The new Liz Phair album is awful. Awful. It is Avril Lavigne.

Thank god there are clips and videos from her past albums at her website to soothe legions of disappointed fans.

One night in 1993 I dubbed “Stratford-on-Guy” off WRHU and bought the disc at The Wall the next day. I was a sophomore in high school. Copied to a side and a half of a Memorex 90-minute tape, “Exile in Guyville” came with me everywhere. Lyrics were scrawled over the backs of my high school notebooks, in the margins of letters I’d written to my best friend Donna who’d just moved to Connecticut. I listened to “Shatter” while getting over one of my first boyfriends; I listened to “Divorce Song” once I’d gotten over him. The hollow wail of guitars on “Shatter” tugged at my heart every time I played the record, and it has ever since. I loved the way the words “babe” and “fuck” rolled off her tongue. Weekend nights when I visited, Donna and I careened through the silent suburban streets of West Hartford in her mother’s white Nissan, screaming along to “Fuck and Run” before retiring to the ball pit at McDonald’s with 49 cent ice cream cones. Boys in other parts of the playground would throw rocks at us as they blew dense clouds of marijuana smoke out of their nostrils. I didn’t really know what the song was about, but I knew I’d know someday.

Whatever happened to a boyfriend?
The kind of guy who tries to win you over
And whatever happened to a boyfriend?
The kind of guy who makes love ’cause he’s in it?
I want a boyfriend
I want all that stupid old shit,
like letters and sodas

In 1994 I rode a Nassau County bus to the Sunrise Mall to purchase “Whip-Smart” at the Wiz on the day it came out. I was meeting someone there for what would amount to the first date in a relationship that ended nearly eight years later. I taped him a copy of the disc and we played it sometimes in his bedroom between repeated listenings of Weezer’s blue album and “Live Through This” by Hole. I’d always skip the first song, “Chopsticks,” because I thought it might make me cry–and it did those few times I let it play through. “Whip-Smart” was my nap companion later that year when I slept anytime I wasn’t at school, ignoring daytime and a near-dysfunctional sorrow that had withdrawn me from everything else in life. Years and years later I finally heard the truth in “Jealousy” and I scrawled the lyrics in a notebook I still carry with me. I had just met my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend.

I can’t believe you had a life before me
I can’t believe they let you run around free
Just putting your body wherever it seemed like a good idea

In 1998, “Whitechocolatespaceegg” was less of a revelation, less of a testament to my place in time. But “Love is Nothing” on a mixtape with its feel-good organs was a permanent fixture in my car, a giant navy blue Oldsmobile Delta 88 that I inherited from my mother. And the sweet morsel of “Girls’ Room” was always a payoff in Emily’s dorm room. We’d play it on repeat and sing along between sips of Old English while decorating our faces with sparkles and eyeliner for some college dance. “Go On Ahead” was bittersweet honesty.

And it goes around in circles:
one night is lovely, the next is brutal