In the early nineties, many of the bands on the label and Matador staffers themselves came from well-educated, upper middle class backgrounds and we wasted no time putting all that good grooming to use "sticking it to the man". We made up outrageous bios to pass on to legitimate publications like Newsweek and People, we encouraged provocative answers to dull interview questions, basically trying to channel a kind of late-stage Beatles malaise, believing this to be the only way to force mainstream media to focus on the songs and not the performers. The music was all that was left standing once we were finished with our schoolyard shenanigans.

Read the rest of Liz's essay here.

Liz Phair: It's probably safe to say that friends of Matador bands are a lot of the people who've been ripping me to shreds [ever since Exile in Guyville]. But the Matador guys were always supportive. They never made me feel bad and never made fun of what I was trying to make happen.

Read the entire post here.

Ken: Is your band for this tour the same band you had in place for the Exile in Guyville anniversary tour?

Liz: Yes, same guys! I figured since they already know a lot of the songs.

The band:
• Greg Suran (guitar / keyboards)
• Nick Macri (bass)
• Dan Leali (drums)

Liz Phair: I associated Matador with the coolest people I knew. Wanting to be on Matador was like saying you wanna go to Harvard in the indie scene. I called them and Gerard told me he'd just read a review of [Phair's first cassette] Girlysounds, like, an hour before. He had that moment of, "Maybe this is something I need to go with." There was some synchronicity to it. So he was like, "Yeah." And he gave me $5,000 bucks [to record her Matador debut]. I mean, it was nothing.

[Gerard] Cosloy: Much the way that coping with Pavement was a whole new ball of wax compared to Teenage Fanclub, the same could be said about the Liz Phair experience. It was an entirely new level of having to deal with the bigger business and what it's like when you're not just working with an artist, but you're working with a celebrity.

Phair: I think I came in there with that celebrity attitude, though I'm not sure where I got the chutzpah. I look back at interviews I did during that period, and I thought I was the shit. I was sure I was destined to be this important voice. I literally said to Gerard, "Are you ready for me to make you a millionaire?" But they were outrageous in their own way, too. You look at the label and they acted the star the way I do as an artist. There were occasional conflicts, but mostly it was very complementary.

Cosloy: I think we tried to treat her as a pretty serious artist for the length of her tenure on the label. But I don't think we always saw eye-to-eye on the celebrity stuff.

Phair: They're like the blond starlet who kind of fucks you over sometimes, but you still wanna hang out with.

In the next few months, Phair would release Exile In Guyville and, along with the success the label had with Pavement, Matador would hit the big time. And experience at least a few growing pains in the process.

Read the entire post here.

I want to be like you,
you want to be like me
lyrics from "Satisfied"

no more tricks in the old trick sack
the minutes tick by till the watch face turns black
lyrics from "Bang! Bang!"

I'll stay in your eyes till you sleep
lyrics from "Miss September"

Sunday evening (October 3rd):

MAIN STAGE (The Pearl):

• Guided By Voices: 11:30pm – 1:00am
• Yo La Tengo: 10:10pm – 11:05pm
• Liz Phair: 9:50pm – 10:10pm
• The New Pornographers: 8:40pm – 9:25pm
• Ted Leo & the Pharmacists: 7:35pm – 8:15pm
• Shearwater: 6:30pm – 7:10pm

Doors: 6:00pm

MC's : Tom Sharpling & Jon Wurster

The rest of the schedule can be found here.

American Songwriter: What was it like for you to revisit your old material on Girlysound? I know some artists can't really listen to their old stuff.

Liz: I asked Ken Lee, who runs one of my biggest and best fan sites, which ones I should put on it, and he gave me a list, a solid list that I almost entirely used. And then I added some that are just.... I cringe, I wanna die! I put them on there cause I thought they were relevant to the sort of voice acting that I do. You know, taking different personas, taking different characters. But oh my god, they're bad! You really just have to suck it up. Yeah, it's really hard to listen to early stuff. But some stuff, you know, it was relevant. The reason that I'm coupling them together needed to be shown. I'm thinking in particular of "California", where I did this kind of low voice that's like I'm a gangster, and I'm so lame and can't tell the jokes right. It's just awful, but it's very distinct because I'm slipping in and out of character. Like I do this stupid gangster voice, telling a joke that probably my dad's golf buddies told him, and I heard over the dinner table or something. Then I slip into a completely melodic chorus that has nothing to do with the joke I'm telling, but somehow the juxtaposition of the two makes sense to me. And artistically brings home a point. I mean, I came from a visual arts background. So, I understand that. I think alot of people in music, that's not how they came to music. And that isn't a part of what they're hearing when they listen to something.

Read the rest of the interview at American Songwriter.

6.) 6'1", Liz Phair. Everyone's heard of "angry short man" syndrome, but as a "little" lady, I think petite women share the affliction. Like Liz, I'm 5-foot-2 and in denial about it. My short stature may have something to do with my tendency to shout when enraged. How else is anyone going to hear me way down here?

On September 28, on the eve of the label's 21st anniversary celebration in Las Vegas, the Matador at 21 box set lands in stores. The limited-edition box contains five CDs documenting the history of the label with remastered songs released from 1989 through 2010, and one CD of unreleased live recordings from the Matador 10th Anniversary concerts in New York City in 1999. These were recorded to multitrack via the Rolling Stones Mobile Truck and not mixed down until now.

DISC TWO – THE YEARS OF MILK AND HONEY (1993-1995)
1. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion – Afro
2. Yo La Tengo – Big Day Coming
3. Railroad Jerk – The Ballad of Railroad Jerk
4. Helium – Superball
5. Pizzicato Five – Baby Love Child
6. Liz Phair – Mesmerizing
7. Pavement – Silence Kit
8. Guided By Voices – Game Of Pricks
9. 18th Dye – Whole Wide World
10. Chavez – Peeled Out Too Late
11. Come – String
12. Moonshake – Secondhand Clothes
13. Guitar Wolf – Midnight Violence Rock'n Roll
14. San Francisco Seals – Back Again
15. Bardo Pond – Rumination

Liz says that she will be touring the East Coast and Midwest soon, but she can't confirm the dates just yet. However, expect those dates soon...

Sunday evening (October 3rd):

MAIN STAGE (The Pearl):

• Guided By Voices
• Yo La Tengo
• Liz Phair
• The New Pornographers
• Ted Leo & the Pharmacists
• Shearwater

MC's : Tom Sharpling & Jon Wurster

[Liz] Phair's first new album in five years – Funstyle – enters the music marketplace Oct. 19. Bundled with the new release will be a second CD, Girlysound, a collection of demos and obscure tracks predating Phair's 1993 debut, Exile In Guyville.

Packaged as a two-CD set, the Funstyle / Girlysound combo marks the artist's beginnings as well as where she is musically in 2010. During the early 1990s Phair distributed her music via cassette tapes under the "Girlysound" moniker, leading to her signing with Matador Records in 1992 with some of the tracks evolving into the songs that appeared on Exile in Guyville.

• Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - The Belly Up Tavern, Solana Beach, CA
• Friday, October 8, 2010 - El Rey Theatre, Los Angeles, CA
• Sunday, October 10, 2010 - The Independent, San Francisco, CA
• Tuesday, October 12, 2010 - Crocodile Cafe, Seattle, WA
• Wednesday, October 13, 2010 - Doug Fir Lounge, Portland, OR
• Friday, October 15, 2010 - Venue, Vancouver, BC

In the meantime, Liz has a question for you all:

I have a question for fans: what are the top 10 most popular songs live?? Trying to make a set list... Please let me know! Xxx Liz

[Regarding "Bollywood"] Really, the pissed-off rap just rattled around in my brain for a while until one day while I was in the studio scoring scenes for 90210, Evan Frankfort (composing partner) and I scrolled through a few beat selections and landed on the Taal loop and I just lit up immediately. I knew it had to be a marriage between that sound and the rap. Ridiculous musical contrast to represent the ridiculous conflict between art and commerce.

You can read the whole interview at Movieline.

Phair's new album has been registered with SoundScan, granting it eligibility to chart on the Billboard 200. However, its first-week sales were less than 1,000, and, thus, the title did not rank among the top 200-selling sets of the week.

Here are the U.S. sales of the Connecticut-born singer/songwriter's prior five albums, according to SoundScan:

• Exile in Guyville (1993) = 491,000
• Whip-Smart (1994) = 412,000
• Whitechocolatespaceegg (1998) = 293,000
• Liz Phair (2003) = 433,000
• Somebody's Miracle (2005) = 83,000

Phair's career U.S. album sales stand at 1,718,000, according to SoundScan.

"It's important to have people who will say to you that you're really off the beaten track. And I knew, with Funstyle -- I've been told, in no uncertain terms, how awful it would be if I put out these songs. And I have waited over a year to release them because I trusted the people who were telling me this, but at the same time after 13 months of not putting out any music, I thought I couldn't go forward 'til I put out what I'd done. I thought, "Fuck it, I'll put these out, people will hate me. What's new."

You can read the whole interview at The Daily Beast.

In an e-mail to Speakeasy, Phair insisted there are "no hard feelings, only circumstances" that led to her split -- "almost a year ago" -- with ATO Records. The label, co-founded by Dave Matthews, signed Phair in 2008 and re-released her acclaimed and influential debut album, Exile in Guyville later that year. Billboard reported at the time that a new studio album was "penciled in" for the fall of 2008, though Funstyle marked Phair's first album of original material since 2005’s Somebody’s Miracle, released on Capitol Records.

In her e-mail to Speakeasy, Phair explained that, following a shift in management at ATO, "the people who were still there didn't like, or didn't know, what to do with the music I was making, so we just stalled out and I asked to leave."

In an e-mail response, ATO Records spokesperson Ambrosia Healy did not comment directly on the details of the split, though she confirmed that Phair and the label "have parted ways".

"All of us here love Liz very much and wish her well," Healy wrote.

Despite the apparent rancor at the music-industry in general, and ATO in particular, on Funstyle, Phair told Speakeasy that her relationship with her former label isn't all sour: "A few of them [at ATO] just contacted me after I put out Funstyle to tell me how hilarious some of the songs were. All good."

How To Like It.

You were never supposed to hear these songs. These songs lost me my management, my record deal and a lot of nights of sleep.

Yes, I rapped one of them. Im as surprised as you are. But here is the thing you need to know about these songs and the ones coming next: These are all me. Love them, or hate them, but dont mistake them for anything other than an entirely personal, un-tethered-from-the-machine, free for all view of the world, refracted through my own crazy lens.

This is my journey. Ill keep sending you postcards."

A brand new album from Liz Phair, Funstyle, featuring 11 new songs, is now available for purchase / download at LizPhair.com. The cost is $5.99, and the formats are MP3, Apple Lossless, and Source Audio (WAV).

The tracklisting:

• Smoke (3:12)
• Bollywood (2:36)
• You Should Know Me (2:56)
• Miss September (4:26)
• My My (3:32)
• Oh Bangladesh (4:39)
• Bang! Bang! (3:38)
• Beat Is Up (3:20)
• And He Slayed Her (3:36)
• Satisifed (3:34)
• U Hate It (4:36)

More details to come...

Sources also reveal to Rolling Stone that Liz Phair, who released her classic LP Exile In Guyville on the label in 1993, is slated to be added to the bill. Tickets for the October 1st-3rd weekend shows will also be reasonably priced — around $200 for three days of music — and the label is keeping ticket counts small (around 2,000) to ensure an intimate vibe similar to festivals like All Tomorrow's Parties.