I will be honest and say that at first, I found The Purple Tape to be unnervingly not abstract. Listening to this song “Snow Day,” you already know what a snow day feels like. As for the songs she was writing, they weren’t raw and totally transparent diary entries, but they weren’t exactly oblique, either. The stylistic freedom of being a singer-songwriter was important to her the songwriter part was especially important to her. She could form a rock or an alt-rock band. Down the line that’d give her more freedom to push her sound more toward rock, alt-rock, whatever. She wanted to be known as a singer-songwriter. She worried any woman with an acoustic guitar was immediately pigeonholed as a folk singer. The reissued CD and streaming version of The Purple Tape includes a lengthy and quite charming interview with Lisa, and she talks a lot about wanting to be perceived back then as a singer-songwriter, not a folk singer. Liz sang lead vocals more often than Lisa, but here’s Lisa singing lead on a song from 1989 called “Bowls and Fishes.” Lisa Loeb was born in Maryland but raised mostly in Dallas in 1990, she graduates with a degree in comparative literature from Brown University up in Providence, Rhode Island, the gilded armpit of New England, where she also forms an acoustic singer-songwriter duo with her friend Elizabeth Mitchell. If I promised to give you $100 if you got it exactly right, I’m guessing you could still not recite, from memory, the exact series of words she’s about to sing here, but I am guessing that you could recite it from memory emotionally. For a song this fundamentally soothing and dulcet and barbed-but-sweet, there’s something very pleasantly off-kilter about what Lisa Loeb sings, and how she sings it. That part perfectly ramps us up to one possible argument for the chorus. “I’m only hearing negative / No no no bad.” And it fits perfectly, in this song, musically and, uh, syntactically. “You say / I talk so all the time / So.” Why does that work, that series of words? Have you ever thought about how clumsy this series of words should be, at least on paper? But even lyrically, the verbal structure, the syntax of this song, is beguilingly odd. There is no chorus, as such, or there are multiple parts of this song that could plausibly be called the chorus. The most compelling thing to me, lately, about the song “Stay (I Missed You)” by Lisa Loeb-that’s “Stay,” parenthesis, “I Missed You” close parenthesis-is how oddly it’s structured. That is partially the case because the song’s music video was also everywhere in the mid-‘90s.Matter of fact, I dicked around for so long we’re just getting right to it again. Whether she’s selling her trademark “ cat-eye” eyeglasses or performing her new batch of Grammy Award-winning kids’ songs, the track remains her most signature achievement. But yeah, it was a story about a breakup I was going through and that situation where it’s gotten into your head too much.”įor the now-53-year-old Maryland-born Loeb, the song remains a calling card. A lot of times in my songs, I get into some phase where I describe some other situation, and there’s a whole verse in there about somebody who is very, very depressed. “And then I go off into some other areas: I remember somebody close to me was going through severe, severe depression. “At the time I was having arguments with my boyfriend, who was actually my co-producer as well-we made records together,” Loeb told Songfacts of the inspiration for the “breakup” song. “Stay (I Missed You)” was also nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Pop Performance Duo or Group but ultimately lost out to All 4 One’s hit, “I Swear.” artist to land that spot despite not being signed to any label. 1 hit on Billboard, which garnered Loeb the distinction of being the first U.S. Soon, the easy-listening pop song became a No. The track, which was the lead single from the original soundtrack of the signature ‘90s movie Reality Bites was written and performed by Loeb, and originally written around 1990 (after Loeb graduated from Brown University and started her band, Nine Stories) for a potential musical project from Daryl Hall (of Hall & Oates).Īfter deciding to keep the song for herself, Loeb’s NYC friend and neighbor, the famed actor Ethan Hawk, heard the song and sent it to producer/actor Ben Stiller, who directed Reality Bites. That’s right, Lisa Loeb’s smash hit song, “Stay (I Missed You),” was all over the airwaves after its release in May 1994.
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