Incredibly, it's been 30 years since singer-songwriter Lisa Loeb released her iconic, Ethan Hawke-directed music video for "Stay (I Missed You)," which established her as the first independent, unsigned artist to go to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 after the plaintive track landed in the zeitgeist-capturing Gen X film Reality Bites. Loeb was in fact the only independent, unsigned artist in Billboard history to achieve that feat for almost 20 years, until Macklemore & Ryan Lewis finally did it with "Thrift Shop" in 2013.
"It was great to have an independent start," Loeb told Music Times' Lyndsey Parker in early 2020, when she was promoting her most recent studio album, A Simple Trick to Happiness. "It was nice to have that security and that sense of creative control, that I was going to be able to continue on until now."
Loeb got the career opportunity of a lifetime while she was living in New York City after college, hanging with an artsy circle of friends that included then-rising young actor — and Reality Bites' leading man — Ethan Hawke.
"There was this big group of friends of us, musicians and songwriters and actors and playwrights. We'd just all run around New York together and support each other as well — go to each other's plays, or I would write music for Ethan's theater company, or Ethan would come see me play," she recalled. "So, along the way, he asked me for a copy of my song 'Stay,' which I had written maybe a year before that. I had just recorded a version of the song with my band, Nine Stories, in an apartment on 52nd Street, in the studio where we worked a lot. ... He said, 'They're putting a lot of songs into this movie that I'm shooting, and I think your song might be good for them to hear.' I passed the song on a cassette tape along to Ethan, and Ethan passed it along to the producers of the movie."
When the song was surprisingly chosen for the hot soundtrack, which also featured U2, Lenny Kravitz, Squeeze, and the Knack, Loeb opted not to sign a record deal at the time, instead keeping "Stay" indie and just licensing the track to RCA. (She eventually signed with Geffen for her 1995 album, Tails.) But she still convinced RCA Records executives to fund a music video for the future hit.
"I think the record company let us make a video because Ethan Hawke was directing it, because he was a movie star," Loeb laughed. "But really, the great part about the video was that he decided to shoot it all in one take." Yes, unlike some single-shot music videos that are actually several attempts cleverly edited together, "Stay" really was done in one tracking shot.
"We shot it a million times. ... There are so many outtakes!" Loeb laughed. "Ethan already knew exactly how he wanted to go, even when he explained the idea of it. We were in his kitchen, and he's with this camera, and he's like, 'And you'll stand there, and then we'll go around here, and then you'll come around here...' He had it all choreographed, and I was going to sing to the camera like I was talking to somebody. We had it all worked out. "
But Loeb said she "had a bone to pick with Ethan," because she had a different original vision for the "Stay" shoot. "I really wanted my band to be in the video. ... I was like, 'People need to see that I really play guitar! This is really important to me, my guitar playing!' I studied it for years, and I'm super into it. They needed to see my band, because I'm not a girl; I'm a person with a band," she insisted.
Hawke agreed to film a handful of takes with Nine Stories, but "the artistic expression of just me singing without my guitar told the story so much better than me and my band and my guitar. So, I just went with the stronger creative vision," Loeb explained.
Hawke's full-band shots ended up being among the above-mentioned outtakes, and the rest was pop history. The solo-Loeb "Stay" video had a massive impact, becoming an MTV alternative-rock smash and catapulting the songstress to instant fame. "[The video] communicated the song well, and it sounded and looked really different from other videos that were on [MTV]. ... It was nice having a song that was just written the way I wanted to, which was an unusual song with no chorus," Loeb points out.
But perhaps what truly made the video so memorable was Loeb's look, with her sexy-secretary cat-eye spectacles and little black dress — which, it turns out, was not black, but "a very dark, deep forest green. It's so dark that on camera, it looked black," Loeb revealed. "It was a Betsey Johnson dress. ... I went to Betsey Johnson, to her studio, and she helped me pick out a dress. It was one-of-a-kind, and she helped me hem it. I'm a petite person! ... She personally was on her knees, helping me figure out the length of the dress. And that was [the start of] my long relationship with Betsey Johnson."
It's a style that young women still emulate today, especially with '90s style back in vogue. "I was at Target the other day, right before Halloween, and I was like, 'Here's a Halloween costume of me and anyone else in the '90s!' It was that little dress: short with a little bit of puffed sleeve and a scoop neck," Loeb chuckled.
There were other times in the '90s when Loeb was uncomfortable with how she was presented, like when one stylist dressed her up in heroin chic for a dark, Gothic photo shoot, but she learned from that experience and took those lessons into her long, largely independent career that has spanned 15 full-length albums and 30 singles.
"I was such a strong, business-minded [artist], super into writing music and performing music and knowing about the music business, and yet here I was in this picture before I had been really established, looking really waif-like. It was really negative. I [looked] very thin and very shy," Loeb recalled of that ill-fated photo session. "That's not me. It's an interesting artistic expression, but that's what I remember a lot from those days ... making sure I was presented in a way that felt like me, that looked like me, having that creative control over your presentation of [myself]. I think that's so important, whether you're a businessperson or an artist."
While the public's fixation on Loeb's appearance surprised or even bothered her at first, she grew grateful for the fact that so many young girls — particularly girls who wear glasses — saw her as a fashion role model. "At the beginning, when I was starting to get played on the radio and all that stuff and commercial success was happening, I didn't want to talk about my glasses," she admitted. "I wanted to talk about my music and my guitar playing and all this other stuff, which I thought was more musician-y." But, she noticed, "People stopped me all the time after a while and said, 'Oh my gosh, I feel comfortable wearing my glasses, because you wear yours!' That still happens today. People stop me at airports and grocery stores and they say, 'My little girl will wear her glasses, because you wear glasses.'
"I realized along the way that there was such a connection, and it's such a hobby of mine as well, finding cool glasses," Loeb continued. "That discussion was really important to me, to see how it had changed some kid's life. ... Instead of being put off by the glasses, I was like, 'That's actually my people. These are my people.'"
Loeb even eventually decided to launch her own eyewear line, with each frame named after one of her songs. And there is, of course, a signature "Stay" model.
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