Feature

Miss Independent

But she’s doing her best. “I am in love with someone,” she tells me. She’s living out in California, near Manhattan Beach, in a place she says she can’t really afford. (“I spend so much time scheming, like how to make money . . . I’ve read The Tipping Point three times.”) If her music right now is about independence, her life is about figuring out how to maintain that hard-won sense of self as part of a couple. “It’s sort of the next level of challenge,” she says. “I had a couple people I cared about pass away, and it puts a different spin on things. I do want to tell people I love them when I love them now. Mortality is definitely in there.”

Phair seems pleased that this album has the potential to call back her flock. “I have no hard feelings,” she deadpans. “They can come sit on my couches.” She’ll take back the people who gravitated toward her when she was young—watch how fast they run to the flame, she sang at the time—but she is not nostalgic about that era. “I fucked up my entire twenties,” she says. “I smoked a lot of pot. I was really angry and snotty. It’s not that those are bad qualities . . . there were some really fucking fun times! If I could replay my twenties, I wouldn’t get Guyville and I wouldn’t have the saucy stories I do. The thing that embarrasses me is that I was dragging out my teenage years.”

I ask what more she possibly could have accomplished in her twenties besides making one of the best albums of the decade, getting married, and having a child. “But I got divorced with a child!” she says. “I don’t think I really knew what I was saying when I said my vows, because to be honest, I had never really had a long-term relationship before that.”

She didn’t appreciate marriage; nor, she says, did she really appreciate her talent or her success. “It wasn’t until I had my son that I realized, You dumb-ass bitch! This is the best job in the world! To get up in front of people and make music? It hit me, the beauty of that: It isn’t about me, it’s about trying to create something for all of us,” she says. “You know how when you’re in early grade school, you make friends who are really different from you through Girl Scouts or whatever, and then later you branch off into groups of people who dress the same and are into the same things? When you become a parent, it’s like, Is there anyone else on this block who has a kid? I don’t care if you are a Republican. You become firmly rooted in the all of us. I should have another one.”

She’d really like to, but she’s not sure she can swing it right now. “It’s a completely impractical thought. My boyfriend is younger, and he’s not really ready.”

I ask Phair if she wants to get married again. “I do. And it scares the crap out of me. A person like me? I’m built for disruption.”