“Weave my disgust into fame,” Liz Phair sang, “and watch how fast they run to the flame.” Then it came true. At the beginning of 1993, nobody except a few Chicago scenesters knew who Liz Phair was. At the beginning of 1994, her instant-classic debut album Exile in Guyville had topped the Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop critics poll and sold more copies for its label than the company had ever sold before.
Everyone wanted to know: What was next? Major-label executives crashed the Wicker Park recording studio where Phair, alongside her co-producer and bandmates, was trying to record new songs. The Chicago music scene gossiped, whispered, and argued about Phair’s success. Phair talked to reporter after reporter; it was not unusual for a 1994 profile of Phair to include a moment in which she had to interrupt her conversation with the writer to conduct another interview with someone else. “Her phone,” the Chicago critic Bill Wyman wrote, rang “literally incessantly.”
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