Exile in Guyville

In the summer of 1991, Phair wrote and recorded songs on audio cassette tapes, which she circulated in Chicago using the moniker Girly-Sound. Initially, she sent out only two tapes, one to Tae Won Yu from the band Kicking Giant, and the other to Chris Brokaw of the bands Come and Codeine.^[3] The recipients of the Girly-Sound tapes circulated copies with other early fans.^[4]

The term Guyville comes from a song of the same name by Urge Overkill. Liz Phair explained the concept of the album in a Billboard article, stating that "For me, Guyville is a concept that combines the smalltown mentality of a 500-person Knawbone, KY.-type town with the Wicker Park indie music scene in Chicago, plus the isolation of every place I've lived in, from Cincinnati to Winnetka".^[6] When asked during an interview with Noah Adams on his radio show All Things Considered about the concept, she elaborated: "It was a state of mind and / or neighborhood that I was living in. Guyville, because it was definitely their sensibilities that held the aesthetic, you know what I mean? It was sort of guy things - comic books with really disfigured, screwed-up people in them, this sort of like constant love of social aberration. You know what I mean? This kind of guy mentality, you know, where men are men and women are learning." Asked about what she sees in Guyville, Phair said that "All the guys have short, cropped hair, John Lennon glasses, flannel shirts, unpretentiously worn, not as a grunge statement. Work boots."

Phair has also stated that most songs on the album were not about her. She commented, "That stuff didn't happen to me, and that's what made writing it interesting. I wasn't connecting with my friends. I wasn't connecting with relationships. I was in love with people who couldn't care less about me. I was yearning to be part of a scene. I was in a posing kind of mode, yearning to have things happen for me that weren't happening. So I wanted to make it seem real and convincing. I wrote the whole album for a couple people to see and know me."^{[citation needed]}

Phair commented in interviews that the album was a song-by-song reply to the Rolling Stones' 1972 album Exile on Main St.^[7] Some critics contend that the album is not a clear or obvious song-by-song response,^[8] although Phair sequenced her compositions in an attempt to match the songlist and pacing of the Rolling Stones album.^{[citation needed]}

More information Review scores, Source ...

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[9]
Blender	[10]
Chicago Sun-Times	[11]
Christgau's Consumer Guide	A[12]
Entertainment Weekly	A[13]
Los Angeles Times	[14]
Pitchfork	9.6/10 (2008)[15] 10/10  (2018)[16]
Rolling Stone	[17]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide	[18]
Spin	[8]

Close

Exile in Guyville received universal acclaim. It was the No. 1 album in the year-end critics poll in Spin and the Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics poll.^[19]

It was also a moderate commercial success. The videos for "Never Said" and "Stratford-On-Guy" received airplay on MTV. By mid-1994, it had sold over 200,000 copies, reaching number 196 on the Billboard 200, and was Matador's most successful release at the time. In 1998, it was certified gold.

Phair said: "I don't really get what happened with Guyville. It was so normal, from my side of things. It was nothing remarkable, other than the fact that I'd completed a big project, but I'd done that before... Being emotionally forthright was the most radical thing I did. And that was taken to mean something bigger in terms of women's roles in society and women's roles in music... I just wanted people who thought I was not worth talking to, to listen to me." The sudden success of the album also generated a somewhat negative response from Chicago's indie music scene. Phair commented, "It's odd... Guyville was such a part of indie. But at the same time... I was kind of at war with indie when I made that record." Another problem that arose from her success was also dealing with her stage fright.^{[citation needed]}

Spin named Exile in Guyvile the 15th-greatest album released between 1985 and 2005.^{[citation needed]} In 2001, VH1 named it the 96th-greatest album of all time.^{[20][unreliable source?]} Rolling Stone ranked it number 328 in its 2003 list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time", 327 in its 2012 list, and number 56 in its 2020 list.^{[21][22][23][unreliable source?]} In 1999, Pitchfork named it the fifth-best album of the 1990s,^[24] and the 30th-best in its 2003 list.^[25] Robert Christgau named it among the 10 best albums of the 1990s.^[26]

In 2013, The New Yorker's Bill Wyman named Exile in Guyville "patently one of the strongest rock albums ever made" and "arguably the quintessential example" of indie rock.^[27] PopMatters' David Chiu wrote that Exile lay bedroom pop music's groundwork. He noted that several indie bands and musicians had gained their "musical DNA" from the record, such as Frankie Cosmos and Jay Som.^[28]

As per the liner notes of the 2008 reissue:^[42]

• Liz Phair – guitar, vocals, piano ("Canary"), hand claps ("Mesmerizing")
• Casey Rice – lead guitar ("Mesmerizing", "Divorce Song"), cymbal ("Shatter"), background vocals, hand clapping ("Mesmerizing")
• Brad Wood – bass and drums (various songs), organ ("Glory", "Mesmerizing"), synthesizer, ("Explain It to Me"), percussion, bongos ("Explain It to Me"), tambourine and shaker ("6′1""), maracas and hand claps ("Mesmerizing"), background vocals, vocals ("Say You"), drones and feedback ("Shatter"), "sick guitar" ("Gunshy"), guitar ("Say You")
• Tony Marlotti – bass ("Johnny Sunshine", "Say You"), vocals ("Say You")
• John Casey – harmonica ("Soap Star Joe", "Divorce Song")
• Tutti Jackson – backing vocals ("Soap Star Joe")