Liz Phair To Release first album in five years this May
Liz Phair debuted three new tunes during a nine-song set at the Ray-Ban Visionary Awards party at the Sundance Film Festival last week. The new material was a preview for her upcoming album, Happy Tragic Thing, due May 20th on Capitol Records.
It had been nearly five years since Phair released an album, and about three since she’d played in public. Despite so much time out of the spotlight, Phair — known for paralyzing stage fright in her early years — was confident and warm in delivering six older songs along with the soothing, upbeat “Extraordinary,” the acoustic love song “Why Can’t I?” and the name-checking rocker “Rock Me.”
Her recognizable, husky delivery, which previously seemed a lo-fi instrument of dissonance, has grown and changed into an almost girlish alto. “My voice is so much better because I’m not as self-conscious as I used to be,” she said afterwards. “Somewhere along the way I got rid of a lot of my fear about singing, and I’ve really been working hard on developing my voice.”
Phair has been writing and recording with producers including Walt Vincent, Michael Penn and pop production team the Matrix (Avril Lavigne, Nick Carter), and reports that theme-wise “a lot of the songs have to do with my own personal gender issues.” Phair plans to release some alternate mixes of the Happy Tragic Thing tunes over the Internet, keeping the straight-ahead rockers for the album. “The songs that made it onto the album are the ones that rock,” she says. “I wanna sell some records, goddammit!”
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