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Phair goes hunting for a Miracle—and finds it

The girl can’t help it

Only ‘Miracle’ is Phair’s transformation

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Those hoping Liz Phair would regain her senses after going pop with her self-titled 2003 album will just have to, well, keep hoping.

By Aidin Vaziri
E! Online, September 27, 2005


Those hoping Liz Phair would regain her senses after going pop with her self-titled 2003 album will just have to, well, keep hoping. With the forthcoming release of Somebody’s Miracle, the former indie queen says she has no intention of reliving the pain that inspired her first batch of raw and ravaging discs. Although, like her 1993 debut, Exile in Guyville, a song-by-song response to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, the new CD did start out as a retort to another album: Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life. It turned out to be so much more.

Why She Doesn’t Feel Her Old Fans’ Pain: “The only way to grow is to keep yourself on the edge between being uncomfortable and being comfortable,” Phair says, as much about herself as the people who keep expecting her to go crawling back to her bad-girl years. “Too many people get stuck doing things and thinking of things in a certain way. Sometimes people just want what they want, which is to hear the same song again and again.” Whatever, Phair’s not buying it. “My dad says I have to make everything as hard for myself as possible.”

Every Song Looks the Same Naked: Phair, who set off on a casual acoustic club tour with boyfriend and guitar player Dino Meneghin just before the release of Somebody’s Miracle, says she did it just to get reacquainted with her back catalog and not to prove that all her songs sound the same when you rip away the fancy production. “You know, we knew that already,” she says. “Nobody else knew that. The reason we did this acoustic tour is because last year, we would go to radio stations and do that acoustic version, and we kind of really liked it. People really responded to it when it was all stripped down.”

If She’d Only Played Acoustic Last Time Around, She’d Have Saved Herself a Lot of Bad Press: “You know, it’s frightening but so true.”

The New Single, “Everything to Me,” Almost Amounted to, Well, Nothing: “It was just a small song with sad lyrics that we really seriously forgot about. Apparently, my producer had picked it back up and started working on it again once we stopped recording and turned it into the label. I got these calls from the label where they’re freaking out about this song, and I’m like, what are they talking about? What song? It was ‘Everything to Me’. Because the lyrics were so sad, and because I wrote about my previous relationship, it was just so wild that would be the one people responded to the most. It was life-affirming that if you put meaning into something, people respond.”

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