heartfelt exercise in genre. In my opinion, it’s the former and Beck makes it work.
By melding funk, pop, rockabilly and, to a smaller extent, dance, Beck created a sprawling 13-track album that plays to all his strength as an ever-mutating artist. No two tracks on Midnite Vultures are the same; much like no two Beck albums are the same. Sexx Laws is probably the perfect opening track to an album that’s purposefully polarising. Horn blasts accompany an almost reggae-like beat and syncopated ‘du-whops.’ The lyrics are ultimately nonsensical but its lines like “I’m a full-grown man but I’m not afraid to cry” that hint at the heart beneath the record’s sheen of irony, despite being eventually engulfed by Beck’s screeching falsetto and glitchy electronics coupled with a banjo break. This is what Midnite Vultures sets out to do. Hit the emotional punches but completely undermine them in the next line or musical break out."
- Kieran Baddeley, Rockhaq
'Mixed Bizness' - Beck
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'Sea Change' (2002)
Beck, Thurston Moore & Tortoise
"Lazy journalism dictates that all reviews of a new Beck album must make reference to the fact that he is a 'post-modern Prince' and that his lyrics tend to be 'surreal wordplay with a hip hop edge'. Well, scratch all that because, compared to his last release - the sexy funk pot-pourri, Midnite Vultures -this is about as straightforward as he's ever been. If Midnite Vultures was his seduction album, Sea Change is his bitter break-up opus. Yes, someone has broken Beck's heart and, for better or worse, we're invited along for the ride.
Always invested with the ability to skip genres, Mr Hansen returns to the melancholy folk template last seen on Mutations tracks such as ''Nobody's Fault But My Own'', but existential angst is replaced by desolate tales of despair and loss. Anyone fond of the white suit-wearing, body popping art terrorist will be disappointed. Maturity, it seems, has taken its toll on our boy, but the stripped back honesty of his approach, with acoustic guitars tastefully picked throughout, perfectly suits the subject matter. The song titles tell the whole story; ''Lost Cause'' (''I'm tired of fighting, fighting for a lost cause''), ''Lonesome Tears'' (''Oh they ruin me every time'') and ''Already Dead (''Days turn to sand'') while the exquisite production, courtesy of Nigel Godrich, perfectly captures the desert-dry keening of crushed dreams. After this and OK Computer Godrich's must be the only number to ring if you wish your album to be as maudlin as a Sunday round at Morrissey's gaff."
- Chris Jones, The British Broadcasting Corporation
"Out of all of Beck’s albums, there is none more appropriately titled than Sea Change. Not only did the 2002 release represent a shift in the songwriter’s musical style but it also symbolized a significant change in his personal life. During most of the 1990s, where Beck was rewriting the rules for alternative rock, what with Mellow Gold, Odelay, Mutations, and Midnite Vultures, he was also in a relationship with designer Leigh Limon. The end of their nearly decade long relationship brought a complete overhaul to the guy’s music, beginning with most, if not all, of the material on Sea Change. The heavy sampling, irony-slinging, upbeat rapping that put Beck on the proverbial musical pedestal is nowhere to be found here. Instead, the songs capitalize on live instrumentation and more introspective (call it “personal”) lyrics which result in the most straightforward album in the man’’s career."
- Joe Marvilli, Consequence Of Sound
"The Chilston Park Hotel in Lenham, Kent, was once owned by Judith and Martin Miller, the antiques stars of the Eighties who wrote the Miller’s Guides. It is a place of lawn tennis and giant chess. Beck’s room has an oak four-poster with a toy sheep on it. He reads a few words from the “ghosts and ghoulies” page of the hotel’s in-house newspaper: a story about a phantom butler. “He affected a slight bow, his face shut and expressionless. As he turned to go they noticed a faint odour about him…”
Beck’s voice is level and rather quiet, sometimes little more than a crack. He is 5ft 6in and wears a grey herringbone blazer, grey V-neck and jeans. He has two staff present, but no one objects when I ask them to leave. His eyes are big and blue. This, perhaps, is a Scientologist’s famous stare in the flesh. It is not confrontational – more, if anything, like being looked through, passive and slightly hypnotic. You instinctively find yourself returning it, from politeness, or from some inbuilt desire not to “flunk” and lose the match. As the afternoon wears on, the effect of looking so hard at Beck in the fading light is slightly hallucinogenic. At times, he goes fuzzy at the edges.
More than once in his life, Beck has lost whole collections of songs. When he was 30, he went into Sunset Sound studios in Hollywood and recorded three dozen Hank Williams tracks as a one-man band. The lonesome Williams was resonating with him at the time: he was separating from his partner of nine years, Leigh Limon. The tapes disappeared – so he recorded Sea Change, the collection of introspective break-up songs that is many people’s favourite Beck album. After that, he lost his next batch of songs – they were kept in a small suitcase. The music was in the same vein as Sea Change but, to make matters worse, “more evolved and more substantial. A plateau up.” The two -dozen tapes went missing after a show in Washington, DC. Beck “shut it out”. You get the sense that he has learned to bend himself to the ways of the universe."
- Kate Mossman, New Statesman
'Sexx Laws' - Beck
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'Guero' (2005)
Beck & Chris Martin
"Without a doubt, Beck’s powers are resolutely threefold – hip-hop, soul and sweaty ’70s rock – and these disciplines combine to make ‘Guero’’s two highlights. ’Go It Alone’ is a combination of the first and the last – prime ZZ Top given a hefty jeep-beat undercarriage. And the giddy, freewheeling ’Rental Car’ is its diametric opposite – a riot of snake-hipped Farfisa organs and rapturous “yeah, yeah, yeah”s. In pop, there’s nothing big and clever about being clever, but ’Guero’ represents a very clever man being clever enough to recognise what he’s good at. Keep on, brother, keep on."
- Peter Cashmore, New Musical Express
"I think my whole generation’s mission is to kill the cliché. I don’t know whether it’s conscious all the time, but I think it’s one of the reasons a lot of my generation are always on the fence about things. They’re afraid to commit to anything for fear of seeming like a cliché. They’re afraid to commit to their lives because they see so much of the world as a cliché.
So I’m trying to embrace the world and all this stuff in a way that doesn’t seem clichéd. [Laughs] I guess I’m creating the new cliché. I mean, there are things that are continuous through the ages, but we have this tendency to laugh at our parents and make fun of them, and I think that’s healthy to a certain point. But I feel that it’s also important to take it somewhere. Otherwise you’re stuck."
- Beck, Rolling Stone
'Round The Bend' - Beck
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'The Information' (2006) / 'Modern Guilt' (2008)
Jeff Tweedy, Pat Sansone, Beck & Elton John
“Beck said every song is its own nation, with rules and customs. This song is the nation of Boogady Boo, and it does this but it never does that. It’s a sovereign nation, you can’t just change it. You’ll destroy it in the process. {PAUSES} I’m one of those songwriters …”
- Frank Black, Clash
"I can't tell you how many times I was looking at faces that were looking back at me with complete bewilderment-- or just pointing and shaking their heads and laughing-- while performing during that period. The attitude I got most of the time was that what I was doing wasn't music. I dealt with that for years. Other bands did, too. Lollapalooza in 95 was a great example of that; a lot of these vast audiences in the Midwest, Canada, and the South being confronted with the Jesus Lizard and 'Wowee Zowee'. It's hard to quantify or qualify what those things do, but they plant seeds. Eventually, if you're experimenting with a sound that's unfamiliar, it gets absorbed, and somebody comes and does it better, and it becomes part of a vocabulary. Post-White Stripes, I heard 150 bands that sound like that, some more blatant than others. The same was true for Nirvana and Sonic Youth. You can hear people trying to sound like Bright Eyes."
- Beck, Pitchfork
"Following some initial reports late last year that Sonic Youth luminary Thurston Moore would be unleashing a new solo LP with Beck behind the boards, we now have some firm release details. On May 24, 2011, Moore will drop the Beck-produced Demolished Thoughts via Matador.
The album was recorded in L.A. and Northampton, MA last year, with the press release stating, "While there's more than a few tonal similarities to some of your favourite Moore compositions from years past, the execution this time around is nothing short of staggering."
Along with Beck, the album features other guests such as violinist Samara Lubelski (Tower Recordings, Metabolismus), harpist Mary Lattimore (Kurt Vile) bassist Bram Inscore and drummer Joey Waronker. Apparently, Beck also does a bit more than produce on Demolished Thoughts, but it's unclear if he's provided extra vocals or just some added instrumentation."
- Brock Thiessen, Exclaim!*'#
"It's a collaboration made in the dreams of alt rock fan boys everywhere. Stephen Malkmus gathered the Jicks earlier this year to work on new material, with the producer's chair occupied by none other than Beck. The resulting album is a sprawling, diverse and ultimately accessible affair. 'Mirror Traffic' is the first dose of new material from Stephen Malkmus since the Pavement re-union, and the last to feature long term Jicks drummer Janet Weiss.
Speaking to ClashMusic, Stephen Malkmus reflected on Beck's contribution to the sound of the album. "(The sound) is as much his fault as it is ours. You can have someone who is whipping the band into shape, asking to rewrite tunes or whatever, and that will work for that band. I’ll just say that for him, he did the right thing for us which was to get out of the way when it was time to get out of the way. A couple of times he would say ‘slow it down’ or ‘let’s change the situation here’ and things like that. But, if you listen to it and you are a fan of mine, you can tell there is nothing insanely different going on."
Continuing, Stephen Malkmus emphasised that 'Mirror Traffic' sits very much within the lineage of his solo career. "For the songwriting itself, I had some ideas that I didn’t want to do a record like the last one. That was a little problematic in the recording - the engineer we were working with was more into guitar meltdown. He was working with Wilco, who are kinda a straight band in a way, so I think he wanted to be weird (with us). I kinda react to people’s vibes and with Beck, although he didn’t want us to be some straight pop band, when we got in there and started sounding a certain way I was going with that – and it ended up sounding a little tighter."
- Robin Murray, Clash
"Teaming up with Jack White, Beck released the menacing country number "I Just Started Hating Some People Today" on Third Man Records this week. The song skirts the line between a range of styles, including punk (with White supplying screaming vocals), smooth funk, and country. It is delightfully cathartic, rife with bluesy guitar slides and a chorus that asserts that Beck was "saying things that a garbage-man would not say." The track also features syrupy vocals from White's ex-wife and fellow Third Man artist Karen Elson. According to the Third Man website, "Today" and its B-Side "Blue Randy" were recorded in 2011 while Beck was recording in Nashville. Both tracks were conceived and recorded on the musician's final day in the studio."
- Brennan Carley, Billboard
“It was like trying to fit two years of songwriting into two and a half months,” Beck says. “I know I did at least 10 weeks with no days off, until four or five in the morning every night.”
Danger Mouse remembers Beck’s stamina during their late-night sessions: “He’s like a machine. I always got tired before he did. I stayed pretty late, but I’d usually hear the next day how late it went.” The resulting album, tentatively titled Modern Guilt, is full of off-kilter rhythms and left-field breakdowns, with an overall 1960s British vibe. Beck’s vocals float over the music as if he’s singing along to some mystical radio station in the next room. The title track has the groove of a good Zombies single, while the twangy guitar and uptempo beat of “Beggars Shoes” make it sound like Beck’s cruising at maximum speed down Route 66."
- Brandon Stosuy, Stereogum
'Say Goodbye' - Beck
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'Morning Phase' (2014) / 'Colors' (2017)
Hayley Williams & Justin Meldal-Johnsen
"The Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan said he would have “knocked out” Kanye West if he had interrupted his awards show speech. The rapper caused a stir when he stormed the stage at this year’s Grammys as Beck went to collect his Best Album award for Morning Phase. West later said that Beck should “respect artistry” and hand the award to singer Beyoncé.
Appearing on Australia’s The Morning Show, Corgan said: “I’ve stood at that podium too and I’ll tell you what, if somebody got up on my stage, I would knock them out. I don’t care who it is, I would have knocked him out.” He went on to say that it was “inappropriate for any artist to take somebody else’s moment and make it their own”.
“I think he really believes what he’s saying, I just think that’s the inappropriate venue to do it, because in essence that’s Beck’s moment.”
He made light of any claims that he may have an agenda against the rapper however, saying: “Between Kanye and I, it’d probably be a stand-off but Kim (Kardashian, West’s wife), would probably take me down.”
- Jamie Cambell, The Independent
Ryan Leas (Stereogum) speaks with Noel Gallagher (Oasis & High Flying Birds)
STEREOGUM: Do you pay attention to the music award shows at all?
GALLAGHER: I’m aware of our mate Kanye being a bit of a buffoon at one of them, yeah. Didn’t he say Beck should “respect artistry” and pass the award on to Beyoncé?
STEREOGUM: At first. He wound up backtracking.
GALLAGHER: Well, No. 1, somebody should buy that boy a dictionary. And he needs to look up the f*cking term “artistry” and then see if it reminds him, in any way, of Beyoncé. If shaking your ass for a living is considered art, then she’s right up there, no? Can I also point out: Beck can play the banjo. The banjo. That makes him a genius.
STEREOGUM: Did you ever try to play the banjo?
GALLAGHER: I’ve been known to play the banjo from time to time.
STEREOGUM: Why does him knowing how to play the banjo make him a genius?
GALLAGHER: Because I play the banjo and I’m a genius. If he plays the banjo, he must be a f*cking genius, too. No? That’s how it works.
STEREOGUM: I can see the logic there. That was how the debate unfolded actually. People were pointing to the fact that Beck played all these instruments on Morning Phase.
GALLAGHER: We could boil this down to two separate things. Beck writes all his own music, OK? There you go, the end. You have to employ a f*cking team of songwriters and eight producers and nine engineers, or you can sing it, hum it, play it yourself, I don’t know. You decide. I know what side of the fence I’m on.
Jenny Lewis & Beck
"For Lady Gaga, it was like meeting her idol. Beck is pretty much her favourite influential artist of the past 20 years. She was a fan girl at first."
- Mark Ronson on cutting the record 'Dancin In Circles', Female First
"Karen O shouted "I'm ready to win!" before launching into 'Heads Will Roll'. Dave Grohl temporarily joined the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Beck at a recent political event, ahead of the US midterm elections. The Foo Fighters frontman hopped on the drums for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ monster hit ‘Heads Will Roll’ at The Last Weekend gig. The event was organised by Swing Left, a grassroots network of volunteers canvassing for Democrat candidates ahead of the elections on Tuesday (November 6)."
- Amy Smith, New Musical Express
"Beck knows where it's at."
- Kamasi Washington, Nuclear Option
'Dreams' - Beck
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Post by petrolino on Jun 21, 2019 23:40:20 GMT
Liz Phair
Suspended Project
Singer-songwriter \ multi-instrumentalist Liz Phair was born in New Haven, Connecticut. She was adopted at birth by Nancy Phair, a historian and museologist, and John Phair, a scientist and AIDS researcher who headed up the infectious diseases program at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Her mother later worked as a professor at the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois. In between her time living in Connecticut and Illinois, Phair spent some of her formative years in Cincinnati, Ohio, later returning to the state to study art history at Oberlin College. Phair's first proper friend in the music industry was Chris Brokaw of Come who also attended Oberlin College (Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs was at Oberlin but some years later).
Phair spent some time in San Francisco, California before returning penniless to see her parents in Chicago. She began obsessively writing lyrics and playing guitar, recording numerous songs on a four-track tape recorder in her bedroom, a process that saw her become underground artist Girly Sound. Phair worked hard to gain a footing in Chicago which is said to be one of America's toughest musical scenes to crack. Through persistence and endeavour, she eventually earned herself a residency at the Rainbo Club. As rock bands took to various club stages in Chicago, Phair found herself spearheading a sonic revolution. She put her own local band together, led by multi-instrumentalist Brad Wood who'd go on to become one of the music industry's leading record producers.
"My parents were very responsible ... They were perfect about it ... I've never tried to find [my biological] parents. My friend who was adopted from the same home requested information and got back a four-page letter about her mother's life. She said it was jaw-dropping."
-- Liz Phair
Liz Phair's collaborated with many different musicians and artists during her career in entertainment. Her twitter pals include Aimee Mann (who joined Phair on stage at the Union Transfer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 2015), Kay Hanley (who joined Phair on stage at the Metro in Chicago in 2016) and Juliana Hatfield (who joined Phair on stage at the Royale in Boston, Massachusetts in 2018); all four musicans have worked as composers in film and television, and all of them participated in the Lilith Fair tours of the 1990s which are said to have raised upwards of $10,000,000 for charitable causes. Phair was working on a double album in the middle of this decade but it's somehow gotten stuck in permanent limbo. She had some creative differences with producer Ryan Adams who's alleged to have released some unofficial material from the album without permission. As far as I'm aware, there's no word yet on whether or not this album will ever see the light of day. I've watched a tiny snippet on youtube, purportedly of a new Liz Phair track being laid down at Pax Am Studios in Los Angeles, California, which is Ryan Adams' recording studio. For now, I just keep waiting and hoping ...
Liz Phair
'Fantasy Is Reality' - Parliament
-- --- --
Projects
'GirlsGirlsGirls' (1991) / 'Sooty' (1991) / 'Yo Yo Buddy Yup Yup Word To Ya Muthuh' (1991)
'It took an hour, maybe a day,
But once I really listened the noise just fell away,
And I was pretending that I was in a Galaxie 500 video,
The stewardess came back and checked on my drink,
In the last strings of sunlight, a Brigitte Bardot ...'
Girlysound ~ 'Stratford-On-Guy'
'Stratford On Guy' ~ Liz Phair
-- --- --
'Exile In Guyville' (1993)
"Liz Phair knew just what she wanted to make: a riposte to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street. Just like that rock classic, Exile in Guyville would be a double album. It’s a near-perfect record: 18 songs that capture a woman learning to navigate the adult world on her own and discovering that her fight for free choice did not end with home economics."
- Evelyn McDonnell, The Guardian
"In June of 1993, bedroom-tape prodigy turned indie-music darling Liz Phair unleashed her answer album to cock-rock culture, Exile in Guyville, upon an unsuspecting college radio scene. A song-for-song response to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St., Phair’s candid, sex-positive tales dressed in indie pop enabled her to hijack the traditional, male rock ‘n’ roll narrative. And her observations of how gender roles play out in personal interactions earned her accolades, backlash, and a spot on many critics’ “Best-Of” lists.
That same month, my own band, Bratmobile, out of Olympia, WA, also released our debut album, Pottymouth, replete with its own brand of personal-is-political tirades, as part of the riot grrrl movement. Though we differed both musically and strategically, the Chicago-based Phair and I shared an affinity for each other and for pushing back against the bro scene as our paths crossed here and there throughout the early and mid ’90s.
I first discovered Phair’s music in the summer of 1991 via my pen pal Tae Won Yu of the band Kicking Giant, who gave me Phair’s Girly Sound cassettes — collections of her confessional, home-recorded songs. Like Tae, I became completely obsessed with Phair’s disaffected delivery of bittersweet tales set to strummy guitar, and I played them for whoever would listen. In the following years, as an occasional interloper in Chicago’s Wicker Park music scene, I got to know Phair a bit, and she helped boost my morale when I was experiencing a little too much Guyville myself.
Early on, in the spirit of DIY idea sharing and inter-scene referencing, I swiped Phair’s song title “F*ck and Run” for a line in Bratmobile’s first single, “Kiss and Ride.” At a Bratmobile show in London a month after our albums came out, I admitted into the mic that although our song came out first, Phair came up with the line “f*ck and run.” Unbeknownst to me, Phair was in the audience and came up to fake-confront me after our set. I was mortified but elated to see her. For some reason, I’d decided I needed to sleep my way across the U.K., so I asked to go back to Phair’s hotel room with her. She wasn’t having it.
Twenty-five years later, both of our debut albums have been re-issued: Phair’s box set Girly Sound to Guyville on Matador and an anniversary edition of Bratmobile’s Pottymouth on Kill Rock Stars. Preceding these releases, I had the pleasure of reconnecting with Phair by phone in sunny, southern California, and I continue to be impressed by her wit, tenacity, and poetic assertions of self."
- Allison Wolfe, Bust
"In 1993 I moved to Olympia, Washington to attend college. The Northwest was full of incendiary bands in the early 1990s. Some of the sounds were heard around the globe, others remained stubbornly underground, festering and smoldering, creating an incognito hysteria and inspiring offshoots. There was twee and lo-fi, angular post-punk, emo, metal, riot grrl, noise -- most of it eager, breathless and frenzied. For months, I rarely saw or listened to a world outside of Olympia. If I wanted to see bands from London or DC, New York or LA, they would play in basements and be sucked into the smallness of the town, if only for a night. Olympia was part of a series of remote satellites sending signals back and forth, sharing information and secrets.
It was within this context, this feeling that everything important had a line drawn around it and that my town was inside that imaginary border, that I first heard Liz Phair. She crashed through the insularity, with no clear alliance to one music scene, writing from the periphery of her own. I was at a friend's house, he was making us dinner and he put on the album. The fact that I remember any details at all about what my friend was cooking, what we wore, the layout of this small apartment--those memories only exist because of Exile in Guyville. Otherwise, it would have been just another night. I was 19.
The first thing I noticed about Liz Phair was the voice. She wasn't screaming, she wasn't being cloying, she wasn't an amazing singer, but there was something serious about the vocals, something deadly. Part of it was the flatness; the strange deadpan delivery, like someone is singing on their back, like they woke up one night and decided they'd had enough and so they made an album. But the songs weren't victim anthems just like they weren't merely come-ons; they spoke of the fine lines between power and powerlessness, autonomy and isolation, they depicted epiphanies and the subsequent letdowns. The album was a journey vacillating between interior and exterior landscapes, the lyrics evoking halcyon moments always on the verge of implosion, either by the author's own hand or by someone they loved. And the album was drenched in desire, of wanting and of wanting out.
Exile in Guyville was a brave and gutsy album and Liz Phair made herself an island out of it. Some critics and fans dove in to the waters, swimming to save her, to woo her, to worship her, while others hung her out to dry. Maybe it was the sheer audacity of the album, coming at a time when many indie music statements -- particularly those being made by women -- were more strident, they clawed out a space with volume and rebellion. The sphere Phair created was murkier, it was inviting but also treacherous."
- Carrie Brownstein, National Public Radio
"When I was 18, I took a trip to Thailand with a friend. We stayed for a month. Bangkok was very raw, for a teenager: there were no cellphones, no internet, and the only music I had with me was this cassette by Liz Phair (Exile in Guyville). I was writing a lot of poetry, and she embodied a talky style of songwriting that I found very accessible. I listened to the album over and over again on my Walkman. I remember vividly taking a tiny ferryboat from Bangkok to a little island, listening to this and thinking, “Holy sh*t, I hope one day I can make music like this.”
- Jenny Lewis, The Guardian
“One of the great blessings of having a career in the arts is that posterity keeps a record for you. I’m not someone who keeps a lot of nostalgic artifacts, so it’s nice to be able to go back and learn something from yourself.”
- Liz Phair, Discover Music
Liz Phair performs at Town Hall, New York City, New York on April 25, 1995 (tracks 1-23) & Lizner Auditorium, Washington D.C. on April 26, 1995 (tracks 24-43)
-- --- --
'Whip-Smart' (1994) / 'Juvenilia' (1995)
"First there was her voice, which mixed girlish glee with irony, both pleasingly conversational and strange in its deadpan rendering of a tumultuous emotional landscape. Then there was her eye, which observed in dead-on detail real-life stories of desire and relationships and fame and things even more ordinary, like bad roommates.
Then there was her talent for and love of pop songcraft, sifted through her own peculiar filter, filigreed here and there with punk, folk and funk. But it was ultimately Liz Phair’s complex persona — audacious, funny, lusty and smart — that blew people away on last year’s phenomenal debut album Exile in Guyville. The record sounded shockingly fresh, honest and engaged, and its low-fi roughness was a foil. Phair’s sophistication and authority issued from every track.
Whip-Smart, Phair’s new record, is an excellent follow-up to Guyville. Phair’s picaresque narrative of adventure unfolds over 14 songs that elaborate on her favorite themes: sex, love, power, freedom and rock & roll. For those who discounted Guyville’s sexual bravura as just a quick and easy way for this ingénue to grab attention, she throws a f*ck into Whip-Smart’s first two songs. Note: F*cking was not a passing fancy but a source of inspiration."
- Barbara O'Dair, Rolling Stone
"Dissecting the themes Liz Phair knows best, Whip-Smart is a loose concept album about the inevitable stages of a relationship that she described as: “meeting the guy, falling for him, getting him and not getting him, going through the disillusionment period, saying ‘F__k it,’ and leaving, coming back to it.”
Whip-Smart builds upon the foundation set forth by her debut, capturing the same intimate, DIY style but with slicker arrangements, multi-layered vocals and experimental sound effects. Phair was never a belter, but that’s a part of her appeal. Her lower register has become her signature but her delivery always seemed to signify shored-up emotion rather than cool detachment."
- Laura Stavropoulos, ReDiscover Music
"Although Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon are often spoken about for their influence or their efforts to nurture new talent, Cat Power is a Sonic Youth success story via drummer Steve Shelley. Along with providing the band’s rhythm since 1985, he also set up the Smells Like Records indie label and helped to discover and record a fledging Chan Marshall after seeing her supporting Liz Phair in 1993.
Shelley didn't just release early Cat Power records, but he also played drums on her first three recordings too: Dear Sir, Myra Lee and What Would The Community Think. Marshall later saluted her mentor's band by blending Sonic Youth's Schizophrenia with Skip Spence's Weighted Down (The Prison Song) to created Schizophrenia's Weighted Me Down, the B-side to her 1996 single Nude as the News. Power is not the only artist to benefit from Shelley’s skills though. He also helped Blonde Redhead early on, and has drummed with a range of acts from The Stooges to Sun Kil Moon... and a certain solo artist called Thurston Moore."
- Tom Ravenscroft, 6 Music
"Liz Phair is doing her damnedest to get past the security guard. “Pleeeease?” she wheedles as a particularly simian man blocks her way. ” What’s the big deal, hmm?” she bats her eyes at him, giving him the full-on Phair charm, but the guard, meaty arms crossed over his barrel chest, is unmoved. “Sorry, Miss,” he says a tad too happily. “The show’s already started. Can’t let you in.”
The show that will not grant Phair entrance, let alone backstage privileges, is not Woodstock ’94, nor is it Pavement, whose Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain Phair, 27, often jogs to. It’s not even the Rolling Stones. No, it’s slightly more alternative: It’s Coral Reef Dreaming, the nature movie playing at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium. She strains to look past the guard’s Refrigerator Perry-size shoulders and tries another let’s-all-be-adults-about-this grin. The fact that Phair’s normally crackerjack oratory powers are a bit dim doesn’t help matters – earlier, she and her companion got baked, high-school style, in the parking lot. “All right then,” she tells the guard haughtily as she spins on her heel. “We’ll look at the fish.”
We shamble over to the Animals of Warm Fresh Waters and commence two hours of pot-addled fish gazing. Scintillating dialogue ensues along the lines of “Look. Look at that one. It has a wart on its nose. Ha.” And “Check this little guy out. See? He’s smiling. See?” We lose steam near Animals of the Indo-Pacific and head back to the parking lot. She sees a look of doubt pass over her visitor’s face as she reaches for the keys. “I’m fine,” she says with a soothing tone in her voice. “Just get in the car.”
Phair pulls out of the lot . . . and smack into six lanes of traffic barreling head-on toward her blue Toyota Corolla. Isn’t it funny how life works out? I’m going to die here in this car with Liz Phair. She seems like a nice enough person. There are certainly worse ways to go. “F*ck! F*ck!” yells Phair as she throws the car in reverse and stomps on the gas. We shoot back into the parking lot and gulp a few deep breaths.
“Usually I’m a great driver.” She grins shakily. “No, I’m serious.”
- Jancee Dunn, Rolling Stone
'Nashville' - Liz Phair
-- --- --
'Whitechocolatespaceegg' (1998)
"Liz Phair’s triumph and curse is that she made a classic album. Her first record, 1993’s Exile In Guyville, was a galvanizing response album to The Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main Street that continues to stand perfectly on its own today. It’s smart, explicit, spare, and unsparing—an indie rock classic. Then she had the temerity to keep making music.
Phair certainly maintained a fanbase as she put out 1994’s Whip-Smart and 1998’s Whitechocolatespaceegg, but neither had the same impact (what could?). Here’s a crazy secret, though: Both of these albums are at least as good as Exile In Guyville, maybe better. That hot take isn’t meant to denigrate Guyville so much as make the case that Phair is, if anything, underrated as a songwriter."
- Jesse Hassenger, The A.V. Club
"Whitechocolatespaceegg is a hell of an album. It’s the end of a three-album run that I’d put up against anything from anyone, at any point in alt-rock history. The talk of Phair as a careerist was all a total canard. The songs are as hard and pointed and eloquent and honest as anything else that was out there in 1998, and the production’s not exactly a whole lot cleaner. Phair wrote big and sticky hooks — “Polyester Bride” was the sort of thing that can and should conquer your brain for entire afternoons at a time — but she’d always been doing that. The album’s arrangements are cluttered and smart and eccentric, full of sharp little touches that you only notice when you’re paying close attention. The only real concessions to the sound of ’98 were a few squiggly synths here and there, and Phair was better at using those than most of her contemporaries were."
- Tom Breihan, Stereogum
"On stage, Liz Phair is raw. There are no theatrics or obnoxious bravado. She’s just herself, plain and simple, and the audience eat her up. At moments you can hear a pin drop and for everyone in the room, it’s just them and Phair, adding a strange yet comforting feeling of warmth."
- Jumi Akinfenwa, Vice
"I’d like to ghost-write Liz Phair’s novel."
- Stephen Malkmus, Andy Warhol's Interview
'Uncle Alvarez' - Liz Phair
-- --- --
'Liz Phair' (2003) / 'Comeandgetit' (2003)
"Liz Phair was always a pop star in disguise. Beneath the veneer of lo-fi production and sexual frankness of her first three albums, there lay a singer-songwriter who fused personal revelations with universal catchy appeal. On her self-titled album, Liz Phair, the indie rock icon took that sensibility to its natural conclusion, achieving the kind of mainstream success she openly sought and sparking a fierce debate about authenticity in the music world that still rages on.
Released in 2003, the album was considered a reinvention of sorts. Phair had followed up her widely beloved classic, Exile In Guyville, with two subsequent studio albums, Whip-Smart in 1994 and whitechocolatespaceegg in 1998, that hinted at her pop tendencies but were still embraced as indie-pop fare. In the five years following whitechocolatespaceegg, Phair was in a very different place. She’d gotten divorced, sold her home in Chicago and decamped to Los Angeles with her son. Not to be confused with a breakup record, a divorce record is an entirely different beast. While Liz Phair doesn’t contain the same vitriol or anguish as Marvin Gaye’s Hear My Dear or Phil Collins’ Face Value, it does deal in the unforeseen complications of adult life. It just happens to be packaged in sunny-side-up pop-rock.
The genesis of the album was starkly different than her previous releases. Phair first worked with the film composer Michael Penn (Aimee Mann, The Wallflowers) before turning to singer-songwriter Pete Yorn and his producer R Walt Vincent. They recorded a number of tracks for the album, but the label (and Phair) were still searching for a hit. They turned to Avril Lavigne’s songwriting and production team The Matrix, resulting in the radio-friendly hits ‘Why Can’t I’, ‘Rock Me’, ‘Extraordinary’ and ‘Favorite’.
In her bid for a wider audience, Phair also learned the downsides of hero worship. Those who obsessively connected with her first three records were taken aback by this seemingly about-face in style. They wanted the raw, confessional songwriting of a 26-year-old and the rough-and-tumble recording of Phair’s early bedroom tapes. What they got, however, was the same brand of candour and bucking of trends that she was always known for.
This was no ‘Sk8er Boi’; this was an adult woman extolling the beauty benefits of male excretions on ‘HWC’. No longer couched in metaphors, Phair’s lyrics were just as unabashedly forward and telling as they always were, except this time they were set to infectiously catchy hooks."
- Laura Stavropoulos, ReDiscover Music
"People don’t like to see women they consider ‘cool girls’ grow up into a more traditional version of womanhood; it’s no coincidence that after having a kid and dominating every rom-com soundtrack of the 2000s, everyone suddenly thought she was washed up. 'Liz Phair' wasn’t the comeback album that so many of her fans wanted, and it maybe wasn’t even what Phair herself wanted, but it’s an undeniably solid pop album."
- Annie Fell, Riot Fest
'Firewalker' - Liz Phair
-- --- --
'Somebody's Miracle' (2005)
"The new Liz Phair album, "Somebody's Miracle," is pretty interesting. It splits the difference between her older stuff and her self-titled CD a few years ago. It's polished, but at the level of her previous albums "Whip-Smart" and "whitechocolatespaceegg," not to the gleaming level of "Liz Phair." It's very personal and honest, with some very frank discussions about her divorce, the substance abuse of people she knows (and possibly herself) and coming out the other side. Her lyrics aren't at the wacky level they once were, but they still are quite fun and interesting. She remains one of the best lyricists of her generation.
For those who want it to be "Exile in Guyville, Part V," it'll likely be a disappointment, but it's a great portrait of where she is now, at 38, a divorced (and possibly re-married) mother who once was a college drop-out with a four-track recorder and a guitar."
- Beau Yarbrough, 'Liz Phair : Finding Balance'
"My response to "Village Ghetto Land" is "Table for One," which wasn't the same thing but that was the heartbreaker on Stevie Wonder's album 'Songs in the Key of Life', and in that song there's such an impressive contrast between the lyrics and courtly chord progression. I was trying to think what was the most devastating thing I experienced in my life, which was the alcoholism that ran in my family."
- Liz Phair, SF Gate
'Lazy Dreamer' - Liz Phair
-- --- --
'Funstyle' (2010)
"Last week, Liz Phair released a teaser track from her sixth album. Through Ke$ha-style raps and Frank Zappa-esque vocals, Bollywood tells the story of how this 1990s indie-rock darling is now making music for TV shows. It's jaw-dropping, uncomfortable, and yet probably the most refreshing thing she's done in years. For some bloggers, Christmas had come early. They proclaimed it the worst song ever, likening Phair's rapping to Madonna's on American Life, mocking her for apparently morphing into a MIA wannabe. But, this being Liz Phair, nothing was as it seemed.
The consensus was that she had committed "career suicide". Which was exactly the reaction that greeted her 2003 album, Liz Phair. At the request of Capitol Records, she reworked the album to include songs recorded with Avril Lavigne's production team, The Matrix. The results made for a frothy and funny post-divorce collection. But critics disagreed, scorning Phair for apparently turning into a boy-crazy MILF and betraying the DIY aesthetic of her 1993 debut Exile in Guyville.
Liz Phair was relatively successful, but its similarly minded follow up, Somebody's Miracle, was not. She called it a "fucking compromise disaster" and by 2008 Phair was on Dave Matthew's ATO label, touring a reissued version of Exile in Guyville. She told Pitchfork that her new material would see her "natural prankster" emerge. Well, having seemingly parted ways with ATO, Phair's new album, Funstyle, sees her tackle a career-long series of demons – and Bollywood is just the beginning.
And He Slayed Her attacks the Capitol CEO who forced her to record with The Matrix (Andy Slater), while Smoke and U Hate It touch upon her public persona, record company battles and the duplicity of LA showbiz. On Smoke, there are skits about not wanting to work with John Mayer and missing the boat (literally) because she's not on the list. U Hate It ends the album via a pretend award acceptance speech: "I wanna thank ATO … OMG … I'm so nervous, who am I forgetting? Dave Matthews, you're the best!" she says, her voice turned chipmunk-high for added irony. Even the deceptively sweet Satisfied seems like a parody of Why Can't I?, Liz Phair's syrupy lead single, with its picture-perfect lyrics soiled by the line, "You held my hair as I puked, oh, everywhere".
Can there be a clearer indication that Phair has returned to form? The price, however, has been high. As well as the web reaction, she's lost her label and management. Last weekend, Phair posted an explanation on her official site. "Here is the thing you need to know about these songs and the ones coming next: these are all me. Love them, or hate them, but don't mistake them for anything other than an entirely personal, un-tethered-from-the-machine, free-for-all view of the world, refracted through my own crazy lens."
The middle-finger-aloft attitude of Funstyle has been compared to Dylan's Self Portrait and Prince's hip-hop parodies on The Black Album. But for all the sense of Liz Phair having eaten herself, this is also the most uninhibited, alive and honest she's sounded in years."
- Priya Elan, The Guardian
"Part of Liz Phair’s success arose from the candor of her lyrics in their erogenous exploration of female sexuality, including polyamory and orgasms. Karen O, similarly, became so emblematic of a contemporary reformulation of punk indie rock because of the explicitness of her sexual bravura. While the major figureheads of punk rock — The Ramones, Television, the Clash and Sex Pistols — all explored alienation with the current political or social atmosphere, female punk rockers and indie musicians utilized the genre to unpack the unique position of women and to redress the hegemonic conditions that undergird sexism and misogyny. With queercore and the riot grrrl movement, marginal politics were given political vehicles for the destabilization of norms within the genre and beyond it."
- Ragna Rak Jons, Bluestockings
'And He Slayed Her' - Liz Phair
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Post by hi224 on Jun 22, 2019 0:03:28 GMT
nice.
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Post by petrolino on Jun 22, 2019 0:46:16 GMT
Drum Break
'Life' - Sly And The Family Stone
I find it's hard to keep track of Beck's collaborative processes as he seems happy to work with almost anybody who presents a serious work ethic; I guess it's no wonder the industrialised, blue collar mentality of Chicago struck a chord (and vice versa). With the Record Club he churned out dense song catelogues by Leonard Cohen, Skip Spence, Yanni and the Velvet Underground, highly experimental, variable in quality, but always interesting. When he supervised remixes and reworkings of minimalist composer Philip Glass' ouvre, he gained the approval of the man from Baltimore, Maryland. He's supplied music for video games (I like the track 'Spiral Staircase' - no relation to Kings Of Leon), songs for soundtracks (I love 'Ramona' on the soundtrack for 'Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World'), conquered dancefloors (most recently with the Chemical Brothers on 'Wide Open') and delivered all manner of traditional and experimental sets.
'Fourteen Rivers Fourteen Floods'
Side-Action
"Multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, producer and arranger Roger Joseph Manning Jr. will have to add ‘Guru’ to his list of titles. While discussing the release of his latest album, Catnip Dynamite (Oglio), Manning waxes philosophical on the virtues of self-reliance and individuality, themes that have more or less defined his career and have equipped him with a razor-sharp focus in articulating his profound musical message time and again.
He is unyieldingly dedicated to his craft, irrespective of the trends in the music industry, and remains committed to charting his own course – exploring different genres and sub-genres within the realm of pop music, as embodied in such diverse band projects as Jellyfish, Imperial Drag, The Moog Cookbook, TV Eyes and Malibu. There is a distinctly innovative quality to the multi-layered and melody-rich music for which he is renowned."
- Ayan Farah, Glide
"He's the living embodiment of a haunted psychedelicist."
- Dr. Kano on Roger Joseph Manning Jr., 'San Francisco's On Fire'
Roger Joseph Manning Jr.
"When we're tracking drums, I work with a few different guys. They're usually a lot savvier at the traditionalist aspects; phase-aligning microphones, gain structure, and laying everything out on the console. That's generally where I feel I need the most help, realizing the sound that I have in mind. But every time I start a project, I find myself reaching over them and grabbing knobs. It seems to happen more often, where I'm becoming more self-assured and realizing that it's not like alchemy. I can do it. Then when drum tracking is over, I can do it all from that point on. I'm pretty adept at getting good vocal and guitar sounds, as well as editing. It's just that an engineer helps me do it faster. It also depends on the budget of a project. If it's a 10 thousand-dollar record, I can't hire an engineer. Maybe I can get a buddy to come in and help me do two days of drums; but if it's a modest budget then I've got to keep things mostly in my own hands. I just think it's more of a confidence thing. I've spent so much time sitting with engineers and gradually tweaking stuff more and more. The confidence is growing, and I'm finding it very easy to assert myself more when it comes to saying, "No, let's swap that snare mic." Before, I would be less inclined to say that, or to know what was creating that non- optimum effect. Now I actually have a clue. A year ago, I wasn't really that guy, even though I'm okay with gear and stuff. Now I'm getting my hands on it."
- Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Tape Op
Justin Meldal-Johnsen at Fender
"You may think an artist, such as Beck, who has sold more than 10 million records, is a big deal, but meet the man who has helped sell nearly 1 billion. His dad. Toronto-born David Campbell may not be as publically renowned as his son, but as an arranger, orchestrator, conductor and sometimes session player, he’s appeared on some of the biggest albums of the past five decades.
Carole King’s Tapestry, Adele’s 21, Justin Timberlake’s FutureSex/LoveSounds, Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On, Taylor Swift’s Red, Nelly Furtado’s Loose, Goo Goo Dolls Iris, Aerosmith’s Get A Grip, Bill Withers’ Lean On Me, Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball, Rush’s Clockwork Angels and The Rolling Stones’ updated version of Exile On Main Street are just a sampling of the 400-plus monster sellers and 185 hits that have been graced with Campbell’s stringed instruments or his arrangements."
- Nick Krewen, The Star
Beck & David Campbell
"I heard Kiss when I was seven, and that was sort of it for me. And from there I got really into it. My parents, being musicians or whatever [Lenny Waronker took piano lessons alongside Randy Newman], tried as hard as they could to dissuade me from playing music. Finally, they sort of gave in."
- Joey Waronker
Bass Study of 'Fast In My Car' (Paramore)
'Where it's at ...
I got two turntables and a microphone,
Where it's at ...
I got two turntables and a microphone,
Where it's at ...
I got two turntables and a microphone,
Where it's at ...
I got two turntables and a microphone ...
Take me home, In my elevator bones!
That was a good drum breaaaak ...'
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Post by petrolino on Jun 22, 2019 14:40:42 GMT
Road Trip
With Liz Phair, all roads eventually lead back to Chicago, Illinois and the stage she set herself as a struggling young artist. There was something for everybody among the fabled 'Class Of '93' and Liz Phair was the singer-songwriter elect. Into this testosterone-fuelled world - a world dominated by aggressive rock God Steve Albini and his macho superstuds - shimmied a small, fragile-looking bird of a woman from Connecticut, who played guitar, bass and piano. Phair had terrible stage fright to overcome yet this added an authentic tremor to her deadpan vocalising, something that would become an essential part of her music.
"For Guyville’s female fans, listening to the record was like being allowed to speak after a lifetime of sitting silently with their hands folded on their laps. “What Phair and the rest of the world didn’t expect was just how many women would hear Guyville and think, hey, I live in a man’s world too, and it’s a problem,” L.A. Times music critic Ann Powers wrote 15 years after the album’s release. “In situations where equality is assumed but men still dominate, women occupy a strange space between the center and the margins. They can express opinions, but they’re not dictating the terms of the conversation.”
I wish I could say that I fully grasped the gender politics that Phair was exploring on Guyville when I first heard the record. But I’d be lying if I said that as a deeply awkward, profoundly confused, and sexually inexperienced 16-year-old boy that I didn’t take Phair’s blunt talk about blowjob queens and f*cking until your dick turns blue at face value. (Phair didn’t exactly discourage this when promoting the record, posing in cheesecake photos that played up her bohemian sex appeal.) I found Guyville titillating and unnerving, which is essentially how I felt at the time about every girl I had ever met. In my world, women had all of the power, which created a not-quite-healthy mix of worship and resentment of femininity that’s common to a lot of boys that age. Listening to Guyville tracks like “Girls! Girls! Girls!”—“I get away, almost every day/with what the girls call, what the girls call, what the girls call/the girls call murder” — was like hearing what they really thought of you, and it was not the least bit reassuring. On Guyville, sex was war — and I was Guam."
- Steven Hyden, The A.V. Club
"I like to think that I am the only fan of certain artists. I like to think that I am among Liz Phair’s biggest fans and cosmically deserving of a ticket to one of a handful of intimate performances. Last night, I prayed that the indifferent universe would repay 25 years of allegiance with a digital ticket. I wrote this essay, set my intentions, and had a dream about the show: I brought my mother, she was dressed like a hipster in a stonewashed denim jacket and red knit cap. She bought me a Girlysound/Exile in Guyville dream box set from the dream merch table. There was a white dog somewhere, doing something. This morning, in the real world, a hawk landed in front of me as I climbed the stairwell to the building where I teach a 9am class on Friday mornings. I took this as a sign that I’d get a ticket at noon. The girl behind me said, “Be careful, they’re aggressive.”
There aren’t many musicians who shaped my formidable years in such a way that I not only remained a loyal listener well into my adult life, but I currently do things like set alarms so that when 12pm rolls around, and concert tickets go on sale, I am reminded to excuse myself from the class I teach in order to stand in a basement corner, punching credit card numbers into my phone. “I need this ticket,” I say. I’ve been listening to Liz Phair so often, and for so long, that I am convinced I have seen her perform live on multiple occasions. After careful research, I can conclude that I saw her once, in 1998, at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel in Providence, Rhode Island. I think I cried but I’m not positive."
- Tanya Pearson, Bust
"Liz Phair will be back in Chicago for shows at the Metro Saturday and Sunday nights and will be taking part in a Pitchfork “In Sight Out” talk Monday at the Chicago Athletic Club. Sunday’s show promises to be special for Phair and fans. Material Issue, which like Phair started in Chicago and made it big nationally in the 1990s, will be on the bill. Phair was close friends and worked with Jim Ellison, former lead singer of Material Issue, who died by suicide in 1996 at the age of 31. For Phair, who said she’ll be singing some of Ellison’s songs with Material Issue for the first time in decades, it promises to be an emotional tribute."
- Bob Chiarito, Block Club Chicago
Liz Phair
The Rainbo
'Story Of The Sound' - Veruca Salt with Henry Rollins (The Sound Of Vinyl)
Billy Corgan talks Chicago with Joe Rogan
I like some of the bands who were active in Chicago at the time. I like some songs by Eleventh Dream Day, like 'After This Time Is Gone'. I really like Smashing Pumpkins. Smashing Pumpkins were fronted by a wailing banshee who could lay down some serious guitar pyrotechnics, while their second guitarist provided textures with his six-string. Rumbling basslines and groove-laden drumming rounded out the Pumpkins' sound which was dynamic. And I love Veruca Salt, who have a song called 'Empty Bottle' that tips its hat respectfully to the Chicago venue. With their dense harmonies, liquid guitar solos, fluid bass work and propulsive backbeat, Veruca Salt were nothing if not arresting. Quentin Tarantino's favourite band on the scene was Urge Overkill who lent a lyrical reference to the title of Liz Phair's first official longplayer.
"When it comes to Chicago's live music venues, perhaps no room has been mythologised quite like Metro. Just north of the Chicago Cubs' Wrigley Field ballpark, Metro has seen countless musical legends grace its stage, from Bob Dylan to James Brown, Prince to Nirvana, and hosted the first live appearance of the Smashing Pumpkins as a four-piece, back in 1988. In 2012, the 1,150-capacity club marked its 30th anniversary with sets by Guided By Voices, Afghan Whigs, Bob Mould, and more. And the show that started it all, back in 1982? A new band from Georgia, called REM."
- Jaime Black, The Guardian
"While a few artists, like Urge Overkill and Eleventh Dream Day, were plucked out of Chicago’s DIY scene, others, like Smashing Pumpkins and Liz Phair, weren’t well-known regulars in that small, tight-knit world. Patrick Monaghan, who founded Carrot Top Records in 1993, remembers seeing Phair for the first time at “a small Polish bar” not long before Exile in Guyville, written about Phair’s experiences in Wicker Park, came out. Monaghan describes Phair at the time as a nervous performer, a “shy girl with an acoustic guitar” who was largely ignored due to her lack of stage presence; he could tell, however, that there was something special about her regardless. When Guyville broke, he was a bit surprised to see that Phair’s stage persona had changed significantly, but not at all surprised to see her success.
A startling number of DIY labels that would go on to have great legacies were founded or thrived in Chicago in the early 1990s, partly because the city's DIY scene bred and supported weird, wonderful artists who would never be able to find the right home on a larger label. Corey and Lisa Rusk had moved their Touch and Go Records operation to Chicago in the mid-'80s. Drag City was founded in 1990; Skin Graft started putting out records in '91; Bloodshot Records began in '92. Kranky and Carrot Top were founded in '93; Los Crudos frontman Martin Sorrondeguy began putting out records on his own imprint, Lengua Armada, in '93, and Thrill Jockey moved to Chicago in '95.
“There was a lot of amazing music in our circles at the time,” Steve Albini says. “Tortoise, Mule, the Jesus Lizard, Mouse, and other animal-named-bands. Drag City wasn't particularly Chicago-centric but their Chicago crew was spectacular, Brise-Glace, anything with David Grubbs in it, Jim O'Rourke, all of Rian Murphy's endeavors.”Most of those groups, and indeed most of the creative and independent music in Chicago, was still too off-map for mainstream consumption at that time. The legendary first-wave British art-punk collective Mekons had “adopted Chicago as their town,” says Doug McCombs, of Tortoise, Eleventh Dream Day, and Brokeback; Mekons/Three Johns founder Jon Langford relocated to Chicago in the early '90s. Langford’s desire to fuse folk and punk in fascinating and confounding ways significantly influenced the Mekons’ direction away from a more straightforward post-punk route.
McCombs also cites Azita Youssefi’s theatrical no-wave group Scissor Girls as one of the most vital acts of the time. “I often look for bands that don't sound like anyone else, and Scissor Girls were kind of like that. The music that Azita's made since then has totally followed suit—you can still see this thing that's totally her own and totally personal.”
For many musicians who grew up listening to punk, free jazz's improvisational nature and rejection of genre conventions made a lot of sense. The crossover between the DIY scene and the avant-garde jazz scene in Chicago in the early '90s led to bands like the Flying Luttenbachers and Tortoise, and the scenes at the HotHouse, where saxophonist Ken Vandermark had a weekly residency, and Lower Links, a club in Wrigleyville that spotlighted underground hip-hop, avant-garde jazz, and experimental music. Cornetist Josh Berman observes, “If you think about the influence of free jazz on the players of Tortoise, and then you think about the influence of free jazz in the no-wave scene, it's really just a different kind of free music, right? It's all the same bag.”
“There was definitely a real interest in free jazz and other music outside of indie rock,” says Chicago Reader critic Peter Margasak. “That's why that stupid ‘post-rock’ term came about, because it was just musicians looking for inspiration elsewhere. Openness and curiosity that fed into it. It wasn't just people saying, ‘Oh, rock is so over.’ It was people saying, ‘We have to look beyond.’”
- Jes Skolnik, Pitchfork
"The Empty Bottle opened in 1992 in a self-described “cat-ridden hole-in-the-wall bar” in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood. A few months later, the venue moved two blocks up the street to the location it has remained in for 23 years hosting bands such as the White Stripes, Flaming Lips, Interpol, OK Go, Girl Talk, the Strokes and many more. It was also ground zero for Chicago’s music scene in the 90s with bands such as Tortoise, the Sea and Cake, Trans Am, Red Red Meat and Jesus Lizard gracing the club’s stage.
On Friday, Chicago independent publisher Curbside Splendor will release a book, The Empty Bottle Chicago: 21+ Years of Music/Friendly/Dancing, documenting the history of the club that helped a generation of Chicago’s indie scene make a name for themselves in the 1990s and then kept on going for the next generation.
The Empty Bottle’s owner, Bruce Finkelman, grew up in Columbia, Missouri, and arrived in Chicago with a dream and very few dollars. “I think we opened up the first Bottle for like $934,” he says. The club was in the perfect location as the rent was cheap and the fans and the musicians who played the shows all lived nearby, pushed into the then run-down neighborhood of Wicker Park by the unseen hand of gentrification. (Real estate brokers may now call the neighborhood Ukrainian Village, but back then it was Wicker Park.) “A lot of us ended up there in the early 90s and it was a rough neighborhood, but it changes so fast it’s crazy,” says Dan Bitney of Chicago band Tortoise. “Back then, it was really kind of the wild, wild west out there,” Finkelman adds. “I remember the second day we were open my manager had got held up by knifepoint.”
The club was finally able to throw open its doors thanks to the scrappy attitude and hard work of the owners and the community. “I don’t think we ever could have done it without the amazing amount of support from the people that were living in that area,” says Finkelman. “They chipped in with painting, they chipped in the programming, they wanted to be part of the operations.”
The club opened in their permanent location the night before Halloween 1993 and was christened with a show headlined by Ohio rockers Scrawl. “I remember we played a Halloween show and I dressed up like Carrie, covered in blood,” says singer Marcy Mays. “I had a pretty good costume! I just don’t remember anything else about the show.”
Before the Bottle opened Chicago’s scene was spread around the city, as locals hopped between bars such as Dreamers, Lounge Ax, the Metro, and the Rainbo Club. “The Rainbo Club was the epicenter, even though it wasn’t a venue. Liz Phair would be in there and the Urge Overkill guys and Jesus Lizard would show up,” Bitney says. “The Bottle was really more the venue.”
“When the Empty Bottle opened, it was this incredible moment because we didn’t have to haul ourselves all the way to the north side to go to the iconic Lounge Ax,” says Kathryn Frazier, who launched her music publicity company Biz3 out of what she describes as “a closet” in the club. “Bruce kept it cheap enough that you would just go there to drink every night, and you would happen to catch all these cool bands. It created a big community and a culture grew out of that place, because we were just there every night.”
- Melissa Locker, The Guardian
Bedroom surfing with Elizabeth Phair
Smashing Pumpkins perform 'Hummer' at the Metro
..
When Liz Phair took to the road off her own back, she mapped out a writer's journey that'd take her state to state. She had Brad Wood with her which was important as he connected her to her roots on the Chicago scene. She still returns to Chicago regularly and has filled bills with old cohorts.
Phair and Material Issue recorded a cover of the Vapors' hit 'Turning Japanese'. They also recorded 'The Tra La La Song (One Banana, Two Banana)' together, from 'Banana Splits Adventure Hour'; this was recorded for the anthology album 'Saturday Morning : Cartoons' Greatest Hits' (1995) and it was subsequently played as a double-sider with the album cut 'Josie And The Pussycats' (from 'Josie And The Pussycats'), a track recorded by Tanya Donelly and Juliana Hatfield.
"Guyville" was a phrase coined by Blackie Onasis of Urge Overkill to describe, as Phair told National Public Radio, "a mafia of music lovers who were representing 'alternative' but I found them to be oppressive."
-- Google Phair
Brad Wood has produced records by Eleventh Dream Day, Trenchmouth, Seam, Red Red Meat, Smashing Pumpkins, Veruca Salt and Tortoise. Smashing Pumpkins toured with Phair in 2016; during a concert in New Orleans on April 22, frontman Billy Corgan and his touring bandmate Sierra Swan performed ‘The Cross’ from ‘Sign O’ the Times’ as a tribute to Prince (the singer passed away on April 21), while Phair covered ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ as part of her set.
"My voice warbles, my projection diminishes. I have more of a sneer, I’ll get threatened by the crowd, I’ll look like I’m really angry. Inability to remember songs, that’s a good sign of stage fright [Laughs] I’ll abort a song if I’m f*cking up."
- Liz Phair discusses dealing with stage fright with Jancee Dunn in 1994, Rolling Stone
"I grew up in Rockford, Illinois, the home of Cheap Trick- the greatest band alive. I played the saxophone well enough to go to college and study jazz performance. Thank you, Adolphe Sax.
When I moved to Chicago in 1987, it didn't take long before we built Idful Music Corporation- a small but mighty recording studio in Wicker Park. That's where I recorded albums by bands like Seam, Tar, Shrimp Boat and Eleventh Dream Day. It was Liz Phair’s Exile In Guyville in 1993 that did the trick for my career. Thank you, Liz."
- Brad Wood, Biography
"Stevie Winwood’s youthfully innocent good looks, his disarming manner and his refusal to wear his stature on his sleeve can make for surprises. An offhand, let’s-get-settled question like. “When was the last time you were in Las Vegas?” elicits an equally casual answer: “Nineteen years ago, on the Blind Faith tour. I went to see Elvis on his comeback tour. He was amazing.”
Still, the Las Vegas setting, the impossible kitsch of his Caesars Palace hotel room (the parlor of the suite is a nightmare vision of yellow, brown and mustard tones, with a wild floral pattern on the walls), the mention of Elvis and even Winwood’s distance from his celebrated past create a certain uneasiness. The scene is haunted by a remark Winwood made three weeks before on a brutally hot Sunday afternoon in Chicago, during one of the first stops on his tour.
In a far more subdued suite at the Omni Ambassador East, Winwood explained how three years earlier, after the relative failure of his album Talking Back to the Night, he had “decided to embrace the fact of being an entertainer.” Straightforward as it may seem, the remark sounded strange coming from a man whose exquisite musicianship, outstanding voice and expansive musical vision had long set the standard of integrity.
“This is probably a recent thing that I’ve realized, about music being entertainment,” he said, his voice hoarse from the previous night’s show. “I had a choice to go a couple of ways. If I was to say, ‘Well, I’m a musician, I’m not an entertainer,’ then I have no business going onstage with lights and trying to look … I should be in the back doing the music, and somebody else should be out front.
“So you have the choice. You have to decide which way to go. I thought about it long and seriously, and I thought that if I sing songs to people, you can’t deny it, you’re an entertainer. It’s not just ‘I’m entertaining them’ but ‘I am actually an entertainer.’ ”
- Anthony Decurtis, Rolling Stone
Liz Phair & Material Issue
Liz Phair appears on 'Squirt TV'
Phair's never really been one for bringing in superstars to record with, as far as I can recall, though she always has a clear vision when it comes to collaboration. R.E.M back her on the short track 'Fantasize' which pays tribute to 'You've Got To Hide Your Love Away' by the Beatles. Pete Yorn is one of the musicians on Phair's self-titled album from 2003 - she and Yorn also recorded a cover of 'Here Comes Your Man' by the Pixies. Phair plays most of the instruments heard on her last album, 'Funstyle', though former labelmate Dave Matthews also lent his talents on guitar. Mostly though, Phair reserves collaborations for scoring and composition work, stage shows and songs recorded outside of her albums.
"Twitter buddies!" When Liz Phair speaks, she's so warm that it feels like you've known her forever. Her energy is palpable."
- Ilana Kaplan, The Independent
David Byrne & Liz Phair
Sheryl Crow & Liz Phair on 'The Tonight Show' with Jay Leno
Out on the open road, Liz Phair's played poker, smoked weed and photographed motels. Her ongoing journey through the world of televised entertainment has led her to play larger venues, seasonal festivals and network entertainment shows, but she's always enjoyed performing in smaller, more intimate concert halls. She's currently working on a memoir that's fittingly entiteld 'Horror Stories'.
"I actually didn't want to write a memoir, I wanted to write fiction or prose. What happened to me after Trump got elected and the blowback we thought we were collectively on board with - I got in touch with this outrage and horror. I wanted to redirect my own attention and put something out in the world that redirected attention towards the interpersonal responsibility and the emotional ways in which we bump up against each other. I wanted to slow everything down and look at what matters between human beings and how we became to be the people we are. I wanted to examine those scars and find the beauty within that. You look at Trump and those people and you think, if you connected to yourself and the people around you, you wouldn't behave this way. As a culture, I wanted to add my weight to a pile of people who stop and see the beauty of the when two people are compassionate to each other. The stories from my life, career and childhood, but they're not all chronological. It's about humanity, beauty and horror."
- Liz Phair, The Independent
Liz Phair goes amplified acoustic
Liz Phair shreds her electric
'Polyester Bride EP' ~ Liz Phair
--- --- ---
Asian Odyssey
"Even in Asia, the thunderclap of Harper Lee publishing a new book shook the ground. Wow!"
- Liz Phair, Twitter
Liz Phair appears on '120 Minutes'
Interview with Liz Phair, Casey Rice & Brad Wood
I must confess, I'm not too familiar with Liz Phair's compositions for film and television. She's particularly noted in television circles for her work as part of the compositional unit Clyto alongside Marc 'Doc' Dauer and Evan Frankfort. Together, they've created music for tv shows like 'Swingtown', '90210', 'The 100' and 'In Plain Sight''.
"I met Doc Dauer through Pete Yorn. He was working on this kids' record called The Body Rocks. So he had me come in, and he was working with Evan Frankfort. My friend, Mike Kelly, that I grew up with all the way from elementary school on has been in television as a writer and show producer- he works on The LXD, maybe One Tree Hill. He came to me and said, ‘F--- the labels, Liz. You need to score my new show. I'm writing a show about our hometown called Swingtown.'
We grew up in a very, very conservative town, and he had been aware when he was younger of a bunch of parents that were swinging, which was so scandalous. He's like, 'You need to score it' and I was like 'I have no idea how to score.' And he said, 'You gotta do it.' So I asked Doc and Evan who had both been scoring works, and at that very moment we became... Three-Headed Monster is what we called ourselves. Since then, we've done a couple other different shows: 90210 and we just finished In Plain Sight.
What I really hooked into is the emotion. In between what you're seeing on screen and the dialogue of the scene and the music you create to support that, for me, it's all about the emotion. It's a conceptual process and very abstract in certain ways. But it just felt very, very right. Like we had gotten to the essence of what making music is all about."
- Liz Phair, American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers
Dan Foliart, John E. Davis, Liz Phair, Doc Dauer & Sue Devine receive awards at the ASCAP Film & Television Awards in 2009
'Sancho' - Girl Problems Band
My favourite piece composed by Liz Phair for the screen is actually a song she co-wrote with A.R. Rahman for a film I've not seen called 'People Like Us' (2012). It's the directorial debut of filmmaker Alex Kurtzman. I believe it's a drama about bribery and corruption. The cast for the movie includes Chris Pine, Elizabeth Banks, Olivia Wilde, Michelle Pfeiffer, Phillip Baker Hall and Jon Favreau.
"On her extremely bizarre and kinda-funny 2010 album Funstyle, Liz Phair played around with Bollywood sounds, which was not something anyone ever expected with her. And on the soundtrack to the forthcoming family dramedy People Like Us, Phair actually hooks up with a figure of Bollywood-music royalty: A.R. Rahman, who has scored about a bazillion films. And weirdly enough, their collaboration “Dotted Line” sounds like straight-up adult contemporary."
- Tom Breihan, Stereogum
"Allah Rakha Rahman was born Dileep Kumar, into a Hindu family. The music composer went on to embrace Islam at the age of 23, after he met his spiritual guru, Qadri Islam. Rahman originally wanted to become an engineer, before taking a liking for a keyboard gifted by his father and turning to music.
Rahman made his feature film debut with Mani Ratnam's 'Roja'. He went on to win his first National Award for the film. The win created history as never before had the award been given to a first-time film composer. Rahman, who initially thought music was a means to make ends meet after the demise of his father, went on to create some of the finest tunes of our time. His talent was evident from the start, when as a kid, he played four keyboards at once on Doordarshan’s 'Wonder Balloon'.
Rahman is the first Asian to have won 2 Oscars in the same year. He also has two Grammy Awards to his credit for 'Slumdog Millionaire'. The Padma Bhushan and Padma Shri recipient has also won 4 National Awards. Even a street in Ontario, Canada, has been named in his honour."
- The Economic Times sends best to wishes A.R. Rahman on his birthday
"Yeah, the director Alex Kurtzman, who’s the writer as well, emailed me. He got in touch with me and said, “Hi, I’m a fan. I’ve been writing this movie that’s very personal and I listened to your music when I was writing the female character, Frankie. I used your music to help me understand how she felt. Maybe you can be a part of this movie somehow. Would you like to come meet?” So, I met him and he had just finished the script, so he gave me the script. It was fun and it was great to talk, but we didn’t really know what we were going to do. That’s not normally how it works in Hollywood. Normally, they’re like, “We need a song. What’s on the radio right now, how much does it cost, and will it work in the film?” This was so personal.
people-like-us-elizabeth-banks-chris-pine-imageA year later, they had a cut, so I went in and saw the cut, and I sobbed in the back. But, we still didn’t know what we were going to do. And then, A.R. Rahman became a part of it after another six months, he was like, “Come in. We need your voice. Just put your voice on something and get in this movie.” So, I did. It was easy and fast. A.R. was a prince and fielded these balls that Alex was throwing at him. It was fun because, when I walked in, they were in the thick of it. I’ve been scoring TV for a couple years now, so I totally got what they were doing and what A.R.’s position was and what Alex was looking for. I played around with them, watching them score, and I remember A.R. being like, “Thank god, you’re here!” He was ready to tell Alex, “Okay, let it go! That scene works!”
I can’t remember how it happened, but he was like, “Can you write a song for the end credits?” A.R. had this theme that he’d woven throughout a lot of the cues that was this beautiful lullaby theme because Alex wanted something that had a lullaby feel to it. The song I wrote for the movie was a little tougher, so marrying the two was interesting and it worked beautifully. It was better than I would have thought. You can hear it in the song. It doesn’t sound like a Liz Phair song, and it doesn’t sound like an A.R. Rahman song. It sounds like the two of us coming together, which is a very satisfying feeling because you’ve created something out of nothing."
- Liz Phair, Collider
Interview with Alex Kurtzman, Liz Phair & A.R. Rahman
'How dare you be you, how dare I be me,
The two of us lost in our own fantasy,
Oh, Bangladesh, you're all I think of,
And nothing, oh nothing is ever enough ...'
- Liz Phair
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Post by petrolino on Jun 22, 2019 20:34:43 GMT
Beck & Liz Phair : Guitar Icons
Beck / Paul Banks / Liz Phair / Travis Barker - Riot Fest 2018
'Devils Haircut' - Beck
A recent survey conducted by guitar manufacturer Fender, as endorsed by the popular music publication 'Rolling Stone', uncovered that the rise in female guitarists has finally reached a level of 6-string equality. Liz Phair had been predicting this for years and gleefully tweeted her approval.
"From singers to drummers, roadies to rock critics, music is an industry still overwhelmingly dominated by men – but perhaps not forever. A new study of those taking up the guitar has found that half of new learners are women and girls, suggesting that the future of rock, metal and indie might just be 50% female. The survey by the guitar manufacturer Fender found that in the US and UK, a phenomenon it had originally assumed was a short-lived blip inspired by the popularity of Taylor Swift was in fact enduring and worldwide. Similar results from a previous, smaller study in 2016 had initially been ascribed to the “Swift factor”, Fender CEO Andy Mooney told Rolling Stone magazine. "In fact, it’s not. Taylor has moved on, I think playing less guitar on stage than she has in the past. But young women are still driving 50% of new guitar sales. So the phenomenon seems like it’s got legs, and it’s happening worldwide.” Fender’s UK team had been surprised that half its sales were to girls and women, he said, “but it’s identical to what’s happening in the US”.
Following the previous US study, Fender changed its tactics to target millennial women, launching a new range of guitars in 2016 and enlisting the female-fronted indie bands Warpaint and Bully in its marketing campaigns. Almost three-quarters (72%) of those picking up the guitar did so because they wanted to gain a life skill or better themselves, according to Fender’s survey of 500 new and aspirational guitarists, with 42% saying they viewed the guitar as part of their identity.
There were some differences in how women and girls in the UK and US liked to play; half of all British respondents said they preferred to play privately, 18% more than in the US. But not all wanted to be rock stars: across the board, 61% said they simply wanted to learn songs to play socially or by themselves, rather than make it big on stage. Despite the success of bands such as Wolf Alice, whose lead singer Ellie Rowsell plays guitar and who recently won the Mercury music prize, live music in the UK remains overwhelmingly dominated by men, with a Guardian study last year finding that two-thirds of live acts had no female members. There is no shortage of female guitarists and female-fronted guitar bands who have received commercial and critical success, including Brit award winner Laura Marling, the Californian band Haim and PJ Harvey, the only artist to win the Mercury music prize twice. But many say they still have to battle in a male-run industry.
“I don’t think it’s a particularly good time [for women in bands],” said James Hanley, senior staff writer at Music Week. “That’s borne out by the festival line-ups that get filled with [male performers].”
To the music critic Caroline Sullivan, the increase in women taking up guitar might be explained by millennial women wanting to play an assertive instrument “whose whole basis is: look at me”. “It doesn’t surprise me that a lot of young girls are taking up the guitar, because playing guitar seems much cooler and more dominant than doing the traditional female thing of standing behind a keyboard looking pretty. Back in the day, girls wanted to sleep with the musicians. It’s much easier now to say, I want to do what he’s doing.”
With the notable exceptions of Swift and Ed Sheeran, on the whole, guitars have become less prominent in popular culture as pop and rap have come to dominate the charts. The kind of rock and indie bands that sold millions of records in the 20th century are now a relatively marginal concern. A potential problem for the guitar manufacturing industry was identified by Fender in 2016, when it found that 90% of first-time guitar buyers stopped playing within a year, curtailing the market for multiple purchases. Gibson Guitars, the second-largest guitar brand in the US after Fender, entered bankruptcy proceedings earlier this year, though its financial troubles were largely attributed to overextending into personal audio products. But – perhaps driven by women – there is evidence that guitars are making a comeback: the research firm IBISWorld found earlier this year that sales had been growing for five years and were projected to keep growing into 2022."
- Esther Addley & Ben Beaumont-Thomas, The Guardian
“Anybody who’s a new guitar player gets pretty intimidated, but it can be more intimidating for women. I’ve witnessed it first-hand. I went into a store with a very accomplished female guitarist and the clerk came up to her and said ‘Are you looking for your husband or boyfriend?’ If you ask that question then you’ve already lost a customer for life.”
- Andy Mooney (CEO of Fender Guitars), New Musical Express
Electric Guitar autographed by Tori Amos, Juliana Hatfield, Joan Jett, Jenny Lewis, Liz Phair & the Indigo Girls
'Debra' - Beck
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Beck : A Man Of Many Instruments
"While Beck’s 2014 release, the sublimely organic, orchestral and acoustic Morning Phase, may have caught some fans off guard, the fact remains that acoustic guitar has always been at the core of his musicality. Beck’s earliest performances in New York City, at age 18, were more akin to folk music than anything else (Beck’s a fan of Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Woody Guthrie and other American folk giants). And lest we forget, his first radio hit, “Loser,” revolves around a droning acoustic slide riff, while other successes, such as “Tropicalia,” “Lost Cause” and “Girl,” rely heavily on acoustic guitar. Perhaps it was only fitting that Beck marked his 20th anniversary as a successful recording artist in relaxed acoustic fashion with Morning Phase."
- Dale Turner, Guitar World
Guitars
* Martin D-16BH Beck Signature Edition Guitar
{'The D-16BH shows Beck's appreciation for a true working musician's instrument: the emphasis is on tone, playability and understated decoration. The "Beck" signature is inlaid in abalone between the 19th and 20th frets. Every D-16BH Beck Signature Edition guitar comes equipped with Martin Gold+Plus Natural II sound reinforcement electronics.
Each D-16BH Beck Signature Edition guitar bears an interior label signed by Beck Hansen and CEO, C.F. Martin IV. A portion of the proceeds from each guitar will be donated to The World Literacy Campaign, which addresses global problems of poverty, ignorance, disease and substance abuse through literacy programs.'}
* Schecter Hellcat
* Martin D-28 (Duplicate)
* 64's Silvertone 1448
* Danelectro U1 Black
* Danelectro Dano Pro Electric Guitar
- Beck at Equipboard 'Up All Night' - Beck
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Liz Phair : Fender Shredder
"Not only did the Musicmaster and Duo-Sonic firmly establish Fender's tradition of student-model guitars in the 1950s, they also became favorites of several indie rock and alternative artists many years later. So yes, they certainly started many a beginner on their artistic path, but fans have likely seen them in the hands of players like Mickey "Dean Ween" Melchiondo of Ween, Dweezil Zappa and Liz Phair. Even Jimi Hendrix played one early in his career.
Both original models were short-scale guitars — 22.5 inches compared to 25.5 inches for the Telecaster and Stratocaster — with slightly smaller bodies, Strat-like headstocks and single-coil pickups. The Musicmaster came first by a couple of months. The first production run had ash bodies, with black paint on their aluminum pickguards. June 1956 saw the second production run of Musicmasters and the first Duo-Sonic models, which were distinguished by an additional single-coil pickup at the bridge position. Throughout the years, the Musicmaster and Duo-Sonic were offered in various body and pickguard colors, but the biggest change occurred in 1964, when they underwent a Mustang-like redesign complete with offset waists.
In the fall of 2016 the Duo-Sonic was reintroduced — alongside the Mustang — featuring a 24-inch scale, a modern "C"-shaped neck and two single-coil pickups. It is also available as a Duo-Sonic HS, which features a rosewood fingerboard and exchanges the single-coil bridge pickup for a humbucker with coil-split capability."
- Mike Duffy & Jeff Owens, Fender
"Kristin Hersh’s live and studio performances are built on a foundation of inspiration, craft, and ferocious technique on guitar. Fender Telecaster Thinlines are among her favorite onstage electrics."
- Bill Murphy, Premier Guitar
"The indie legend Liz Phair loved her 1969 white Duo-Sonic with a red pickguard so much so that she featured it on the cover of her self-titled 2003 album. Playing it almost exclusively early in her career, Phair’s guitar was even included in a touring exhibit entitled “Women in Rock.”
- Mike Duffy, Fender * Fender Duo-Sonic Electric Guitar
* Fender Mustang Electric Guitar
* Fender Musicmaster
Liz Phair chats with Joe Rogan
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Excerpt from a conversation between Liz Phair & Tom Murphy (Westworld, published January 14, 2011) :
Westworld - On your website you said that your new album lost you your record deal, but to my ears, it's one of the best things you've done. What inspired your use of such a broad range musical styles this time around? I mean you have a song like "My My" that is a bit like a Sly & The Family Stone type of funk and "Bollywood," which is not unlike the kind of hip-hop done by M.I.A.
L P - I was just having fun. I'd been scoring for television here in L.A., and when you do that, you utilize a lot of sounds and sound design, and it's a very fast process. A lot of those style choices were born of long hours in the studio just cracking each other up and doing sound design stuff that, as you're working on the piece, scoring, you start to go sideways and you just start experimenting pretty wildly, and that's sort of where that came from.
Westworld - Do you still play a Fender Duo-Sonic II? Is there anything in particular about that guitar you like?
L P - Well, I do, actually. It's currently in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in an exhibit, so I don't have it on me. But we got one sort of similar as a stand-in until it's returned to me. Really, I just got used to it. It's small, it's light, it has a twangy sound that goes with my voice, because my voice is pretty high, and it's not very strong. It became my signature sound. It's what I began playing, and so in my ears, in my head, that's how my voice and my guitar should sound. When I'm writing, it's sort of important to have that totality to write with.
Westworld - In an interview for Starry Constellation magazine, you said you considered yourself more of a studio geek than a performer. Do you still think so, and why so?
L P - You know, I always thought that because I never grew up aspiring to the stage, it was never part of what I wanted in life. In fact, I dreaded it. But I loved making art. I grew up a visual artist, and with music and songwriting, it's all about making things to me. That's what I'm really in it for -- making things. That's what I love, that's where I'm comfortable and that's what I think I'm best at. It was a struggle to perform live for many years. I think you either have the instincts or you don't.
Now, actually, I kind of love but I still don't think I'm that great at it. I think, for me, I've become quite good. But compared to people that I see, I recognize, in performers, that kind of available inspiration that's always at your fingertips, that I have in the studio, in their live performances.
I think most of the time, I'm just at the mike trying to play my guitar and sing. It was just really recently, that after I read Keith Richards' Life, that I started becoming proud of the tradition of live performing. It tangibly changed how I felt about what I did out there. It was maybe the beginning of being actually a good performer.
'Stuck On An Island' - Liz Phair
--- --- Excerpt from a conversation between Liz Phair & Dan Ozzi (VICE, published May 1, 2018) :
Noisey - When you wrote Guyville in your 20s, a lot of it dealt with feeling trapped in this very guy-centric universe of mansplainers. Do you see a difference now in this generation? Has that culture shifted at all?
L P - A bazillion percent. I can go online and spend all day checking out new bands with women and I’m not even trying to. I follow a new female artist, I’d say, daily on Twitter, just because I hear a cool song. It’s what I dreamed of. I could only dream of it back then. And they’re all coming into the male rock world going, “This sucks, this is horrible, I’m the only woman.” And I’m thinking: You have no idea! [Laughs] Right now, I feel like I’m looking at a bumper crop and they’re looking at it going, “We’re still the minority and it’s hard,” and it is, but I can see the progress and I’m very excited about it.
Noisey - Who are some younger artists that excite you?
L P - I’m gonna gonna go to Twitter and look through the people I follow. I love them all. Everyone’s like, “Who are your favourites?” And I’m like, I have no idea, I think they’re all amazing. [flips through Twitter] I follow… Rae Morris, Snail Mail, Soccer Mommy obviously, Margot Price, I’ve got Karen O...
Noisey - Where do you find out about these artists?
L P - I literally use the social network socially. Mostly online word of mouth – someone that I’m following flags something or gives a shout-out to their friend. And then there’s all this reach-out. All these young artists reach out to me on Twitter, and I follow them and see who they follow. To me, it’s like woman-world. It’s awesome. It’s all female artists. I think I mostly listen to female music now.
Noisey - Woman-World could be the sequel to Guyville.
L P - Woman-World! That can be oppressive too. [Laughs]
Noisey - When you listen to these new artists, do you hear any of your influence in them?
L P - Sometimes. Like when I first heard Courtney Barnett, I heard it big time. But I don’t even think she listened to me. She might have known about me, but I don’t think she listened to me. When I was listening to Snail Mail’s guitar, I heard me a lot.
Noisey - Do you wish that Twitter was around in the 90s?
L P - No. It’s funny, Joe [Rogan] and I were just talking about that on his podcast. We’re the last generation to straddle both worlds, when you weren’t connected. We got to live in both times. I liked being part of the world more, and I don’t just mean the human world, I mean the world-world. We don’t just go out anymore. We don’t go looking to see where everyone is. We know where they are.
Noisey - What would Liz Phair’s Twitter have been like in 1993?
L P - Oh my god, I would tell you about the millions of things I was smart about, I would be snarky, I would be… When I listen to my old interviews, I just want to reach through the screen and tell myself to shut up. I don’t know what I’m saying and I act like I know everything.
'White Babies' - Liz Phair
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New Power Generation
Liz Phair with Anderson & Roe
'Dogs Of L.A.' - Liz Phair
"Sonic Youth was something that made me go to shows, and before I had a music career at all she was an obsession of mine because she was this cool chick. She was clearly from an art background, and she was nothing like me — she was way cool. She was definitely someone from the beginning that I really admired and held up as someone in a very male environment that shone and had a lot of presence."
- Liz Phair on Kim Gordon, Spin
"As I walked into the iconic venue that is Empty Bottle, I couldn’t help but marvel at the show I was about to attend. One of the most interesting and endearing newer artist Soccer Mommy was opening for a revered icon, Liz Phair. I was overwhelmed to see a new favorite and one that has persevered in my mind since childhood. I snapped a picture of the chalk door listing their names just as Alton Brown paced to the back line, feeling all too lucky to see what would be a spectacular show.
While waiting for Soccer Mommy, the musical project of Sophie Allison, I overheard a fair share of people wondering how she would sound. It’s pretty obvious that when Liz Phair is playing a venue 1/100 of what she typically does, she will be the person most people are here for. Rest assured, I told as many people as I could they were in for a treat and thankfully Allison delivered with a fantastic solo set.
Soccer Mommy came to the stage alone and was practically welcomed with opened arms. Allison’ performance was somewhat understated, but revealed more than it let on. It put her songwriting and personality on full display. It’ incredibly difficult not to be impressed with songs like “Skinned Knees” and “Grown”, odes to young love and growing up. Allsion’s songs are shockingly dense, saying way more in a single verse than most songs can muster in their entirety. This fact was not lost on the crowd as they responded quite well to Soccer Mommy’s bedroom pop tunes.
In the middle of her set she let the crowd know that a cover was coming up. As soon as she revealed it was a Bruce Springsteen songs, the crowd cheered. She laughed and was happy for the approval, something that not every crowd responded with. “I’m on Fire” fit her cadence wonderfully, finding itself pretty early on and dazzling the crowd with it’s tender edition. She ended her set with “Flaw ” and “Cool”, two songs of her latest album Clean. “Flaw” centers into some darker elements of Allison’s songwriting while “Cool” masks them with undeniable sardonic tone as she belts out “I wanna be that cool” about heartbreaker girls. There’s no Doubt in my mind that Sophie Allison left the stage with a fair amount of new fans after this performance.
When Liz Phair came to the stage, the crowd understandably erupted ..."
- Julian Ramirez, Third Coast Review
'Records In My Life' : Snail Mail
'Records In My Life' : Soccer Mommy
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Post by petrolino on Oct 26, 2019 2:10:22 GMT
Indian Summers
* Beck has been teasing the release of new music from his upcoming project 'Hyperspace' throughout 2019. Hot on the heels of this year's single 'Saw Lightning' comes 'Uneventful Days', a fresh offering arrived earlier this week.
'Uneventful Days' - Beck
-- --- --
* In early October, Liz Phair announced during her book tour that she's preparing her first original album in almost a decade. Some online music sites are carrying reports of her new single, 'Good Side', which she performed live on a CBS platform while promoting the 2019 Halloween pumpkin patch. She also dropped in at WFUV to perform an oldie ...
"Liz Phair is back. The songstress announced on Friday (Oct. 11) that a new album will be coming sometime in the next year. The new project will be her first since 2010's Funstyle. In celebration of the announcement, Phair dropped "Good Side," which she told Stereogum is thematically related to her recent autobiography, Horror Stories, and “captures the optimism and acceptance I feel even in the face of disappointments.”
- Rania Aniftos, Billboard
"I know you guys thought I forgot about the music because I’m on my book tour, but I made a record with Brad Wood over this last year and I’m bringing the sounds you love into 2020! Good Side is the appetizer. Have fun! Love, Liz."
- Liz Phair, Twitter
'Good Side' - Liz Phair
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Post by petrolino on Jun 26, 2020 21:25:37 GMT
Liz Phair in Lockdown
"Quarantine giving me major vibes of being grounded over the summer in high school and having to do a lot of chores."
- Liz Phair (@phizlair), Twitter
"Liz Phair has jumped straight into using Twitter’s new audio tweet tool by recording a song. The unnamed track was posted by the singer-songwriter yesterday (June 17), which contains lyrics about how impressed Phair is by the new feature.
“Twitter’s a smart cookie/ ‘Cus it’s got me hooked already/ I think I’m playing hookie/ I think I’ll probably go back to work after this verse“, Phair sings over acoustic guitar in a seemingly improvised performance. Elsewhere in the track Phair laments that the tool is a distraction from her work. “I like it a lot/ I think I’ll use it too much/ ‘Cus I do this anyway, all through the day/ When I’m supposed to be working.” Phair’s audio tweet song is her first song since last year’s ‘Good Side’, which was her first single in 10 years. The singer’s seventh album, ‘Soberish‘, was slated for a 2020 release, however, it’s not known at this stage if the release will go ahead with the uncertainty set by the coronavirus pandemic."
- Charlotte Krol reporting on 18 June, 2020, New Musical Express
'Fire Up The Batmobile' - Liz Phair
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Red House Painter
Liz Phair shared her latest painting through Twitter this month, in dual formats. Though I've not yet seen it myself, I believe it's inspired by a scene from Fernando Meirelles' drama 'The Two Popes' (2019).
-- --- --
Inside The Lounge
"Liz Phair is, first and foremost, an artist. She's a musician, she's a visual artist, and in some ways, you could also think of her as a performance artist because the Liz Phair you might think you know from her music — the brash, sometimes profane, in-your-face Liz Phair — isn't exactly the person you meet in real life. The real life Liz Phair is quieter; she's thoughtful. And you get the impression that she's always paying very close attention, observing everything and picking it apart. Now, it's hard to overstate the importance of Liz Phair when it comes to rock music — specifically, to women in rock music, both in the music women make and the way women are perceived by an industry that is famously dominated by men. Her 1993 debut album, Exile In Guyville, was a bold and confessional work that tore down the facade of the 'pretty pop star.' But its success also launched Phair into an industry that wasn't entirely prepared for that facade to disappear."
- Raina Douris, National Public Radio
Liz Phair inside The Lounge
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Post by petrolino on Jun 12, 2021 22:51:19 GMT
Liz Phair Returns To The Stage
Liz Phair is back with her first studio album since 'Funstyle' (2010) which was released eleven long years ago. 'Soberish' (2021), which was released on 4th June, sees Phair reunite with record producer and multi-instrumentalist Brad Wood for the first time since they worked together on 'Exile In Guyville' (1993), 'Whip-Smart' (1993) and 'Whitechocolatespaceegg' (1998) in the 1990s. Having listened to it several times, I can say it's my favourite album she's released since 'Whitechocolatespaceegg'. I think Phair and Wood work brilliantly together and I'm glad they're back in the studio.
Six months in, 'Soberish' would rank as my favourite longplayer of the year so far. Phair has been on social media thanking fans for being patient and sticking with her. I think I speak for the great many when I say we're just delighted to have her back. Thanks Liz ... make mine a double.
"Thank you all for the love and support over the years 💜can't believe my album is out. I'm over the moon to be putting music out with you again."
- Liz Phair sends a message on Youtube
'Soberish' - Liz Phair
-- --- --
'Soberish' (2021)
"Soberish is Liz Phair’s first album in 11 years. There is a lot riding on this one. Her 1993 debut Exile in Guyville is an enduring alt-rock touchstone. Her mid-2000s foray into radio-friendly pop? Not so much. Unlike certain other artists for whom this is true — say, Weezer — Phair largely took the 2010s off. She reissued Guyville, with an excellent box set of early bedroom recordings, and toured on it. She worked, for a while, on a song-by-song response to the Beatles’ White Album. After several women accused the record’s would-be producer of sexual abuse, Phair scrapped it. And thank God for that: Soberish is far more honest, forthright, and heartfelt than any concept album. It is a solid, sharply written record of sturdy, enjoyable songs that gradually unfold to reveal new depths of feeling.
It doesn’t sound like Guyville, not even with Guyville producer Brad Wood at the helm. It doesn’t sound like the glossy “Why Can’t I,” which is really not such a bad song. It doesn’t, mercifully, sound anything like the frenzied rap stylings of “Bollywood.” Instead, Phair opts for tasteful, timeless rock arrangements. She hones in on a few key themes: falling in love at 54, falling out of it; falling into bars, hauling herself out of them. She is refreshingly frank about her struggles with sobriety, firm and empathetic when she refers her friends to recovery. It’s like Brandy Jensen’s beloved Ask a Fuck-Up column; you trust Phair’s advice because you know she’s seen the bottom of the barrel."
- Peyton Thomas, Pitchfork
"Since 1993, Liz Phair has primarily been remembered for her debut album ‘Exile in Guyville’, a classic record from the indie canon which playfully skewered the sexism at the core of rock’n’roll. A double album based on The Rolling Stones’ ‘Exile on Main St’ the record saw the US musician taking the potent sexuality of Mick Jagger, and owning it for herself – gatekeepers be damned.
Her next records – 1994’s ‘Whip-Smart’ and 1998’s ‘Whitechocolatespaceegg’ – were just as accomplished, and then came Phair’s major label debut ‘Liz Phair’. Perhaps unfairly, it saw the musician lambasted for ‘selling out’ with the pop-leaning anthems that would later become gateway songs for her next generation of fans. ‘Somebody’s Miracle’ would be her final major label record in 2005 – and was followed by the wilfully strange, self-released album ‘Funstyle’ five years later. After that, Phair went on a kind of hiatus, not touring for eight years. Instead she focused on writing memoir Horror Stories, and worked in television scoring and sound design. And after a rocky ride in the industry, ‘Soberish’ – Liz Phair’s first new album in a decade – marks a return to the sound of her earlier records and the home-recorded cassettes she released as Girly Sounds in the early ‘90s. One such link comes from her choice of collaborator – Brad Wood produced Phair’s first two albums, and a handful of tracks from ‘Whitechocolatespaceegg’. Liz Phair has long been interested in drawing the beauty out of imperfection: a ‘wrong’ finger placement nudging a neighbouring fret, the subtle buzz of a fingertip. And in Wood, she finds the perfect creative match – together, they weave these small moments into something that sounds alive.
Dig into these pacey, indie rock songs, and you’ll find countless experimental touches and snatches of studio chatter (on ‘Bad Kitty’ you can hear Phair shout-whispering at her 20-something son, who helped her to record during lockdown). ‘Spanish Doors’, a song about pasting on a smile after discovering something life-changing at a social event, sees three competing choruses jostling for headspace. “Don’t wanna think about it, don’t wanna talk about it,” lulls a chipper robotic vocal; underneath, Phair sings of unsmiling ghosts in the mirror, and her biggest fears. “I can’t hide my lying face,” sings a buried vocal, “there’s no way out for me and you”.
The sleeve for ‘Soberish’ shows a crossroads, and this is also an album about transitional moments. On ‘Sheridan Road’ the splutter of a motorbike makes way for a rumbling storm; Phair looks back over years of memories “merging, converging” on this same Chicago road. Beneath spiky, restless guitars, the title track finds her in the blurred phase between intoxicated and sober. “Tell me, why do we keep dicking around?” she asks, plain-speaking as ever. “Waited such a long time to be with you, now I’m chickening out”. And ‘Good Side’ sees Phair breaking away from a relationship and only leaving fond memories behind; “There’s so many ways to fuck up a life,” she quips in the opening line, “I’ve tried to be original”. It screens like a break-up song, but also feels like a song about artistic legacy. Speaking of legacy: ‘Soberish’ serves as a reminder of Liz Phair’s brilliance after years of underestimation. Far from simply drawing on her most critically acclaimed albums, it draws on the whole lot, and finds newness within. ‘Bad Kitty’ (sample lyric: “My pussy is a big dumb cat / It lies around lazy and fat”) feels like a throwback to Phair’s most playful side: evident both on the debut and her 2010 release ‘Funstyle’. ‘In There’ and ‘Soul Sucker’ show off her atmospheric prowess, and sit closest to ‘Whitechocolatespaceegg’.
These are all songs that, just like the rest of Phair’s finest moments, have a delicious knack for becoming lodged in your brain."
- El Hunt, New Musical Express
'The Game' - Liz Phair
-- --- --
Phair is planning to go on tour with Garbage in support of Alanis Morissette later this year. The tour will mark the 25th anniversary of the release of Morissette's landmark album 'Jagged Little Pill' which first appeared on 13th June, 1995. Morissette cancelled some tour dates that had been planned for this month due to the global coronavirus pandemic.
Garbage's new album, 'No Gods No Masters' (2021), was released this week (on 11th June). Like Phair, they're returning with their seventh studio album.
'Spanish Doors' - Liz Phair
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Post by Zos on Jun 13, 2021 12:00:12 GMT
For me, two artists who peaked early and have never really returned to those levels.
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Post by petrolino on Jun 13, 2021 13:48:26 GMT
For me, two artists who peaked early and have never really returned to those levels.
I have to be honest and say I'm surprised you would rate anything either of them did.
I found it was tough being a fan of them in the mid-1990s as everybody I knew in England either listened to dance music or was caught up in the Blur Vs Oasis debate. It was the height of "Cool Britannia", lads mags and "Best of British", so you did well to hide your liking of anything from America, and were expected to dress in baggy, ill-fitting clothes to demonstrate your patriotism and show allegiance. Not much has changed.
That's probably why I hung out a lot with metalheads back then, because they did generally appreciate alot of American metal as well as European metal. Also, some heavy rock bands like Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins that were popular at the time and some classic American rock bands from the 1960s and 1970s. Oasis fans I'd meet thought classic rock was the Beatles, Status Quo, Stone Roses and not much else.
'Records In My Life' : Liz Phair
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Post by Zos on Jun 13, 2021 16:03:36 GMT
For me, two artists who peaked early and have never really returned to those levels.
I have to be honest and say I'm surprised you would rate anything either of them did.
I found it was tough being a fan of them in the mid-1990s as everybody I knew in England either listened to dance music or was caught up in the Blur Vs Oasis debate. It was the height of "Cool Britannia", lads mags and "Best of British", so you did well to hide your liking of anything from America, and were expected to dress in baggy, ill-fitting clothes to demonstrate your patriotism and show allegiance. Not much has changed.
That's probably why I hung out a lot with metalheads back then, because they did generally appreciate alot of American metal as well as European metal. Also, some heavy rock bands like Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins that were popular at the time and some classic American rock bands from the 1960s and 1970s. Oasis fans I'd meet thought classic rock was the Beatles, Status Quo, Stone Roses and not much else.
Mellow Gold, Odelay and Mutations was a very good 3 some of releases, also like Sea Changes. Never really heard much I liked by Phair after "Guyville". Was never a fan of Britpop apart from the Auteure and was listening to mostly US indie during the mid to late 90's. I can't listen to metal though, utterly tedious to my ears, but each to their own. Would be boring if everyone liked the same stuff.
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Post by petrolino on Jun 13, 2021 18:08:46 GMT
I have to be honest and say I'm surprised you would rate anything either of them did.
I found it was tough being a fan of them in the mid-1990s as everybody I knew in England either listened to dance music or was caught up in the Blur Vs Oasis debate. It was the height of "Cool Britannia", lads mags and "Best of British", so you did well to hide your liking of anything from America, and were expected to dress in baggy, ill-fitting clothes to demonstrate your patriotism and show allegiance. Not much has changed.
That's probably why I hung out a lot with metalheads back then, because they did generally appreciate alot of American metal as well as European metal. Also, some heavy rock bands like Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins that were popular at the time and some classic American rock bands from the 1960s and 1970s. Oasis fans I'd meet thought classic rock was the Beatles, Status Quo, Stone Roses and not much else.
Mellow Gold, Odelay and Mutations was a very good 3 some of releases, also like Sea Changes. Never really heard much I liked by Phair after "Guyville". Was never a fan of Britpop apart from the Auteure and was listening to mostly US indie during the mid to late 90's. I can't listen to metal though, utterly tedious to my ears, but each to their own. Would be boring if everyone liked the same stuff.
Watching England play Croatia today in the European Championships group stages in the football, was like being taken back to 1996. They were playing hits by all the big guns of Britpop. It was like 'Nuts', 'Zoo' and 'Loaded' were sponsoring the BBC.
'What's In My Bag?' - Liz Phair
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Post by petrolino on Jul 9, 2022 23:25:00 GMT
Cowgirl Bibbe-Bop
In 1964, Bibbe Hansen recorded an album on Laurie Records with Jan Kerouac, as part of a band called the Whippets. They released a single on the music label Josie called 'Go Go Go With Ringo' which paid tribute to the Beatles.
Edie Sedgwick & Bibbe Hansen in 1965
'I Want To Talk To You' - The Whippets
From 1990 through 1995, Bibbe Hansen operated the Troy Cafe in Los Angeles, California, where she performed with singing drag queen Vaginal Davis. She and Davis went on to form the satirical band Black Fag, named in deference to punk band Black Flag.
'Liz Phair addresses the romance between Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, pondering how they might have felt and interacted privately in her new song “Hey Lou.” Produced by longtime collaborator Brad Wood, it’s Phair’s first new song in two years following the Wood-produced “Good Side.”
“Hey Lou/Are you feeling all right?” she sings on the catchy, retro reverb-tipped hook. “What you want to do/Are we staying all night?”
The video features Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson and Andy Warhol puppets. The song and video touch on debauchery and character flaws, but the puppet pair also enjoy reading, making music, and strolling a sunny beach together.'
- Rolling Stone
Edie Sedgwick & Bibbe Hansen during rehearsals
Interview with Beck at SXSW Landing Festival (South By Southwest), Austin, Texas [9th May, 2022]
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Post by petrolino on Mar 19, 2023 1:01:53 GMT
Bibbe Hansen shared a stage last year with Danny Fields who used to work as a publicist at Elektra Records. They both go way back with Andy Warhol and were in attendance at the Roxy Cinema in New York City, New York for a 50th anniversary screening of John Palmer and David Weisman's film 'Ciao! Manhattan' (1972) which starred Edie Sedgwick.
Filmmaker Billy Name with Bibbe Hansen at the Factory
Artists signed to Elektra included Fred Neil, Tom Paxton, Judy Collins, Phil Ochs, Tom Rush, Tim Buckley, Harry Chapin, Carly Simon and Jobriath. Bands on the roster in the late 1960s included the Dillards, Love, the Doors, the Incredible String Band, Earth Opera, Clear Light, Rhinoceros, the MC5, the Stooges and Bread.
'After stints at publications such as Liquor Store and Outdoor Advertiser, Danny Fields got a job at the teen-fan magazine Datebook. In 1966, as Managing Editor, he was responsible for shining a spotlight on John Lennon's "more popular than Jesus" quote.
In the 1960s, Fields began frequenting Max's Kansas City. It was there that he developed connections to Andy Warhol's Factory social circle. Fields occasionally shared his loft with Warhol actress Edie Sedgwick, and wrote an account of the Warhol-sponsored Velvet Underground during their early years. He later penned the liner notes for the band's album Live at Max's Kansas City, recorded in 1970, but released in 1972, after the band broke up.'
- Wikipedia
'Ciao! Manhattan : 50 Year Anniversary' with Danny Fields and Bibbe Hansen taking questions at the Roxy Cinema [Roxy Cinema New York]
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