FEATURE:
Groovelines
Lisa Loeb & Nine Stories - Stay (I Missed You)
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ONE of the defining songs…
of the 1990s, everyone can recognise Lisa Loeb & Nine Stories’ Stay (I Missed You). Released in May 1994 as the lead single from the original movie soundtrack, Reality Bites (1994), it was written and composed by Loeb. Originally, Stay (I Missed You) was originally conceived in 1990, though Loeb deciding to use the song herself. It is said that Loeb's neighbour and friend, actor Ethan Hawke, heard the song and passed it to Ben Stiller for use in the film he was directing, Reality Bites. The song plays over the film's closing credits. It is a marvellous song that has one of the best choruses of any written I think. I am going to end with critical reaction to Stay (I Missed You). In one of the best years for music (1994), Lisa Loeb & Nine Stories’ classic stands out as one of the greatest of that year. It went to number-one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. One of the great things is that she was the first artist to top the U.S. chart before being signed to any record label. That happens today, but it was extremely rare in the 1990s. Stereogum run a feature where they examine number one songs and give the background and their opinions on them. They covered Stay (I Missed You) in March. I have chosen a few sections from the extensive feature (American Songwriter have also written wonderfully about the song):
“Lisa Loeb started to write “Stay (I Missed You)” when she was still at Berklee. She’d just gotten into a bad fight with her producer and long-term boyfriend Juan Patiño. As she continued to work on the song, Loeb learned that Daryl Hall, a guy who’s been in this column a bunch of times, was looking for songs for a solo project. Loeb usually wrote strummy, folky songs, but she tried to tailor “Stay (I Missed You)” to Hall’s sensibilities. Years later, Loeb told Genius, “I was trying to come up with something that was a little bit R&B, but good for [Hall’s] voice. So I came up with that guitar… It’s not a riff. It was just chord changes, and it felt kind of R&B groovy-ish, for me, at the time.” Loeb never got the chance to play “Stay (I Missed You)” for Daryl Hall. (Loeb met Hall after “Stay” has already been a hit, and she got to tell him that she wrote it for him. He never had any idea.)
Lisa Loeb kept “Stay” for herself, and she noticed that people liked it when she played the song at her own shows. When she was living in New York, Loeb was friendly with Ethan Hawke, the young movie star who’d broken out in 1989’s Dead Poets Society. Loeb and Hawke had mutual friends, and they lived across the street from each other in Manhattan. Hawke’s character in Reality Bites has a go-nowhere band called Hey, That’s My Bike, and the script called for him to sing a song called “I’m Nuthin’.” Hawke asked Loeb to write “I’m Nuthin’,” and she did, but her version didn’t make it into Reality Bites. Instead, David Baerwald, formerly half of the duo David & David, wrote the “I’m Nuthin'” that Hawke sang in the movie. (David & David’s only charting single, 1986’s “Welcome To The Boomtown,” peaked at #37.)
But Ethan Hawke still wanted Lisa Loeb to be a part of Reality Bites. A few days after Loeb’s “I’m Nuthin'” got rejected, Hawke went to see Loeb play live, and he liked “Stay (I Missed You).” Hawke sent a cassette copy of the song to Ben Stiller and to music supervisor Karyn Rachtman, and they liked it enough to make it the film’s end-credits song.
Originally, the song was just called “Stay,” but the soundtrack people changed the title. In Fred Bronson’s Billboard Book Of Number 1 Hits, Loeb addresses the issue of awkward song-title parentheses head-on: “We decided to add ‘I Missed You’ as a parenthetical, which I vowed I would never do because I always see the parentheticals in the Beatles’ songbooks and I never understand how they picked that parenthetical as a parenthetical.” Shout out to dorked-out English majors making #1 hit songs. It doesn’t happen often, but today, we are represented.
The Reality Bites soundtrack is mostly a nice little collection of ’80s pop nuggets and mid-’90s alt-rock jams. When the soundtrack came out, RCA didn’t pick any particular single to push; they just sent the whole thing to radio stations. A few of the songs ended up getting some traction, though it varied from station to station. Ben Stiller himself directed the video for the Juliana Hatfield Three’s “Spin The Bottle,” which became a minor alt-rock radio hit.
Reality Bites also gave nice little bumps to the Knack’s “My Sharona” and Squeeze’s “Tempted.” Unfortunately, it also made a hit out of Big Mountain’s shitty reggae-pop cover of Peter Frampton’s “Baby, I Love Your Way.” (The Big Mountain cover peaked at #6. It’s a 3.) But “Stay (I Missed You)” became the song from Reality Bites. The video had a lot to do with that.
Ethan Hawke, who’d only ever directed a short called Straight To One, helmed the “Stay (I Miss You)” video himself. The cat in the video is Hawke’s cat, though the empty apartment is not Hawke’s empty apartment. The whole thing is one extended camera shot, with Lisa Loeb running through the apartment and singing directly to the camera. The idea was that the clip would re-create the argument from the song, putting you, the viewer, in the shoes of the boyfriend. That’s not really what happened, though. Loeb never seems angry in the “Stay” video. Instead, she comes off dewy and romantic. She’s also super fucking hot, and she’s a kind of super fucking hot that was pretty rare in the circa-’94 pop-culture mainstream. A whole lot of people bought cat’s-eye glasses after the “Stay” video came out, and Loeb eventually started her own line of spectacles. The light in the video is a kind of light that only exists in the films of the mid-’90s. That video a beautiful piece of work, and it stood out boldly on MTV and VH1.
The song itself stood out, too. Lyrically, “Stay” is a little bit scattered, which makes sense; most couples’ arguments are scattered. It’s not clear whether Loeb’s narrator is about to break up with this guy. (Loeb and Juan Patiño did stay together for a while. Patiño produced “Stay” and a bunch of Loeb’s later records.) The issue seems to be these two people’s respective images of each other not lining up. He says she only hears what she wants to. She doesn’t listen hard, and she doesn’t pay attention to the distance that he’s running or to anyone, anywhere. She thinks that she’s throwing, but she’s thrown. He says that she’s naïve, but she thought that she was strong. They can’t make sense of the dissonance”.
A lot of songs from the 1990s have not aged well and have lost their spark. Brilliantly written by Loeb and with excellent production from Juan Patiño, Stay (I Missed You) is a timeless classic that will live for decades. Wikipedia collated reaction and critical reception to a beautiful song:
"Stay (I Missed You)" was well received by music critics. Larry Flick of Billboard wrote: "Harmonic rock ballad from New York-based upstarts perfectly balances on the fine line between modern rock, AC, and top 40 pop sensibilities. With a vulnerable, determined delivery, Loeb's vocals recall the sweetness of the Sundays' Harriet Wheeler and the brashness of Edie Brickell." In the UK, Alan Jones from Music Week stated that "its pleasing amalgam of semi-acoustic stumming and sublime vocals is attractive enough to do rather well." Mark Surtherland in Smash Hits predicted UK chart success akin to that on the US charts, calling it "a rather touching acoustic ballad thingy in its own right. Just right for when you're feeling a bit angstful, and could be just as big here. In his retrospective review of the album Tails, Stephen Thomas Erlewine from AllMusic said: "Tails delivers on the promise of 'Stay'. While the basic folk-rock elements of the song are present, much of the material on the record doesn't sound like her breakthrough hit; there are some distorted guitars here and there, and she even rocks out a little bit. Nothing on Tails is as good as 'Stay'." In 2005, Erlewine wrote of the song in a review of The Very Best of Lisa Loeb. He said "'Stay (I Missed You)' took her from obscurity to minor celebrity when it was included on the soundtrack of Reality Bites [...] While Loeb never strayed very far from the sweet, gentle template she laid down with 'Stay (I Missed You),' she always was friendly, melodic, and rather ingratiating."
Almost twenty years after the release of Reality Bites, Jim Beviglia from American Songwriter wrote: "What [Reality Bites] did yield was a song that not only succinctly summed up that era but also managed to transcend it [...] Lisa Loeb's 'Stay (I Missed You)' is not just the relic of a specific era. It still resonates with anyone who ever loved someone not mature enough to properly reciprocate.” Rhik Samadder from The Guardian centered the song in an "Old Music" article, praising the song saying: "Listening to the song now is like looking into a crystal ball backwards, seeing myself looking into it forwards. For that convoluted and dubious reason, whenever I hear Stay, I always turn the radio up".
I love the story behind Stay (I Missed You) and how a film helped bring it to the fore and make Lisa Loeb a big name. The song did appear on her 1995 albums, Tails. Whilst not one of her best albums, she has gone on to release some magnificent albums. 2020’s A Simple Trick to Happiness is one of her most personal and best. I wonder whether she has an opinion on her best-known song. It is played heavily today and has this simplicity and charm that means it will continue to resonate and influence musicians for years to come. It is one of my favourite songs from the 1990s, and it is one I play to this day. It is a simply brilliant track from…
A magnificent songwriter.