She’s got a few great early songs that convey a sentiment she summarizes as, You’re really dumb but you used to be cool. But Lisa’s deliberately childlike vocabulary and imagery, it gets to you, it grows on you, it grows in you. That’s from the next song, called “Train Dreams,” and I will be honest and say that my first reaction was, like, well, this ain’t exactly Ani DiFranco in terms of scouring, literary, bare-knuckled hostility. Depending on your personal history, be careful with this Purple Tape, is what I’m saying. I guess that’s preferable to any other reaction. And this part ain’t Lisa Loeb’s fault but my immediate response was, like, revulsion, like, Oh god, I don’t want to be in college, arrrrrrgh. Like I warged into a college student’s body. And as I’m standing in line to vote, I’m not listening to Lisa Loeb at this exact moment, but I’ve got The Purple Tape in my head, milling with all this visceral coffee-shop ambiance, and suddenly, bam, I’m back in college. There’s classrooms, meeting rooms, whatever, but also a coffee shop right in the front, tons of collegiate-ass college students milling about with their laptops, two baristas clinking bottles, grinding beans, spraying foam. Election Day, right: My polling place was a student-union-type building in a tiny university in my town. Lisa’s clear, bright, buoyant, mournful voice Lisa’s clear, bright, deft, and crystalline acoustic guitar. If you even set foot on a college campus in the 1990s-if you have any open mic night experience, collegiate or otherwise, as a participant or as an audience member or as like a hostage- The Purple Tape will take you back there. I will be honest and say that at first, I found The Purple Tape to be unnervingly not abstract. Listening to this song “Snow Day,” you already know what a snow day feels like. As for the songs she was writing, they weren’t raw and totally transparent diary entries, but they weren’t exactly oblique, either. The stylistic freedom of being a singer-songwriter was important to her the songwriter part was especially important to her. She could form a rock or an alt-rock band. Down the line that’d give her more freedom to push her sound more toward rock, alt-rock, whatever. She wanted to be known as a singer-songwriter. She worried any woman with an acoustic guitar was immediately pigeonholed as a folk singer. The reissued CD and streaming version of The Purple Tape includes a lengthy and quite charming interview with Lisa, and she talks a lot about wanting to be perceived back then as a singer-songwriter, not a folk singer. Liz sang lead vocals more often than Lisa, but here’s Lisa singing lead on a song from 1989 called “Bowls and Fishes.” Lisa Loeb was born in Maryland but raised mostly in Dallas in 1990, she graduates with a degree in comparative literature from Brown University up in Providence, Rhode Island, the gilded armpit of New England, where she also forms an acoustic singer-songwriter duo with her friend Elizabeth Mitchell. If I promised to give you $100 if you got it exactly right, I’m guessing you could still not recite, from memory, the exact series of words she’s about to sing here, but I am guessing that you could recite it from memory emotionally. For a song this fundamentally soothing and dulcet and barbed-but-sweet, there’s something very pleasantly off-kilter about what Lisa Loeb sings, and how she sings it. That part perfectly ramps us up to one possible argument for the chorus. “I’m only hearing negative / No no no bad.” And it fits perfectly, in this song, musically and, uh, syntactically. “You say / I talk so all the time / So.” Why does that work, that series of words? Have you ever thought about how clumsy this series of words should be, at least on paper? But even lyrically, the verbal structure, the syntax of this song, is beguilingly odd. There is no chorus, as such, or there are multiple parts of this song that could plausibly be called the chorus. ![]() The most compelling thing to me, lately, about the song “Stay (I Missed You)” by Lisa Loeb-that’s “Stay,” parenthesis, “I Missed You” close parenthesis-is how oddly it’s structured. Matter of fact, I dicked around for so long we’re just getting right to it again.
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