Reality rules

Nov. 3—Lisa Loeb reached the recording industry's mountaintop before she ever signed a record deal. And then, for the next three decades, she had to figure out a way to, as she might've put it, "Stay."

Loeb, whose hit "Stay (I Missed You)" topped the charts in 1994, has become a master of reinvention. She won a Grammy Award for Best Children's Album in 2018 for Feel What U Feel, and she started a nonprofit organization that sends underserved kids to summer camp. She created her own line of eyewear and a coffee brand, and she hosts a radio show on Sirius XM's '90s on 9 channel.

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Amp Concerts presents Lisa Loeb

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7:30 p.m. Friday, November 3

Immanuel Presbyterian

114 Carlisle Boulevard SE, Albuquerque

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7:30 p.m. Saturday, November 4

Santa Fe Scottish Rite Center

463 Paseo de Peralta

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ampconcerts.org

But for many people, when they hear her name, they're taken back to the 1994 movie, Reality Bites.

Loeb's song "Stay (I Missed You)" played over the film's closing credits, which helped the song shoot to the top spot on the Billboard charts, despite the fact that Loeb had not been signed to a record label. In the days before YouTube and social media, that was unheard of and was the first time that had ever happened. Songwriter Macklemore later topped the Billboard Hot 100 with his song "Thrift Shop" as an unsigned rapper in 2013, and Loeb says she thinks it might be easier these days to reach No. 1 without a record deal.

"I think it was way more unusual when it happened to me, because things were very much tied to the music business and the music industry," says Loeb, who plays shows in Santa Fe and Albuquerque Friday and Saturday, November 3-4. "Now, things are way more independent. Artists are able to record music on their cellphones if they want. You can make a video on your cell phone if you want.

"You can get music out to people immediately without having to go through a whole system we used to have to go through to reach a lot of people. A lot of us sold cassette tapes out of boxes at shows after we performed. ... I think it's easier to reach people now. But you still have to learn how to connect with the right people that might be interested in what you're making."

Despite her early success, Loeb was hardly an overnight sensation.

She and her siblings — a troupe that includes classical pianist and conductor Benjamin Loeb — started taking piano lessons at an early age, and Loeb says she was writing songs by age 6 or 7.

By the time she was in high school, her band had enough of a following that the group was already selling cassette tapes of their songs. Loeb attended Brown University in Rhode Island and began playing in a band with Elizabeth Mitchell called Liz and Lisa, with future recording artist Duncan Sheik supporting them on guitar. Later, Loeb went to Boston's renowned Berklee College of Music for a summer session and formed the band Nine Stories — it was at that point that she recorded "Stay (I Missed You)."

However, the song didn't reach a mass audience until several years later.

Loeb moved to New York and began to build a following; by coincidence, she befriended actor Ethan Hawke, who brought "Stay" on a cassette tape to Ben Stiller, who was directing Hawke in Reality Bites. Stiller decided to use it in the movie soundtrack, and Loeb was soon a top-of-the-charts sensation.

"It was amazing having a song go to No. 1 — it also upped the ante," she says. "I definitely connected with way more people over those handful of months that it took to get to No. 1 and to come back from No. 1. It gave me a big leg up to have a song on the radio like that. And people still connect to the song 'Stay' today. I still connect with it. For a lot of people, it opens the door to hear other music I do or other projects I'm involved with."

After later releasing three solo albums, Loeb reunited with her college bandmate Mitchell in 2003 to release Catch the Moon, a folky-acoustic children's album with an accompanying book. She returned to that genre multiple times in future releases, penning songs for children and also an album, Camp Lisa, that celebrated her youthful summers in camp.

That led her to her nonprofit endeavor, Camp Lisa, which sends underserved children to summer camp so they can experience the same fun that Loeb did. In that same youthful groove, Loeb released a Silly Sing-Along album in 2011 and a Nursery Rhyme Parade in 2015.

She's released six children's albums in all and says that playing songs for kids unlocked her creativity and served as a portal to a simpler time in her life.

"I made a couple of family-friendly records, and when I was trying to figure out what to do next, I realized that my summer camp songs were some of the songs that meant the most to me," she says. "Just playing guitar at summer camp, remembering how social it was to play guitar and how creative it was to make up songs at camp, I wanted to share that experience."

The genre mattered less to her than connecting with people. The creative aspects of making albums always come first, Loeb says, but after nailing down those elements, she tries to figure out how to best make it resonate.

"Making something is really magical, whether people hear it or not," she says. "But connecting with people is another chapter of creativity."

She wasn't a mom at the time she got into creating children's music, but Loeb loved the children's album Free to Be You and Me, released by various artists in 1972, and says she was inspired by the Carole King album Really Rosie as a youngster.

"I loved from the 1970s that combination of earnestness, silliness, humor, and cleverness. Great melodies. Great production," she says. "I loved my own childhood relationship with summer camp and music at summer camp, so I wanted to live in that world and started making kids' records. And it wasn't until later that I actually had kids and I realized there were songs I hadn't recorded, like nursery rhymes, which I hadn't thought a lot about until I had kids."

That arc of her career reached a fitting denouement in 2018, when her album, Feel What U Feel, won a Grammy. Loeb praises collaborators such as Craig Robinson and Ed Helms (both musically inclined The Office alums) for working with her on it and says many of the songs have crept into her grown-up set.

For Loeb, decades after "Stay," the Grammy represented more than just the realization of her early promise. It meant that she had followed her own muse once again and had touched a lot of people in the process.

"I really try to go and follow what I enjoy doing," she says of listening to her inner compass. "And then I try to do it really well. I collaborate with people when I feel like it's going to make the project even better or make it more efficient. But as a mom of two children with a lot of different projects happening all the time, it can get a little unwieldy if I don't watch it."