Catching up with Liz Phair + “Good Side” Track Review

By Maria Coraza
Music Journalist 

DIY female-indie rocker Liz Phair first made her musical mark in the early 1990s with the underground bootleg-cassette of Girly-Sound. Phair never intended to pursue a musical career when the tapes were circulating around at the time, but it did lead her to a recording contract with Matador Records.

On June 22, 1993, she released her studio debut and critically-acclaimed Exile in Guyville. With lo-fi production and earnest lyrics written by a girl unashamed of her “girly feelings”, the debut album has made impressions of feminism in a male-dominated industry. She continued the sound in her sophomore album Whip-Smart on Sep. 24, 1994. 

She progressively leaned towards pop starting from her third studio-released album Whitechocolatespaceegg in 1996. About a year after her third album, Phair gave birth to her son and took some time to enjoy her motherhood before she went back to the recording studio to release her self-titled album Liz Phair in 2003.

This particular album has welcomed her into the realm of mainstream pop with the award-winning track “Why Can’t I”. Fully deviated from her DIY-sound, she embraced the lucrative pop avenue with Somebody’s Miracle in 2005 and Funstyle in 2010. 

After a decade since her last release, Liz Phair makes a comeback to her music career in 2019 with her latest single “Good Side” with co-producer Brad Wood (Exile in Guyville). Just short of three minutes, the track presents itself as an easy-listening pop-rock tune about moving on with no hard feelings.

Lead by a repeating acoustic motif and a feel-good driving beat, “Good Side” throws you back to one leisurely walk around the neighborhood in the early 2000s with a CD-player in one hand and flip-phone in the other.

“Good Side” gives us a shiny peak at the unnamed upcoming album set to release in 2020. As Phair said in an Instagram post in regards to her latest release, it is the “appetizer” of what is to come. 

Aside from Phair’s music, she also recently released her memoir “Horror Stories” on October 8, 2019, where she reflects her journey early in her career and how she faced obstacles as a young female in the industry. 

With future plans for releasing new music through the newly-found record label Morphic, Phair prepares to make her stride in the industry again. It is exciting to hear where her style and sound will lie in the year 2020 and hopefully she can shake things up with a nostalgic return of that angsty-DIY sound that her fans first fell in love with in Exile to Guyville.

Featured image courtesy of Stereo Gum.