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Liz Phair “Soberish”

Liz Phair’s new album Soberish – her first release in 11 years after scrapping a few songwriting projects, working in television, and writing a book – sounds like it could be an album she and producer Brad Wood made immediately after Whitechocolatespaceegg in the late ‘90s but simply didn’t bother to put out until just now. It feels comfortable and lived-in, and full of textures that would’ve felt modern at that time but now feel a little retro. If you pay attention you can notice how her creative path through the 2000s informs this work but for the most part it sounds like a resumption of the trajectory she was on through the ‘90s. Even aside from the musical palette, the record does something I think a lot of us were hoping she’d get around to while she was silent for a decade: approach the romantic and sexual experiences of a straight woman in middle age with the same nuance, wisdom, and wit she brought to writing about all this as a younger woman.

“Soberish,” a song that moves between a pastoral folk affectation and lightly anxious new wave minimalism, tells the story of a woman getting ready to meet up with a man she’s had a long-simmering long distance romance with at a hotel bar and is finally, hopefully, about to hook up with him. The situation is widely relatable to anyone who’s ever done app dating or had a romantic scenario start online, but I like the specificity of this being a bit deeper in life when the idea of wasting time – “tell me, why do we keep dicking around?” – is more frustrating, both out of feeling a ticking clock on your life and in feeling like you’ve outgrown certain anxieties or don’t have use for elaborate courting rituals anymore. The story of the song plays out as it often does in life, with mild panic leading to brief discomfort and then clicking into the rapport and chemistry that existed before you came up with a bunch of distracting psyche-out narratives. The point of the song isn’t necessarily “it’ll be fine, this worked out for me,” but more to show the full emotional context of the scene and setting up the stakes for the happy ending.

Buy it from Amazon.