Liz Phair Announces Details Of New Album, Soberish

Liz Phair is pleased to announce details of, Soberish, her highly-anticipated new album, and first collection of original material in eleven years. Produced by Phair’s longtime collaborator Brad Wood – known for helming Phair’s seminal albums Exile In Guyville, Whip-Smart, and whitechocolatespaceegg – Soberish will be released on 4^th June 2021 via Chrysalis Records.

“Spanish Doors”, the album’s opening track, is available to hear now. Phair describes the song as being “about the fracturing of a beautiful life, when everything you counted on is suddenly thrown up for grabs.” She explains, “I drew inspiration from a friend who was going through a divorce, but the actions in the lyrics are my own. I relate to hiding out in the bathroom when everyone around you is having a good time but your life just fell apart. You look at yourself in the mirror and wonder who you are now, shadows of doubt creeping into your eyes. Just a few moments ago you were a whole, confident person and now you wonder how you’ll ever get the magic back.” The inventive musical sections vault over each other in an exhilarating rush and the contradictory emotions in the layered vocals speak to a universal truth that when bad news arrives, it never picks a good time.

CLICK HERE TO PRE-ORDER OR PRE-SAVE SOBERISH

Almost thirty years since her peerless debut album, Exile In Guyville, was released (voted #56 on Rolling Stone’s 2020 list of the 500 Greatest albums of All Time), Phair returns with a new record that will both intrigue and satisfy her long-standing fans, and introduce her to a smart young audience whose contemporary heroes have been reading from Phair’s playbook since they first picked up a guitar.

Liz Phair has achieved the kind of status in her industry rarely bestowed on recording artists. Her albums in the 1990s were central to the indie rock canon of the day. Her image was featured in countless magazines, early Apple commercials and Gap ads. Her eponymous album for Capitol Records in 2003 took Phair in a pop direction that ruffled some critics’ feathers but nonetheless went gold, galvanizing a host of new fans, particularly among young women who fell in love with hits like “Why Can’t I” and

“Extraordinary”, tracks that were featured in several major films and TV shows, including 13 going on 30, Raising Helen and How to Deal. Liz has picked up two Grammy nominations, and a spot in Pitchfork’s “Greatest Albums of the 90s” with over five million record sales to date (including three U.S. gold albums). She sang “God Bless America” at the opening game of the Chicago White Sox World Series victory in her hometown in 2005.

Her acclaimed memoir, Horror Stories, published by Random House in 2019, was an insightful, passionate and no-holds-barred look at the life of a singular woman who has been disrupting and influencing since she knew the meaning of the words. The New York Times, The Boston Globe, NPR and the Wall Street Journal championed her first foray into prose. She’s a guitar player who’s created her own voicings and structures; a feminist trailblazer; a composer for film and TV; a visual artist; a lyricist of brutal honesty and devil-may-care insouciance.

Soberish is a portrait of Phair in the present tense, taking all of the facets of her melodic output over the years and synthesizing them into a beautiful, perfect whole. She’s at the top of her game in the recording studio, drawing upon years of experience in television composition to weave through the songs daring and unexpected sound design. With Brad Wood’s exquisite engineering and masterful production, the result is a wholly fresh yet satisfyingly familiar sound that challenges on the first listen and seduces with each subsequent play through. The earworms are strong with this one!