It was produced by Phair, Michael Penn, Pete Yorn, R. Walt Vincent and the Matrix songwriting team.

Phair said she wanted to earn more money from her work, and hired the Matrix, who had produced songs by pop acts including Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, Ricky Martin and Avril Lavigne.

"[6] Searching for "more spontaneous stuff", Phair recruited the Matrix, who had created songs for pop acts including Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, Ricky Martin and Avril Lavigne.

[8] Phair said they pushed her to sing different kinds of melodies: "It's top-of-the-line song structure, and it was really exciting to graft my DNA with theirs and to see what we came up with.

[23] According to the Washington Post, Liz Phair "inspired some of the most vitriolic music press in ages, with bad (and surprisingly personal) reviews outgunning the occasional good ones by a huge margin".

[25] Matt LeMay of Pitchfork rated the album 0.0, writing, "It's sad that an artist as groundbreaking as Phair would be reduced to cheap publicity stunts and hyper-commercialized teen-pop.

[26] In the Guardian, Adam Sweeting wrote that Phair's lyrics, once "smart and provocative", had become "crass and bloated", and criticized the sexualized cover photograph.

irritating, feeling they sounded desperate instead of confident, and found the lyrics "oversexed and silly" and "sometimes just plain base".

[12] Bond contrasted the lyrics with Exile from Guyville, which she argued used sexuality to explore other topics, such as "the vast murky territories that lie between men and women".

[12] Bond felt the sexuality of Liz Phair instead "feels like the pseudo-sensual posturing of a woman who aspires to join the MTV harem".

[12] She felt that the songs Phair wrote alone were the album's best and "suggest the wit, honesty and flawed humanity that made her endearing in the first place".

[12] In Blender, Ann Powers wrote: "It isn't clear whether Phair knows that audacity as a strategy has diminishing returns; what once shocked now seems like a habit."

She said that the best songs "cut through the bullshit to portray a hot young mom reflecting on lust and guilt", and hoped that listeners would hear the intelligence beyond the production values.

[15] In Entertainment Weekly, Chris Willman described Liz Phair as "an honestly fun summer disc", noting "Little Digger" and "Rock Me" as highlights.

[17] The Slant critic Sal Cinquemani also praised it, calling Phair "frank and funny" and citing "It's Sweet", "My Bionic Eyes", and "Rock Me" as noteworthy tracks.

[27] Robert Christgau wrote in The Village Voice that it included "no bad songs", and credited Phair for "successfully fusing the personal and the universal, challenging lowest-common-denominator values even as it fellates them".

[16] The Rolling Stone critic Barry Walters wrote that "Rock Me" and "Little Dagger" matched the "lofty songwriting standard" of Exile in Guyville, and concluded: "Phair is a fine lyricist, and although she's lost some musical identity, she's gained potential Top Forty access.

"[28] In 2019, Phair said she felt O'Rourke's New York Times review had attempted to shame her for dressing and acting sexually as a mother and for trying to reach a broader audience.

To a smug 19-year-old Pitchfork writer (cough) in 2003, it was just as inconceivable that an established indie artist would try to—or want to—make a radio-friendly pop album in the first place.