An email from Liz Phair.

From 2007 to 2011, Jackson turns Fast Food Town into a concept musical in the vein of Company and Passing Strange. He scraps all of “Why I Can’t Get Work”; the main character is renamed Usher. By 2010, Jackson has retitled the show A Strange Loop, inspired by the final track on Liz Phair’s 1993 debut, Exile in Guyville, itself a response to the 1972 Rolling Stones album Exile on Main St., as well as

Douglas Hofstadter’s concept of a strange loop. The story is now about Usher trying to write a musical and get the rights to Phair’s songs; its score is a mash-up of Jackson’s songs and Phair’s. In real life, Jackson is also trying to get Phair to say yes to his musical. In 2011, she responds in an

email. “You need to write your own songs. I didn’t use the Rolling Stones’s songs to do Exile in Guyville. I wrote my own and you should do the same,” Jackson recalls her saying. He tosses his Phair mash-ups but preserves her influence throughout

A Strange Loop; one song, “Inner White Girl,” references Phair’s “Perfect World” in the lyric “They get to be cool, tall, vulnerable, and luscious.”