“Help Me Mary” by Liz Phair

"Help Me Mary" comes from Exile in Guyville, the debut Liz Phair released on Matador in 1993, a couple of years after she'd started passing her self-made Girly-Sound cassettes around Chicago. She wrote the song alone and sings it, and the recording is a lean one: Phair and Brad Wood on guitars, Wood on drums too, and Casey Rice, the assistant engineer, chipping in backing vocals.

Phair and Wood produced it along with the rest of the album at Idful Music Corporation in Chicago, in sessions that ran across 1992 and 1993, with Wood engineering. The album went gold in 1998 and has since landed on best-of-the-'90s lists from Pitchfork and Robert Christgau, as well as every edition of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz.