Liz Phair's Soberish

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin from her gritty nineteen ninety three debut album, Exile in Guyville, Liz Phair helped lay the foundation for a generation of fierce independent artists. My confidences shook I don't know where. Early in her career, she pushed for freedom and creative control, especially for female artists, something she's finally seen become the norm in the industry. That progress inspired her new record, Soberish, which has her reuniting with the producer of her first two albums, Brad One. On today's episode, Who's Held Them talks to Liz Fair about how her approach to recording music isn't a technical one. She relies in the unique way she hears music and her background as a visual artist. She also talks about how her first ever creative aspiration was to write a classic Christmas Carol. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's Bruce Headlam with Liz Phair. So this is your first album since you wrote your terrific book Horror Stories. Thank you. Yes, it is my first album in ten years. Actually, did writing the book change how you write music? Did affect it at all? I don't know that it did I feel like writing music affected how I wrote the book. I think there's only so many words I care to fit into three minutes, and if anything, I might have left words out of the music to some extent. I mean you can see bursts of it at the end of songs. I'll sort of like start getting really already at the ends of songs. But if anything, it freed me up to think about sound design and production more. And I definitely did feel the arc of the album was important this time, almost in a way that I haven't felt since Guyville. That the story I was telling of sort of a breakup of one long relationship in the first half, and then the reemergence of my single self in the second half, sort of dating two different guys. That's how I see the album, and then like the third song from the end or fourth song from the end, I regret or a missing of that original relationship. So I don't know that it did. I think a lot of people are curious about that, and I think it's more the other way around. I think the reason I broke core stories into short stories was because of the way that I write a song, the way that I could only I couldn't quite go for the full book arc. Each chapter feels to me like an expanded song with many more detours and many more tangents. Your album's full of great characters, AS's your book. One I do want to ask you about off the Top, and I think you released it last year, was Halu. That is a joyful song that sprang up spontaneously. It was actually an entirely different song when I brought it into the studio and at a very specific mandate for so Brush, I knew exactly where I wanted to end up on the other side of it, but I had no idea how to get there. And Brad Wood, who was the producer, who was the producer on my original three records, although White Chocolate Space Egg has Scotlet as well, he produced so Brush and so working together after not working together for gosh twenty years something like that was an interesting reacquaintance too, to kind of like get back into a rhythm with him. Halo was a very different song it was. It had entirely different lyrics, different subject matter, a lot of guitar strumming, which I wasn't satisfied with. I just thought like, this is clutter this doesn't feel like what our mandate for the album is. And I listened to the whole mix and I just said, take out my guitar entirely, just take it out. And then we were messing with like loops and samples and Brad he said, listen to this artifact. You know when you create a loop and you have to tighten it so that there's you don't catch the next phrase. There was a little tag, a little artifact left over from the next singing phrase that sounded like who who And it was just coming over and over again the chorus and we started laughing about it, and He's like, it sounds like Hay Lou, And he said, what if you wrote it about like Laurie Anderson looking at Lou read and we just died. We just started. We went from this tense studio moment where nothing was working and we were pulling different instruments out and putting them back in and the whole thing just wasn't satisfying to this breakthrough fit of giggles, spontaneous riffing, and we were just writing down lyrics as we went and it just flew out of us. This hilarious scenario of lou read up to his Shenanigans and Laurie Anderson loving but exasperated, whether you know, following her husband's whims as he went around making trouble. And we both had such admiration for those artists, and they were formative for me. They certainly influenced me greatly separately individually before they even got together, and then as a couple just felt like such a romantic story. I mean, like that's my kind of fairytale. That's a rock and roll fairytale, Like how can those two people have such a wonderful, loving relationship. They're so strong and independent, and it just has always sort of been out there on the horizon as a you know, a goal couple goals for me. So we really had a great time writing that. That was one of those songs that just spontaneously comes into being and it just feels I mean, I don't mean to say this about my own song. What it's kind of brilliant, you know, like you can't relate to wondering what the daily life of legends are. You know, you're book, you have a long chapter about working with an unnamed producer, but you said he was working in a way that you didn't like in the studio, So how do you like to work in the studio? I get in there, I don't like any equipment. Equipment and I do not belong together. I resent heavy black boxes of equipment and cables. I resent all of that. I feel uncomfortable and unsafe around equipment. But I am one hundred and fifty thousand percent focused on sound. I feel like I'm painting with sound. I see it spherically. I'm like, you know, there's something we don't We're kind of empty in the lower left quadrant and the plugins. When Brad will dial through the various sounds that we can get on it, we can just go for an hour. He's the same way. We'll try all these different settings till it's exactly right. And then there's a lot of this going on in the studio with Brad and me, where I say that one, that's the sound. I like that sound. He's like, great, okay, but I want to try a couple other ones. I'm like, okay, but did you write down what that song sound is like? Can we get back to that if you go further, can we come back to that one because that's the one I like and then he's like, yeah, yeah, I'm just checking other things out. And then when I really like it, I'll kind of edge up on him and I'll just gently and slowly insert my arm over the key like the board and just be like no more, no more, don't go anywhere like this is it? Yeah, stop flutsing like right here, I'm minutely aware of every change, like all those Tokyo fades of the vocals going from left to right. That was my new invention for Soberish and conflicting leads. That was another thing that I was trying on Sobrish. I wanted no traditional song structure. I wanted every single song to feel effortlessly like it passes you by without noticing that it has such an unusual arrangement. You're gonna have to explain this to me because you cross through your hand. Well Spanish Doors. The album version has a lot of that work. I'm working with two or three different lead vocals that are singing different parts, They're singing different words, they're singing different melodies. And part of that was because the chorus lyric I'm slowly disappearing behind our Spanish doors. I wanted to create that moment when you suddenly realize everything in your life that you count on as being your identity, like your pile of what's good in your life is just decimated. I had a friend go through a terrible divorce, and I kind of wrote the song. It started before she went through divorce, but then I went quickly in and changed it to sort of write it from her point of view about that moment, that turbulent moment, and on the album version that don't want to think about it, don't want to talk about it, when you just want to deny what's happened, there's a part of your brain that's just pounding, going like nope, nope, nope, nope. So that's going on in the chorus, and then there's this truthful statement, which is I'm slowly disappearing behind our Spanish doors. The ghost I see in the mirror doesn't smile anymore. When as someone you thought loved you doesn't love you anymore, you begin to fade for yourself for a while, you actually like lose part of your substantialness and you're weakened, and you see it in the mirror. You can see yourself fading. And there's another part of the song going, you know, like there's no way out of this place. I can't hide my lying face. There's no life here without you, just the echo of off you know. So that's going on in the chorus too, and we're playing with these elements, bring them in and out almost to say, like, what is a lead vocal really what you're doing with the songs creating an emotional moment, and for me, that song is about the turbulence of finding out new information that just shatters your world and the various parts of you that are competing to say what's happening to you? And yet at the same time it's this incredibly driving, great pop song. But it's very complicated under all that. That's the trick. That's what I wanted you to feel. I wanted this to flow right past your ears, you know, not feel how weird it was, and yet if you take it apart, it's extraordinarily weird. Do you want to know about the tokyo fades? I want to know tokyo fades? Now? Okay? So in like you and you hate it another game to play because I don't know about you, but I have many sort of voices in my head, different sides of me that talk to each other. Maybe I have a thicker sagittal section than most people, Like the left brain and the right brain are kind of independent operators. So on Soulsucker, the second verse, there's an entirely different second verse that's being ghost sung underneath the lead, and they switch size, they cross over each other, and it's sort of daring your mind to follow one or the other, and you can't follow both because they're going to split. Have you noticed lately this is interesting to me? In music, I like to layer tabs on my laptop so that more than one thing is going on. I think we all have been doing that for a while, so you're paying attention to multiple things. I tried to reflect that in the music of Soubrush. I tried to reflect how I think we're living now, which is with sort of sonic complexity, and yet it will make it feel like a pop song, like something that is recognizable and familiar, and yet I'm reflecting what we're immersed in sonically now. When you talk about sound and you use your hands too, you really think of it spatially. Is that because you're a visual artist as well? I think so, But I've always felt that way in the studio, like even on Guyville, I was doing that. It just immediately hit me when I first learned how to work in a recording studio that that's what we were doing. We were placing things on a canvas, but it was spherical. It was spatial. We were building an imaginary atmosphere, or an imaginary room, or an imaginary performance. And because I guess my ears are very sensitive, I wanted to reflect the way the world sounds to me, which is full. You know, the birds are going, this is going, that's going. I'm very distracted by all that. It's hard for me in restaurants because I'm hearing everybody's conversations, you know, like it's hard to just focus on the one thing I'm hearing. So I guess I'm more and more trying to reflect that. We'll be right back after a quick break. We're back with more from Liz Phair and Bruce DLin. Now, I just want to go back to you. Growing up, your mother was involved in art, your father was an infectious disease specialist, which means you've probably had some smart thoughts over the past year as we all lived through the pandemic. When did music start for you, though. I mean I took piano lessons when I was five. Then then I began to take guitar lessons in seventh and eighth grade, classical at first, then folk, and then as it became more apparent to my guitar teacher that I was not interested in learning notes, and you know, I'd had it with that kind of formalized musical. And she says she told my mother. She said she lived across the street from us in Winnetka, and she said, she keeps asking me to play it for her. I don't think she's reading the music. I think she's imitating me. And she realized I had a very good ear. And my guitar teacher said, as well, you know, I was tired of James Taylor and Dan Fogelberg, you know, not my choices. And she said, if you bring me, I'll cut you a deal. I won't tell your mother, and if you bring me in one originally written song a week, we will continue our guitar lessons. So that's really when it began, this sort of And I would do the same thing when my mother wanted me to practice. She'd be cooking in the kitchen and I didn't want to practice, so I'd make up my own songs on the piano, and as long as I was doing something on an instrument, all these people seem to be okay with it. So I would say from a very young age, and my parents are so they're not musical in terms of performing, but they enjoy music. It was. It filled our house. It's part of every meal. I don't think we sit down to a meal together without music in the background. And they took us to concerts, and you know, we went to symphony we went to musical theater productions. It was just always a big part of life. Was there a particular pop song or something you heard in the radio that at one point just said, wait a second, I want to do that. This is the truthful answer, but I'm not sure it's what you're looking for, or maybe I'm not as impressed with it. But I also sang choir in our church. So I began to think that I wanted to write a classic Christmas carol, and I thought like that would be a really good thing to do. It was to write a new classic Christmas carol, like as as Stupid as Jingle Bells or as you know beautiful as a little town of Bethlehem. Just something I loved to put the lights up in my room. And our church had a big, huge pageant. It was very Anglican because we all dressed up, you want to think, like Henry the Eighth type banquet that we all went to and like in the light and we were in page and tights and we did tumbling and singing and stuff like that. And we lived in England for a year, so like, it all felt very kind of But yes, I wanted to write a classic Christmas carol. So that's the first time I remember formally sitting down and say I'm going to do something professional. And I must have been a freshman in high school or an eighth grade something like that. Have you ever written a Christmas Carol? I wrote a funny dystopian one for Amazon Music like ten years ago, and I like it. I think it's kind of a off pieced Christmas classic. So yeah, I guess I have. It's called Ho Ho Ho. I think I remember that. But I want to ask you about your guitar playing, because your guitar playing is so distinct. You don't play the way other people play. Maybe it's because you do you write in the guitar as well? I do, yeah, okay, because there's a lot of interesting chords and modulations you use that I don't think someone writing at a piano would use. So first of all, where did the rhythm come from? How did you develop that sense of playing? It's innate. I mean, it's hard to explain because it's not conscious. As much as I've just told you this whole long history of musical training, that wasn't what my focus was. I was a visual artist, and I knew that I wanted to be that, and I wanted to be a professional visual artist from a very young age, and I took that very seriously, and music was just more of what I don't know. I came from a family that you were supposed to do stuff. You're supposed to do sports, you're supposed to do arts, you're supposed to help in the community. So in my basket was music. But I see the guitar as an object that makes sound, all different kinds of sound, and all different positions make different sounds, and fingers make different sounds. And most people learn chords. I couldn't tell you what chords I was playing or what key I'm in to this day if my life depended on it. Really, I have no idea and I have no interest in it. So you couldn't tell me the chords in Halu And no, really, I have to relearn all my songs. I'm so prolific that I have to relearn every song I've ever written for tour. I don't know them any better than the band does. I have to go back and figure out what I was doing. Luckily, there's a muscle memory, and I know the kind of shapes I like to make on the fretboard, but it's all instinctive, and it's all about the ears, and it's the same in the recordings. To whatever sound I need, I'll figure out a way to get it if it's up if I've been playing. I mean, I sound like a crazy person, and maybe I am, but I just have had an always innate sense with creativity that I had the authority to do it my own way. I don't know if that's from my parents encouraging me or how I got that, but in all respects, I'm sort of an untrained expert. No, it makes sense. I'm just amazed that. I mean, I guess Paul McCartney still can't write music, and you know, lots of people still just have a feel for it. I just didn't know that was the way you wrote. Yeah, and it's all about my ears. I hear very very very well, too well. How do you mean too well? If people are moving around the house, I hear it, you know, I just hear everything. I'm like, oh, you can't block it out, can't block it out. It's distracting. Like when the wind blows. I can't handle windy days. I don't like it. It irritates me. I could be out in the wind, but if I'm in a house and the windows are rattling, I can't get any work done because I'm just like too much sensory information. To this day, you use a lot of unusual progressions, things more trained musicians would shy away from. And was that purely just you in the instrument, or were there songs you were hearing that did things like that that you wanted to emulate, or was it simply you with a guitar. I never consciously emulate anything. I think there are times when in the studio it's helpful to bring in to find a comm and language. I will emulate in the studio because it's the simplest way I've found to convey what I want. I'll say, you know how this song has this, but I'm actually going back after the song is written, trying to communicate with a producer by finding a song in the popular repertoire that has the thing I want that I can't put into words. So I'll bring in a song into the studio and say, like, let's do something like this, because it's a communication thing. But it never sit down to write and consciously imitate something. But I'm sure, in fact, I know that it's been you know, my love of music has come in, been digested. My subconscious is holding onto it and it spits it back out through my hands and through the instrument. So writing for you is always just you with a guitar, yes, figuring things out, yes, and then the lyrics come later or same time. Really, now, am I really that strange? This is the first time in an interview that I've sort of felt like I might be extremely out of the norm or out of the mainstream here, like I've never really I think a lot of musicians are that way, aren't they? Or No, No, I think you're maybe further along on that particular spectrum. But now I think that's how most musicians do it. It's much more by feel, but that you don't even to this day you have to go back and figure out your own songs by ears. Really interesting to me. Do you ever go back and say, oh, you can't figure it? Like? No, I've never not been able to crack a song. I'm terrified each time that I can't. Like when we did the box set, a reissue of my first record, Exile in Guyville and all the girly sound tapes, which were these cassette recordings I made before I was discovered, so to speak. You know, when I was just making wacky songs in the middle of night for my own pleasure and some of those you know, that was thirty years ago. How am I going to figure out what I was playing? Luckily I wasn't that great of a guitar player, so it turns out like not that many leaps and bounds were made. It wasn't that difficult. But half of what I know to do is actually in my hands. Like my hands have brains and they remember, and once I start doing something, it's almost like a dance. Oh, I remember this dance. It'll come back to me. You said once that the best songs are the ones you write when you think no one's going to listen. Is that still the case for you? Are you able to sort of block out the expectation that you know one day people are going to listen to this. I think that's why I wait so long in between records usually because I think the more honest, vulnerable songs come when I am just in a private space, a dream space, and that's how I grew up writing songs. I think that's why I brought in the idea that I was a visual artist intentionally, because that left music as a play space, an inventive place with no expectation of being heard. And I think that's what people liked about my music in the beginning, this kind of spontaneous. They may have taken it too literally and thought it was just confessional when it was actually a little more playful than that. But it's always been a free space for me, and I fight to try to keep that free space open. And the more people expect something from you, or the more professional it becomes, I think that dream space shrinks and you start to become what I would call clever, and there's nothing I hate more. I would prefer a half written, unfinished snippet of an honest song than a clever song. And I'm very capable of writing a clever, self conscious song, and they're dead. They're so dead they're offensive to me. Like when I write a clever song, I actually hate it. What do you mean by clever? It means just too calculated. It rhymes fantastically, and you know, the devices, the literary devices are so swell, the turn of phrase and the you know, the isn't that funny because you wouldn't get from the verses that that's where I'm going in the chorus, Like this kind of showmanship. And I would always choose sometimes with grammar, like I know what correct grammar is, but sometimes I will sing it incorrectly because it just feels unpolished, feels more honest to me, and I'm attracted to my own vulnerability. You have your conscious mind, and you have your ambassador self that goes out in the world and puts on the best show. And I'm not interested in that. And that's what I would call a clever song, writing from that that front facing you that you know, we've all perfected to work in society if it comes from there. And some of them are just dazzlingly clever, like they really are clever, and I just hate them. I'm only interested in the stuff that I maybe don't even know about myself like that. There was a period not long ago that I was writing and I would I would weep every time I was writing a song because I didn't even know I felt that way about a person or about an experience. So it's like this discovery. It's like going into a dark cave and finding those crystals. There's somebody back there making sense of it all and boiling it down to poetry, and I'm on an expedition spelunking to find that person. There was a rhyme and I don't even remember the song when I was listening to your album, and it was something Diamonds rhymed with behind us. It doesn't sound like a rhymes when I say, but it worked perfectly in the song, and I thought to use a bad word. I thought, oh, that's really clever. No, it's But aren't those the best those rhymes that are not rhymes or the unexpected rhymes? Like I guess they are clever, but they didn't come out cleverly. My professional, front facing self did not write that. You know, my open, exposed self, my deepest self. Don't you ever find it fascinating? And I think it's the closest I ever get to actually religious faith, that there is a deeper truth inside of you that only certain circumstances can unlock or can open up. And it actually makes sense, And there's an order in there, deep in there. Maybe it's an emotional order, but someone's making sense of it all and boiling it down to the most profound part of you. And whenever I can connect to that part, it just feels so damn good and so life affirming. I guess I have those, but I find those periods very almost hallucinatory. That's that trippy flow sensation. That's what I'm talking about. I live for that. You said you want to preserve that space. Now you have, I think because of the expectations after your first album, you have had more than your fair share of harsh criticism. How do you keep that space for yourself? Then a good, solid grounded private life. I keep old friends even when they drive me absolutely up a wall, and there's many times in my you know, but I keep the person that I've always been close to me. So in one space of my life, I'm not a rock star at all, and I like it that way. You know, I'm still the sort of smaller with my tall, bossy friends. You know, I'm still the one that's like, well, where are we going? Well what's happening? You know, Like I'm not the leader of my pack of friends by any stretch. Like I just thinking about this the other day. In almost all my friend circles, I'm not the leader, you know, But here I am the rock star in my career. But I'm the same person that I was when I was nine, So I have this other life. It hurts when you try to do something and everybody hates it, and they point out something that you didn't even see coming as some transgression that you've done that is offensive. That always feels like, you know, you've been slapped unexpectedly. But it doesn't rock me to my core because I think, via my parents and their group of friends and our extended family and the relationships that I've kept my whole life, that's not what's going to unman me. You know what I mean, that's just gonna suck for a really long while, but like there's still a me behind that me that is intact. After a quick break, we'll be back with more from Liz Phair. We're back with the rest of Bruce Headlam's conversation with Liz Phair. The other thing I wanted to ask you about was writing melodies. And you may say it just flow, it just comes out, but they're very angular and different. Do you spend a lot of time and you're on your melodies. Is that something you think about more consciously than the other things? Don't get mad, but I don't. They just come flying out of me. I'm like a songbird and I am very proud of my melodies, and nobody ever talks about them, so thank you for bringing it up. I feel that that is one of my chief most gifts. My melody ability is something I'm very proud of that doesn't get talked about a lot. Well, they're original, they don't sound like other people's. I'm very gratified to hear that. I love melodies. I love singing, and I started to think consciously about it when I went into television composition. I remember listening to an NPR program. I think it was coming out of USC Classical and they're talking about they're interviewing someone who composed for musicals, and he said, if you can't take away the words and still understand what the song is expressing, you haven't finished that piece, that that song is not complete, or that's the goal, that without words, it should still convey everything you want. And of course I hear that and I think, well, what if you did the opposite, you know what I mean? Like then I start to want to get playful with it. But I've always remembered that as being incredibly important, that the melody should reflect the emotion with no other data at all. You should be able to understand the song simply from its fluidity. You wrote television music for a couple of years. You did the nine O two and O reboot. We did a bunch of shows. We did a sort of anyone that would take us. Was it fun? Yeah, it really was. I had that epiphany moment and my friend Doc, who was my scoring partner, there were three of us. We love to remember that moment where I was the picture was on the big screen and I was just playing piano to it, and something very simple, and I looked at him, I'm like, this is great, you know, like we were filling in the emotion for what was on camera while it was playing. And it was an entirely new sensation in a new way to flex creativity. And I never took it as far as I would have liked. I was hampered by my dislike of equipment, so I always had to work with someone. There's always someone in between me and composing. But it's the essence of what I do as a songwriter. I am filling in emotion to your blank spaces. You're living your life, and I'm providing you the emotional component to go along with whatever you're experiencing. And that's why you choose this song or that song. You need someone to score your life. And that's sort of what the sense is of what I aspire to do. What I hope my records will fulfill for people, that I will become part of the score of their experiences in their life. So to do it professionally directly was I never got tired of it. Really, you do it again, I would, and I had to do lots of the stupid stuff that I don't have to do as a rock star, like go to meetings and take notes and listen to bosses like I had to do. All that stuff never bothered me. I thought it was really fun, you know, occasionally when there would be power plays going on shocking in the TV world, like if someone falls off a project for various personal reasons, the power fighting between the people left behind, trying to step on each other to be the new authority, like I can take over the show, like don't hire an outside show runner. I'll show you that I can do it. And then they made us do all these changes because these people were fighting, I mean, scrappy, scrappy business. I didn't like that. Did it help you writing pop songs again? Did it give you just a new fresh way of thinking about it? No? I think it gave me an idea of an entirely different industry's strengths and weaknesses. I think I just came away from that experience thinking about power in studios and how many people work on a production and how things get done and why something's green lit and everyone's taking notes from other people, like just the arduousness of that process. I thought a lot about emotional turns. I watched directors come in or showrunners and say like, let's turn this scene on this emotion. I mean I actually I prefer to work with less people and just be more direct about creativity. It's hard to deal with all those agendas and you end up sometimes with the compromised product. So when you see a breakthrough thing like Fleabag or I May Destroy You, or something that's just pure, it's one vision, it's so attractive because it just feels like a bolt of lightning shot through the industry. And I have a much greater appreciation of that kind of art making now after having seen the studio process. Yeah, do you relate to those kind of productions, because really that's a lot of what you've done in your career. Yes, I feel like that's what I always want to be, no matter what's going on in the culture. I want to be a bolt of lightning that shoots right through it with like one vision. You think this new album does that, I don't know. I mean it does for what I wanted it to do, So we'll see you never do know. I suspect it will take a second for people to go, oh, she's new again, like there's a different sound again, which no one ever wants they just want Guyville. But I do think that there's a very strong through line in Soubrush. It is what it is, and it has been created to be exactly like it is, So sink or swim, we do not know. We shall see a couple of times you have done You've written in answer to other people's work. Famously, Guyville is your answer to Exile on Main Street. And you did a project it wasn't released, but it was an answer to the White Album. What does that give you as a writer? So much I feel almost like I have too much creativity and that grounding in something that I can play with, something solid and secure that is immutable, that then I can join with, oppose, inspect, rock back and forth, you know, like I can try. I have all these tools of ways to approach a thing that is immutable, and I feel more free and secure working my way around something that already exists than I do with just wide open nothingness. The same thing about like if someone gives you a blank page and they say write something or draw something, it's so much easier if they give you a triangle and say draw something for me, or write something about and one of the things that we can name him Ryan Adams. Before we got into the studio together, he was a beautiful sort of instigator of songwriting. He would say, write me a song about Elvis, and he knew and I knew that I was going to take that some totally unknown direction, but the fact that he gave me one simple mandate, not a lot of rules, not a lot of regulation, just one simple mandate Elvis. And I turned it around a number of ways. You know, it's like a dog. I just like play with it. And I googled Elvis and stuff, and I found this thing called Elvis legs. Elvis legs is a phenomenon that happens to rock climbers because they're so weakened that their legs just start doing this Elvis thing. And I wrote this beautiful song about The metaphor was You're on this cliff trying to ballet, you know, over and I will help you ballet like your Elvis legs good and reach the pegs on the overhang of your secrets. I'm clipping into the anchor pin and I will help you ballet. And so I turned it all around into this guy that has so many secrets that he's just like hanging onto the cliff edge, like not knowing how to get out because he's told so many lies, you know, and that I'm seeing him out there. I mean the second course, I mean, the second verse is just even more beautiful than that. And I'm flipping in and I'm going to help him get over to safety because he's just overdone it with the lies and the secrets and he doesn't know how to get off the cliff And how beautiful is that? Are you going to tell me the second verse? You and I we survive on the sheer wall of Hope Canyon while the screamers fall. I will hear your call and I will help you. Bilay. Oh, come on, you're not going to release Elvis legs. It hasn't been recorded yet, just in demo version. But like you and I, we survive on the sheer wall of Hope Canyon while the screamers fall. I will hear your call and I will help you, Bilay. Not beautiful, it's it's well the screamers fall. That's the line that it gets me. That's very good. What's it like to react to? First of all, you were reacting to Rolling Stone songs, and then you were reacting to Beatles songs. Did you learn more about how they put songs together in doing this or was it more just almost a thematic thing. Like I'm thinking about what the Rolling Stones meant and I'm answering them. I think I owe the Beatles because my parents were big fans when I was very little. I think I owe them more of my subconscious than I owe the Stones. I think Stones was something I arrived at later as a young adult, and the Beatles got in there at the very beginning, but it was more the earlier record, you know, like maybe Sergeant Peppers is like deep and my deepest subconscious. So I think I owe them my melodies and some of my progressions, and probably some of my lyrical flavors, maybe the playfulness and the imagery and the storytelling. I was overawed by some of the songs on the White Album and I thought like, there's no way I can do this song. But some of them I terrific responses for, like really just perfect and I'm sorry it never got it never got. Made very proud of some of that stuff. Yeah, do you know what the to me I'm thinking now, the Liz Fair song that they did was an album is a cry Baby Cry, crab baby cry, make your mom huh old enough to know better? Yeah, it does kind of doesn't sounds it sounds like it sounds like one of your melodies. And then the little descent after that. I think you have to do that in concert now. Oh okay. One of the things that really impressed me in your book, I think you said in the in the introduction is something that you were examining. It makes us stronger, basically to examine our weaknesses. And what I found so compelling in your book is it's not this catalog of evil or cataclysmic events. It's little decisions that just kind of accumulate over time. And you describe some very painful episodes in your life very early. There's the Redbird Hollow, which is just about you and your brother climbing a tree. It seems very innocent and then it kind but it almost sets the tone for the book. There's things getting a little bit worse and you don't know the decisions are going wrong, and then suddenly it goes terribly terribly wrong. Get that flavor in your song sometimes too, that your songs are instead of a whole story of a whole arc you're right here in the song making this mistake. And there's something kind of almost fatalistic about your songs to me. Yeah, like your songs, they don't have the whole story, but they've got that one part of the story. I'm a big believer in endings. If I don't have a satisfying ending, I get mad at this in other people's art, and I get mad at in my own. I really want to arrive somewhere with something to take home with me, some kind of wisdom or something. So the arc of things, where they start, where they land, and is very important to me. I also, I think you can tell this from horror stories. My memory is filled with blank months where I don't remember a thing, but I hold on to vivid moments, almost like a capture. I can walk back into it, like inception, and move through the whole thing. It's as if my brain has decided, has elected to let go of most everything that doesn't spike very high or spike very low. Do you always have those moments in songs too? Like? Does every song have an emotional insight or something? I'm thinking of a song like a good Side, Yeah, which has a great lead. I'm not going to give it away. It gets at the heart of something very quickly. Yeah, you can always identify those in songs. That's how I write. That is an emotional that is an epiphany moment, where as a mature person, I'm writing in a circumstance where I might have written fucking run, where I might be resentful. Now now I'm looking at the an abrupt ending of relationship and saying, it's not such a bad idea to end it here, you know, even though it wasn't my choice, I can understand that because if I continue to pursue this to try to get you back, or to get you to want me back, it's only you're gonna be left with a better impression of me. Like I don't know if this has legs, this thing between us, and so it's better just to you know, like that's only a mature person could leave it there and say, like I can live with that, you know what I mean, Like this is probably a better impression of me that you're ending with right now than it would be if we continued on down the line. Because I think I've been here before. I can see how this is going to roll out, and it's something I want to say to someone that I don't feel like I can call up and say. It's a way to communicate with someone that I cared about and hoped that I would have a longer relationship with and it didn't happen. And it's a way to sort of write that song that I would have written at twenty five, angry and resentful and like you used me or blah blah blah blah blah, and just say like I might be getting out of this. Okay. It's kind of beautiful the arc of life. So what is what is next in the arc of life for you? Once the Pandemics verre even a tour with these songs? Oh yeah, Well there's the Atlantis Garbage Tour, which I am on, which has been sold out for two years, so that hopefully will happen. I'm very much looking forward to that, although I am not looking forward to trying to move through this crazy country that can't get its shit together with COVID, So I'm of two minds. The tour itself is this ah thing I've been waiting to do for two years, thinking of me as the luckiest person on earth that I get to do this. And then there's the idea of how do you move in a bus through truck stops, through hotels, through you know, different state lines, different cities. If one of us gets sick, where do we leave them behind? I could get enraged on this podcast, thinking about can we just pick a strategy and all work together and deal with it? But no, everybody's doing their own thing. Everybody's approaching it their own way, and it's just gonna go on and on. It's like watching a train wreck and slow motion and I'm so angry and so frustrated and so disillusioned. That is spoken like the daughter of an infectious disease special. Sorry, I'm really mad about it. Maybe that's my opening act as the compliance officer getting up and the like. But they're gonna have to use their own microphone because no one's touching my mic. Listen. Thank you so much for doing this. It's been a real treat. Thank you so much. What a fascinating conversation, many many lovely roads we went down. Thanks for Liz Fair for sharing her creative vision for her latest album with us to hear Soberish and our favorite Liz Fair tracks headed Broken Record podcast dot. Are you sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken Record Podcast, where we can find all of our episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced with help from Lea Rose, Jason Gambrel, Martin Gonzalez, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chafee. Our executive producer is me a little Bit. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries and if you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast at the Musics by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Mishbert