In this work, we have demonstrated through the use of EA-CIS and EA-TDDFT that linear-response approaches are completely adequate for the description of liquid-phase XAS if orbital relaxation is taken into account at the level of the reference state. Contrastingly, standard linear-response approaches that use the n-electron ground state reference are entirely inappropriate for application to the condensed phase and should be avoided, even in calculations of the pre-edge. This finding is cohesive with the idea that the influence of double excitations on a spectrum can be limited largely to supplying additional orbital relaxation that is missing in the standard n-electron ground state reference determinant. Furthermore, the choice of a core-ion reference supplies implicit correlation effects at the mean-field level, permitting an accurate description of liquid-phase XAS spectral profiles at the level of single excitations. While we did not perform algebraic diagrammatic construction (ADC) calculations in this work, it is worth noting that we expect our conclusions to be general. Similar improvements should be expected in solution-phase XAS for approaches that include perturbative electron correlation (i.e. CC2 or ADC) effects atop core-ion reference orbitals, but we leave intensive study of this hypothesis for future work.