She made wearing glasses and not a lot of make-up cool, and had us invested in the whole geek-chic look as sexy, even before fashion magazines deemed it so. “I always thought she was really clever and liked the way she described things.” My sentiments exactly - well that and I loved her style.
I turned to her and asked what she liked about Lisa Loeb. One of whom was a woman sitting next to me. When I looked up, half the people around the room were bobbing their heads and a few were even mouthing the words. Tails meets the challenge of giving Loeb a clear shot at credibility, confirming that she’s capable of much more than a hit single, but the exquisite “Stay” remains the song on which her career hinges.I was in a coffee shop when I first started writing this post and Lisa Loeb’s 90s hit song, Staycame on. Still, at the first inkling of the guitar introduction to “Stay,” all of the effort and quality preceding it flies out the window. Intensely tuneful but too often prone to repetition of choruses whose content merits one pass through, Tails is a considered and respectable account by a gifted artist with plenty of room to grow. Modulating the presentation to portray Loeb in three dimensions, Tails - which recycles four songs from the cassette - employs solo simplicity (“Sandalwood”), punchy rock (“Taffy,” “Garden of Delights,” “Alone”), surging power pop (the Bangles-like “Waiting for Wednesday”), baroque folk-pop with strings (“It’s Over,” “Hurricane”), even something like country (“Lisa Listen”). Conveniently, that also puts it as far as possible from “It’s Over,” a song which shares its melody. And, to a degree, it succeeds in moving her past The Big Hit, which is wisely saved for the album’s final slot.
Produced slowly by Loeb and boyfriend Juan Patiño (who also recorded her debut) under the glowering cloud of commercial expectations, Tails is a painstaking translation of Loeb’s music into mainstream presentability. Several fine numbers (“It’s Over,” “Come Back Home”) stumble over language offenses: words like “stultify” and “muse,” and references to Hadrian’s Wall are not indicative of acute artistic judgment.
But while the songs demonstrate Loeb’s impressive compositional imagination, they also reveal her blind spot to lyrical clumsiness. Straightforward acoustic-guitar renderings of material both ingratiatingly lovely (“Snow Day,” “Hurricane,” “Guessing Game,” “Do You Sleep”) and irritatingly precious (“This,” “Airplanes,” “Train Song”), the cassette - which does not include “Stay” in any form - suggests the sensitive seriousness of a young Paul Simon. Long before her lucky break, the result of a friendship with actor Ethan Hawke, the Texas émigré had committed ten songs to tape and sold an untitled cassette of them at gigs. Beginning your career at the top leaves little room for missteps.įar from an arriviste sensation, Loeb had been performing with her unstable band, Nine Stories (so named in collegiate tribute to J.D. With the success of “Stay (I Missed You),” New York singer/songwriter Lisa Loeb became a hot property with a pretty voice, horn-rimmed glasses and a millstone around her neck. In the summer of ’94, a smart, sensitive take on modern relationship travails popped off the Reality Bites soundtrack to become the first single by an unsigned artist to ever top the Billboard chart.
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