In 1993, Liz Phair knocked rock cognoscenti on their ears with her ambitious debut, Exile in Guyville, a double album she constructed as a song-by-song, post-feminist, alternative-rock "response" to the Rolling Stones' decadent 1972 classic, Exile on Main St. Hailed as a masterpiece, it was named album of the year by the Village Voice and it paved the way for a wave of imitators, from Alanis Morissette to Fiona Apple.

Phair grew up in the posh Windy City suburb of Winnetka. She famously attended summer camp with Julia Roberts, studied art history at Oberlin College and evolved into a beatnik, artist and self-described "Sassy-style quasi-good-girl slutty type." Her first passions were painting and charcoal etchings, and she only started making music in her bedroom as a lark, joining the four-track DIY underground with a release called Girlysound.

The enthusiastic response to that tape and to Exile in Guyville prompted Phair to change career goals, and she followed that disc with two more conventional releases: 1994's Whip-Smart and 1998's whitechocolatespaceegg. Since then, she's been missing in action -- distracted by the birth of her son, Nicholas, the end of her marriage to filmmaker Jim Staskausas, and a move from Chicago to Los Angeles. Now she's back with a self-titled album on Capitol and a driving ambition to achieve pop stardom on the level of her friend, Sheryl Crow. (Parts of the new disc were produced by The Matrix, the platinum-selling production team behind Avril Lavigne's Let Go.)

Recently, Playboy spoke with Phair as she was gearing up to tour, touching on touchy topics including selling records, selling out, marriage and turning warm semen into a hit song.

Playboy: You live in LA now, and your fans are already contending that you've "gone Hollywood." What are you going to do about alienating those people?

Liz Phair: [Laughs] They're partially right. I mean, there's definitely a step I'm making that's trying to sell records. But at the same time, I feel like if I tried to just write stuff I had written before, from the same kind of point of view. When I was making this record, my lawyer asked, "Are people ready for the happy Liz Phair?" I remember thinking, "I can't make them angry!" It's hard to know what exactly "honest" is. Is honest when the public perceives I'm being honest to their expectations? Or is honest me being true to how I actually feel? It's hard to know, and I think it's a fine line.

Playboy: Why are you suddenly concerned about selling records? Ten years ago you never discussed how many copies of Exile people would buy.

Phair: That was natural in the beginning. Back when I made Exile, I really was a visual artist who was very much trying to be successful and trying to make a big splash and be provocative. I was interning for these famous artists, and I was hell-bent on becoming a big, splashy, famous artist, too. So the music was just sort of an aside, a hobby. It wasn't something I'd invested my competitiveness in. And now music has become something I've invested my competitiveness in.

The last record, whitechocolatespaceegg, might have seemed like a sell-out to people. But after [the birth of] Nick, I was writing songs that were softer and mellower because that was where I was at. So what happened to me after whitechocolatespaceegg is that I got that competitive spirit up again, and I think it's because the industry itself was telling me I was over. We were trying to shop [my record] at DreamWorks or something, and they all looked at me like, "Nice piece of art, hang it on your wall, but it could never sell." I kept hearing that from everyone and I kept not getting my calls returned and I just got competitive. Like, "Fuck you, watch me do it! I can blow your fucking pants off, asshole!"

Playboy: You've always wanted to prove people wrong if they say, "Liz, you can't do this."

Phair: Yeah. And it doesn't mean you can go through life just with that motivation and not deal with the consequences of what that brings to you. I just wanted to make a record that woke everybody up again and was still my point of view.

Playboy: But you came to mean a lot more to your audience than other artists. People had a connection with Alanis Morrissette, but not the same way they had a connection with you; it was on a much deeper level, especially with young women. You have this burden of having been one of the voices of a generation -- voicing what it was like for smart young women to come of age sexually, politically and emotionally at a certain point in time. Now, 10 years later, they're going to want you to give voice to where they are now.

Phair: I think I did. I mean, more or less, that's what I was trying to do. Songs like Extraordinary, I live and die by that. That is me. And Little Digger -- I mean, it's there. I cannot make art, whether I want to or not -- and sometimes I have wanted to -- for an audience's expectations. I can't. I'm not capable of it, or Whip-Smart and whitechocolate wouldn't be the way they were. I can only come from the place where I am at that point to satisfy my own needs.

Playboy: You've said you had 40 or 50 songs to choose from for this record. How do you know when you've written a good song, a keeper?

Phair: It usually has a kind of sophistication in that it's a little bit conceited, but everything falls together without much difficulty. The lyrics, especially, will kind of fall into place, and they'll surprise me a little bit. The music will be the same way.