Before Exile In Guyville dropped and launched her career back in the summer of 1993, Liz Phair was working hard in Chicago writing and recording homemade music under the name Girly Sound. Some of the songs would later end up getting repurposed on Guyville, but for the 25th anniversary of that album’s release, Phair is giving her fans a refreshed glimpse into the material in its most formative state.
Today, she’s shared one of the standout songs from her Girly Sound period, a track called “Bomb,” that ended up morphing into the song “Stratford-On-Guy” on Exile In Guyville.
Along with “Bomb,” Phair is also debuting a cleaned-up and HD rendered video for “Stratford-On-Guy,” which she directed herself.
“[Industry bigwig] Danny Goldberg came backstage to meet me. I told him about my idea for the next video – ‘Stratford-On-Guy’ – explaining that we were stalled due to budget constraints,” Phair recalled in a press release. “He asked ‘what do you need?’ I said, ‘a private plane to fly over downtown LA and get footage at night.’ I wanted to shoot the electric veins of the city. He just said, ‘done!’ It was one of those real rock star moments.”
Phair’s upcoming Exile In Guyville twenty-fifth-anniversary box set is called From Girly Sound To Guyville and will be available for purchase on May 4 via Matador. You can listen to “Bomb” above, and check out the “Stratford-On-Guy” video below.
