Divorce Song - 2018 Remaster

Indie rocker Liz Phair was still in college when she wrote this song, about a couple whose relationship starts to disintegrate on a tense road trip, while trying to sort out a friends-with-benefits-type relationship with a classmate. Like the couple in the song, the pair went on a road trip and found themselves at a motel, wondering if they should spend the night together.

Phair's debut album was crafted as a song-by-song response to the Rolling Stones' 1972 album Exile on Main St., with this track corresponding to "Ventilator Blues." Phair explained the connection between the two songs in a Song Exploder podcast: "What I got from that song was tension, and everyone's gotta release the tension. In 'Ventilator Blues,' things get like so intense and people just keep slogging through life. So with 'Divorce Song,' it's a lyrical corresponding thing. That was like what it is when you're in a relationship. You're just slogging through together. There are times that you blow up and fight with each other, and it doesn't have to mean it's the end of the relationship necessarily – you just have to ventilate."

Phair revisited Exile In Guyville for its 25th anniversary and broke down the tracks in a Rolling Stone interview. She said of this song: "It has that deadpan delivery. It's an ordinary person doing ordinary things, and the action in the song is really just about relating to another person. It feels like an action-packed song. You've done a lot, you've been a lot, you've seen a lot, you've heard a lot, but really it's just two personalities trying to be intimate and bumping up against each other on a road trip and that's all that happens. So much of what happens in our lives that we feel so deeply is really no action at all. The stuff that's in movies never happens. There's rarely an earthquake, there's rarely, like, a break-in, and most of your day, you feel like you had drama, but it's just these micro-interactions with people. 'Divorce Song' is very much about that."