Forget Exile on Main St. and "1993, The Year of the Woman." Try to forget the six-figure advance and Rolling Stone cover story (though not the glistening cover pin-up). Forget the disappointing follow-up and the under-appreciated whitechocolatespaceegg. And for now, forget the "blow-job queen" and "cunt in spring." After all, that's a lot of baggage for what to the casual listener must appear a rather unprepossessing album ­ eighteen minimalist tracks rooted firmly in the rock tradition featuring a singer whose limited vocal range favors personality over chops.

At its core, Exile in Guyville is a series of semi-fictionalized diary scribblings, the musings of a young woman locked in her bedroom as she practices her moves. Despite the telling influences of a privileged upbringing and bohemian leanings, Phair displays an uncanny facility for image manipulation, trying on roles and stances like a mischievous girl raiding her mother's closet. And though I've never really understood the Rolling Stones connection (aside from several Richards-worthy indenti-riffs), her "diary scribblings" are structured and sequenced with uncommon care, craft and intelligence. Phair's richly varied and often contradictory guises bump against each other ­ predatory yet vulnerable, sometimes defiant, sometimes reflective, always searching ­ creating the loose, suggestive portrait of an educated woman's struggle for individual identity, a woman who "always wanted more than I knew."

As is so often the case, the album's outre lyrical content (like the hint of nip and blow-job pucker on the insert) functions as cover and come-on. Phair's matter-of-fact handling of sexual issues is merely her chosen metier, a conduit for a rich and revealing exploration of our age-old obsession with male/female relations. During Exile's pop-cult ascendancy, it was all too easy for horny rock-boys to project their sexual fantasies upon a single, identifiable figure; Phair's use of the first person alone resulted in reams of short-sighted critical reductionism. But over the past six years, the alt-rock establishment has come to recognize Phair's creation for what it is, a seldom-revealed dimension of a more general (perhaps universal) feminine persona.

Similarly, the album's aural palette offers numerous subtle yet expansive pleasures. Making a virtue of limited means, Phair and co-producer Brad Wood litter the album with interesting (even meaningful) sonic details. Such '90s mainstays as loud/soft dynamics and alt-guitar noise are complimented by underwater piano intros, evocative mists of drone and feedback and offhand porno nursery rhymes. Phair's experimental touches gradually insinuate themselves in the mind's ear, creating a varied soundscape that serves to foreground the album's more traditional pop/rock rave-ups and anthems.

Back in 1993 my song of choice was "Fuck and Run," its churning guitar rhythm and catchy chorus barely masking the hurt, loneliness and self-loathing of another empty romantic encounter. The song's throb and ache suggest a potential key to Exile's elusive power, an ability to rest fresh archetypes whole from the detritus of everyday scenarios. The emotional content is invested with personal experience, yet it manages to draw upon our shared unconscious, striking an all-too-common nerve.

But after enjoying the album over years rather than months, the near-perfect "Divorce Song" seems an even loftier peak, as precise and damning a break-up song as I can remember. Just two cuts after "Fuck and Run"'s desultory one-night stand, Phair details the disintegration of a long-term relationship. Bickering devolves into petty argument, hurt feelings unearth unspoken resentments, and the fragile tissue of connection is torn apart. The song's sharpest lyrics linger like a deep bruise: "And the license said you had to stick around until I was dead / But if you're tired of looking at my face, I guess I already am." The chorus rallies for temperance and reconciliation, but as they say, things will never be the same ­ something vital and irretrievable has been lost.

Like the Replacements' Let It Be, Exile in Guyville is of-the-moment music. It's hard to imagine the album being produced by any other artist at any other time ­ an accomplishment that cuts both ways. It's equally hard to imagine that the artist could ever recapture the same mood, moment or magic. To her credit, Phair appears unfazed by her early masterwork; she's moved on, forging something resembling an adult life in music. Would that ex-Mat Paul Westerberg were blessed with such grace.

Two summers ago, touring with the collective group hug billed as Lilith Fair, Phair dispelled any lingering doubts about her live prowess ­ and without copping to any of rock's gender-defined norms. Wearing a sundress and beaming with confidence, every inch the suburban mother, she up-staged the festival's more road-tested performers by merely being herself ­ for all the world appearing 6'1" instead of 5'2". We're lucky to even know her.