Liz Phair's 'Exile In Guyville' Celebrates Landmark 30th Anniversary!

It just might be fair to say Liz Phair has become a chameleon princess when it comes to providing the soundtrack for every element of our relationships with handling relationships.

Two decades ago the alt-legend crossed over to pop radio and into romantic comedy soundtrack staple territory with "Why Can't I?", an ode to the shiny parts that come with falling in love.

A decade earlier, Phair would unknowingly craft an album for those of us who just wanted the simple things in a relationship: a partner who would be smitten enough to regularly write letters and buy us sodas.

"Exile In Guyville" was, and would become so much more than an album for the grrrrls, and those of us with perpetual broken hearts; Phair depicted how the societal landscape looked for women, and those who identified as anything besides a heterosexual white man in the early nineties.

The album released 30 years ago today, would help lay the groundwork for establishing a path for those of us who are bold enough to come face-to-face with vulnerability and understand being vulnerable isn't always glossy. We tell our stories unabashedly and move forward; the prickly and painful parts are just part of the path into 'Guyville.'

"Exile In Guyville" would impact alternative radio and find its way to listeners with the help of MTV.

Phair, who was in her mid-twenties at the time, did several interviews to promote 'Guyville' including one with MTV, where she would detail the inspiration behind the record.

"It's hard to be female and be yourself," Phair said at the time. "You often kind of adopt whatever formulas exist, or try and adapt yourself to fit some expectations, and I really, really, really want to remain myself."

Remaining herself would indeed be the backbone to "Exile In Guyville"; Phair would go on to tell Tabatha Soren, "If the songs are really going to speak for what I don't say in normal life, that's what they've always been, sort of a venue for my thoughts the way I think them."

Phair thought a lot about "Exile On Main Street," the gritty magnum opus from The Rolling Stones, released 11 years earlier. 'Guyville' was seen to be the 'female' perspective of "Exile On Main Street."

When asked about the connection in an interview with MTV a year later Phair said, "I took it like a thesis. So, I was just thinking the other day I would go to my parents' attic and dig out all [of] the papers, the lists and lists trying to make sense of it so I could be more clear of explaining this. What I did, was I just took the 'Exile On Main Street' album like, lyrically, and just in terms of like, arrangement and sequencing, and I answered it in my own way," Phair continued. "Sometimes it was disagreement... I treated mixed lyrics as sort of my 'love object.' He was what the man was saying, and this is what I was coming back with..."

Just like Phair described herself in the first MTV clip above, I, your dearest writer, was also a "late bloomer" to love. I wanted it right then and there, and everything to do with it NOW.

Never mind learning about myself or wasting any time understanding that understanding who I was as a person would largely impact our respective experiences with it.

My first serious boyfriend was my first serious everything. I met him when I was much younger than Phair, and was in a relationship with him until I was about her age when she recorded and released "Exile In Guyville." It was as if I didn't understand that love could be messy; I had absolutely no concept that people broke up with people, and doing so was not some colossal failure.

I found "Exile In Guyville" courtesy of my best friend, and found it to be helpful in my post-relationship experience with dating. Phair not only showed me that it was okay to have and feel a range of feelings about relationships, but it was absolutely necessary to make these 'exiles' through 'guyville,' and that they could help me get to know myself so I didn't have to metaphorically drive around feeling downright stunned by an extremely pivotal form of human interaction; figuring out my relationship with myself was just as pivotal as figuring out I wanted to date a guy who strived to own a bed frame.