Liz Phair at Palace Theatre (11-17-23)

Friday night in downtown St. Paul was a nostalgic trip to eras gone by with a tequila sun setting on the Eagles and their “Long Goodbye Tour” at the Xcel Center and Liz Phair revisiting her debut album that many consider to be one of the all-time greats.

Blondshell aka Sabrina Teitelbaum opened the evening sporting a vintage Rod Stewart concert baseball shirt with the tagline: “Blondes have more fun.”

Blondshell (11 Jul 2023)

We last saw Blondshell at Seventh Street Entry in July and it appears she has been on the road since as she promotes her self-titled debut album with songs like “Veronica Mars,” “Sepsis” and “Street Rat.” And although the crowd skewed older than her Seventh Street Entry performance, she received a favorable roar of applause for her songs “Salad” and “Kiss City.”

It’s easy to see why Liz Phair picked Teitelbaum to open for her tour. Even with the age gap the two singers have a conversational persona in their singing that tends to casually if not coolly remove them from subject material that is not casual or cool.

It has been thirty years since Liz Phair released her 18-track debut double album Exile in Guyville. Guyville is Wicker Park, a northeast neighborhood in Chicago. And it was there, after returning penniless from San Francisco, she sat in the bedroom of her childhood home and recorded the songs that would make up the album, an album that had immediate and long-term critical success with Rolling Stone currently ranking it #56 on Best 500 Albums of All Time.

With the fans her impact is evident. The Palace was sold out and it seemed that every person there was in their twenties when the album was released. And a lot of the fans kept pressing ahead to get a better view of a personal icon that was luminous in her performance. She looked great. The band looked great. The set design was great. And most of all the music sounded great. There was no rust as Phair played the album in order and in its entirety.

“I want to create, for people coming to the show, a much more immersive experience,” Phair told Billboard. “So even if they think they know the album well, they come out with a new take on it.”

Personally, I have a casual reference to Phair and what I found surprising in listening to the whole album was the unabashed frankness in her lyrics. Even though her voice was not filled with operatic arpeggios, the words clearly show her state of mind as a twenty year-old with a wry honesty and yearning to find love and knowing it might not happen as in “Dance of the Seven Veils”:

Remaining tour dates: