Liz Phair - Divorce Song

"And the license said you had to stick around till I was dead."

Album: Exile in Guyville [debut album]
Recorded: Chicago, Illinois
Genre: Indie Rock, Singer-Songwriter
Album Release: June 22nd 1993
Length: 3.21
Producer: Liz Phair & Brad Wood
Vocalist: Liz Phair [age 26]
Label: Matador Records

Official Audio


Live on WFUV in 2019

Charts, Streams & Sales

Spotify: Over 2 million
YouTube Music: Over 250 thousand

Credits

Lead guitar, harmonica, guitar, bass, drums

Details

• An early version from 1991-1992 is available. Phair promoted the songs in her local Chicago under the moniker Girly Sound.
  
• The song isn't autobiographical. Liz Phair wasn't married until two years after the release.
  
  
• "That stuff didn't happen to me, and that's what made writing it interesting. I wasn't connecting with my friends. I wasn't connecting with relationships. I was in love with people who couldn't care less about me. I was yearning to be part of a scene. I was in a posing kind of mode, yearning to have things happen for me that weren't happening. So I wanted to make it seem real and convincing. I wrote the whole album for a couple people to see and know me" (Liz Phair promoting her second album Whip-Smart)

• "It’s an ordinary person doing ordinary things, and the action in the song is really just about relating to another person. It feels like an action-packed song. You’ve done a lot, you’ve been a lot, you’ve seen a lot, you’ve heard a lot, but really it’s just two personalities trying to be intimate and bumping up against each other on a road trip and that’s all that happens.

  So much of what happens in our lives that we feel so deeply is really no action at all. The stuff that’s in movies never happens. There’s rarely an earthquake, there’s rarely a break-in, and most of your day you feel like you had drama, but it’s just these micro-interactions with people. Divorce Song is very much about that." (Interview with Rolling Stone in 2018)
  

• "With Divorce Song I wanted to have an element that complemented and pushed further the accented strumming that Liz does on that song, and that's where the percussion comes in. What makes Divorce Song sound like a Stones song in my mind is that it's got shakers and cabasa playing this odd accent." (producer Brad Wood talking to Sound Exploder)
  

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