Stiller added the song to the movie soundtrack, and Loeb made history. At the time, Stiller was producing the movie Reality Bites, in which Hawke starred. Loeb ’s neighbor and friend, actor Ethan Hawke, admired her songs and brought a tape of her song “Stay ” to movie producer Ben Stiller. Consider the poetic flow and offhand profundity of these lines: “Some of us hover when we weep for the other who was/Dying since the day they were born/Well, this is not that/I think that I’m throwing, but I’m thrown.Lisa Loeb ’s talent as a folk/pop rock musician was brought into the mainstream with her “discovery ” in 1994. Yet in the midst of all of the breathlessness, she focuses enough to spin out several couplets that really nail the topsy-turvy feeling that romantic mind games can play on you. Considering all of the lines that start with “And,” the song can seem like one big run-on sentence. Loeb’s lyrics definitely capture the breathless way of expressing oneself that was common at the time. “Partially because somebody else is telling you that you’re only hearing what you want to, and that puts you in a little bit of a tailspin.” “It was a story about a breakup I was going through, and that situation where it’s gotten into your head too much,” she said. Helped by the exposure, the song became the first ever by a literally independent artist to top the Billboard Pop charts.Īs Loeb told Songfacts, “Stay (I Missed You)” was inspired by her own personal relationship turmoil. Hawke passed a tape of the song along to the movie’s director Ben Stiller, who promptly put the song in the movie. It seems that Loeb wasn’t even signed to a recording contract but was acquainted with Ethan Hawke, who starred in Reality Bites. That song is “Stay (I Missed You)” by Lisa Loeb and her band Nine Stories, and the story of its success is an unlikely one. (Behold the mating rituals of the heavy-lidded slacker and the over-analytical pixie!) What it did yield was a song that not only succinctly summed up that era but also managed to transcend it. The film was practically anthropological in its look at these strange creatures. Hollywood, of course, tried to put their own spin on this loosely-defined group, with 1994’s Reality Bites being one of the more high-profile examples. At least those are the broad generalizations you’ll get from retrospectives of the era. They wore flannel, they listened to grunge, and their fallback emotion was indifference. It’s been 20 years now since the heyday of Generation X, a catch-all term for the teenagers and twentysomethings of the early 1990’s.
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