PHOTOBOOTHS IN MUSIC

Exile in Guyville

Liz Phair (Matador Records, 1993)

From a story about "Exile in Guyville":

(The album cover) was Nate Kato's (of Urge Overkill) idea. Put it this way, we were at the Rainbo taking pictures because I'm doing some sequences for my video of me singing into photo booth pictures mouthing various parts of the sentence, which we were going to like flip in. It sort of fully didn't come off so I'm going to probably do it in the next video. We're just going to stick in some now.

But I've been doing this for months, going to the Rainbo and doing some more photo essays as I like to call them. And he got me to take my shirt off while I was doing this and I went back into the booth and I had my big coat on and stuff, and then I brought out the product and we were all just sitting around and he was like, "This is the album cover! This is the cover!" I don't know if you know him, but he has this brilliant sort of way of just being like, "This is absolutely...and this is so '90's! And we, Urge! If anyone knows what '90's are, Urge are!" I mean I don't think that is particularly true, but he cropped it, he said, "You have to crop it exactly like this!"

He has an eye which I think is damn near genius, and he was showing me how to crop it and he cropped it all up for me and I thought that was really cool. But it was an after the fact thing. I had taken the picture, and he just decided that it would make a great album cover.

Contributed by Brian