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.com 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.