GIRLY SOUND FOREVER
LIZ PHAIR has spent the pandemic at her home in Manhattan Beach – an upmarket seaside community in Southern California. “I don’t think I have self-care,” Phair reflects on this protracted period of isolation. “I have determination and grit!” Speaking to Uncut from a lime-green room adorned with hot-pink curtains, pink artwork and pink balloons, Phair explains that she has spent lockdown in the company of her adult son, Nick – who has reactive airway disease – which means she has remained on a “very protective spectrum” compared with many people she knows. “My friends have been gallivanting everywhere,” she explains with evident frustration. “I can’t even talk about it.” Most days, she explains, she and Nick have disinfected their groceries and refused to permit guests inside the house. “More than anything I have a sense of being really lucky to be able to stay home,” she says. “Self-care is like, ‘Wow, I can look out my window at the ocean.’ That makes me enormously more fortunate than a lot of people.”
Another unavoidable consequence of the pandemic is a delay in the release of Soberish – her seventh studio album and first since 2010. A typically candid collection of songs, the album continues the kinetic and playful ruminations on love, relationships, sex and womanhood Phair has been exploring since the start of her career. As a taster, in February she released “Hey Lou” – an imaginary dinner table conversation between Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson that brought into focus her gifts for wry, observational lyrics and hook-laden choruses. Soberish also reunites Phair with Brad Wood – the producer and engineer who helped transform Phair’s bedroom recordings into her 1993 debut Exile In Guyville.
“I came in with a mandate,” Phair explains. “I want to do something that’s evocative of our past, that uses
