Major record companies had already shown interest in Lisa Loeb by the time she moved to New York in the early 1990s.
Ethan Hawke helped her seal the deal.
Loeb was living in an apartment across the street from the future Oscar-nominated actor, often writing music for his theater company. He would often stop by one of her shows.
"He was a friend of a friend from college," Loeb recalls. "We had a real artistic community also in New York City - there were a lot of us who were either just out of college or that same age. Writers, playwrights, songwriting, actors. And we all participated in each others' projects."
That artistic symbiosis paid off for Loeb. Hawke introduced her work to Ben Stiller, who was directing a film Hawke was starring in called Reality Bites. Stiller decided to include one of her songs on the film's soundtrack.
Just a few months later, the one he chose - a sprite, mid-tempo acoustic number called "Stay" - launched Loeb's career, making her the first unsigned artist in history to nab a No. 1 song.
It's been 10 years since the track spent three weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 in late 1994. Reality Bites has been cited as a Gen-X touchstone, while the video for the song - directed by Hawke and featuring both a wandering cat and Loeb's trademark cat glasses - is cemented in the minds of those who grew up in the early days of VH-1.
Loeb still enjoys playing the song. She gets a kick out of the way fans react - whether it be the two girls who started dancing along when she played it during an acoustic set at Trayes Hall on Douglass campus earlier this month or the 20-something who tells her how much they enjoyed the song as a teenager.
"I played it last night in Buffalo, and there were people screaming the words," Loeb said before the Douglass show. "It used to be a little strange to me when people said, 'Oh, you know, when I was a little kid, I'd listen to your song, "Stay."' It used to be kind of strange, but now I realize just because they feel 10 years older, they are. It's a big difference between being 10 and 20, or 13 and 23. "
Loeb's post-"Stay" career has been both successful and varied. She scored another Top 40 hit with the hook-happy "I Do" in 1997, toured with the groundbreaking female-arist-only Lilith Fair the same year, and has recently attracted another group of fans with a show she made with husband Dweezil Zappa on the Food Network called Dweezil And Lisa.
In between, she's released six albums - including her most recent, The Way It Really Is - acted in a handful of movies, and even provided the voice for Mary Jane in MTV's animated Spider-Man series.
"I just like doing a lot of things," Loeb says. "I studied acting a lot in college and in high school, and that was what I wanted to do when I grew up. But music was something that took off more. It was something that the more natural transition, and I didn't want to be an actor walking around New York sitting for headshots. I liked the feeling of playing music."
Loeb's passion for music began in Dallas, where she grew up playing piano and guitar, eventually writing songs by the age of 14. She soon went off to Brown University, teaming up with roommate future Ida singer Elizabeth Mitchell in the duo Liz and Lisa. (The pair recently reformed to release a children's music record called Catch The Moon.) While at Brown, she also played with Duncan Sheik, who would go on to record his own mid-'90s smash, "Barely Breathing."
After briefly attending Berklee School of Music in Boston, Loeb formed the band Nine Stories, and recorded a cassette demo in 1992 that included "Stay," which she recorded in an apartment. She played frequently around Manhattan clubs, doing temp work before a Houston radio station started playing "Stay" off the Reality Bites soundtrack.
Soon, Loeb was signed by Geffen Records and released her debut album, Tails, in 1995. She and Nine Stories also received a Grammy nomination for "Stay" in the Best Pop Performance by a Group with Vocals category.
"We had met with record companies freshman year of college, so it was something I had been working on for six or seven years in a sort of professional mindset," Loeb remembers. "And it seemed like the natural next step - something that was happening little by little.
"In retrospect, though, I realize because I have a lot of other friends who are still making music now who were making music then who still never broke through the commercial side of things. And I realize how special it is to have been able to do that at all, and then have a couple of other songs on the radio. It really helps me to reach out to a much larger crowd."
And she never minds playing her most famous song - simply because she knows the crowd will be expecting it. It's a concept she's familiar with, being a die-hard music fan herself.
"I know when I was growing up, if I went to see a band and they didn't play that song that I knew - even if it was their one song that I knew - if they didn't play it, that was lame. And if they didn't play it the same way or with the same feeling that they originally played it, that was really lame. So just out of respect for that, I want to play it."
It also brings her back to a special - and important - time in her life.
"We recorded it the way we wanted to in an apartment in New York City, we made something that we were really proud of," she says. "So it reminds me of that. It's not like some lame, sell-out song that I had to write to make the record company happy. You know, it's kind of like something you're proud of that you made, and then that's the thing that people know
you from."
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