NEW LIZ PHAIR SONG DISCOVERED IN OBERLIN ARCHIVES
By: Isabel Hardwig, Contributor
Most of Liz Phair’s classic “Exile in Guyville” album was written when she was at Oberlin. When I went to her concert in December, she talked about coming back to her dorm room after parties, anxious and insecure, and sitting down to write some songs. Because of that, many of these songs feel deeply relatable to college students everywhere, even 30 years later.
Recently, as the Grape staff were combing through the college archives, we found evidence of a song that Phair wrote during her time here, but never released to the public. Through months of painstaking work, we collected all the material we could find, and now have what looks to be the basis of a future No. 1 hit.
The song, titled “Red,” was written on notebook paper and seemed to span multiple years of Phair’s college career. It’s clear that she was struggling to communicate something important to her, and that it took a number of drafts to excavate the truth at the heart of this work. The song opens with a powerful undercurrent of emotion, with the first lines, “If all the doors get painted red / 34 years after I graduate / I will feel neutral about it.”
What did Liz mean by this? The mystery only deepened as we uncovered more of her work. Phair’s song “Fuck and Run” put a voice to the feelings of longing and loneliness that many of us experience at Oberlin; “Red” articulates similar feelings. It has a perfect scream-in-your-room chorus of, “Red and yellow are the colors of this school / but do they need to be the colors of the doors? I don’t know. By the time it happens / I think I will have other priorities.” Oof, powerful stuff!
As always, Liz Phair pinpoints the things I’m feeling before I even feel them. When I first read the lines “Ooooooh red doors / I have no opinions about them one way or the other,” I knew that I had found the anthem of my twenties.
It’s hard to gauge what this song would sound like, since Phair didn’t write any chords. It’s possible that this song was never intended to make it onto Guyville, but instead was a piece of experimental poetry. While Liz was writing such smash-hit songs as “Soap Star Joe” and “Never Said,” she might have needed a place to vent her deepest, most personal feelings. And that place was the 16 total drafts of “Red” that we dredged from the archives.
This immense body of work shows some of the ways that the song changed since its conception. While the early drafts have lines such as “I’m fine with red and yellow doors / But I’m also fine with the normal ones,” the later drafts instead suggest, “As long as a door gets me into the building, I’m happy / I’ve never paid much attention to paint color.” It’s obvious that Liz’s feelings on this topic were tumultuous, and they evolved as she devoted more time to the piece. It might even be fair to say that the song became something of an obsession for Phair; the line in draft 11, “The doors now are black or brown / but in the future, they might be red” says it all.
I know I’m not the only one who wishes that “Red” had made it onto “Exile in Guyville” or any of the eight albums that followed it. But reading these lyrics makes it clear that Liz Phair was going through a lot while she was writing it. From the audience’s perspective, it’s easy to say that pain makes art better, but we have to remember that Liz Phair was a student just like us, and it must have been incredibly difficult for her to even get these thoughts on paper. We should be commending her for her bravery even as we wonder “what if.” For now, we should continue to sing along to “6’1”’ and “Gunshy” while we do our best to articulate our own feelings about these complex issues.
