Word: phair
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...Phair isn't a great singer (her intonation is sometimes uncertain), her songs too often sound alike (a slight melody with a plucky bass), and she is no longer an independent-label secret (she just appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone). Yet there is something so vital and appealing about this Chicago rocker that it's hard not to admire her. Not many singer-songwriters manage to be so honest and so much fun at the same time...
...Phair's 1993 debut album, Exile in Guyville, dealt bluntly, sometimes profanely, always intelligently, with sexual desire. It sold 200,000 copies -- a good showing for an independent release -- and won Phair critical adulation. On her second CD, Whip-Smart, Phair hews to her previous theme -- but where Guyville was an angry critique of relationships, Whip-Smart reveals a woman who appears much happier. On Supernova, for example, she sings with almost embarrassing exuberance about a lover who has proved to be ideal: "I have looked all over the place,/ But you have got my favorite face...
...Phair's guitar playing has a likeable, warbling strangeness; she is developing into a stronger, more varied songwriter. Her best new track, May Queen, has a melody that ranges more widely than the ones in her previous compositions, and her songs sometimes break out of the verse-chorus-verse penitentiary of most rock 'n' roll. Shane, for example, has no chorus. It's about disquiet before a war, and it ends with Phair repeatedly singing, "You've gotta have fear in your heart," an unsettlingly effective close...
Within a few weeks a fine Irish uproar was under way. Church of Ireland Bishop John Percy Phair journeyed from Kilkenny to Fethard to comfort the Protestant flock of 25 and advised them to meet their Catholic boycotters with "smiling faces" ("Fethard unphair to Protestants" punned the press). Letters flooded the newspapers with suggestions, e.g., all Ireland's Protestants should buy from Leslie Gardner's hardware shop and Betty Cooper's news agency-grocery in Fethard. Northern Ireland Unionists urged the government to start a fund for the boycotted Protestants, and a group of Belfast aircraft workers...
Macky swam the 220 for the first time in his life in a meet, forced Yale's Captain John Phair and Ray Ellison to come from behind to place second and third--the latter caught up only on the last turn, and recorded the excellent time of 2:13.5. That clocking ranks with the top six in the East, but with it, though he forced the Yale entries to swim faster than they ever had before and nearly pulled off a surprise third that no one expected, Macky was panned by Danzig...