I met my favourite singer!

Lisa Loeb!

When you’re a fan the most amazing thing you sometimes get to do is meet your idol. Yesterday, that dream came true for me when I had the chance to meet Lisa Loeb. Because of border closures and social distancing, this was all online, but still incredible!

25 Years!

Lisa Loeb was celebrating the 25^th anniversary of the release of her album Tails. She did a live online concert, which blew me away! She is such a talented musician. The cool thing about it being online was that I got to see her close up, which would be impossible at a live concert. I could see the delicate precision she has over the strings of her guitar. Her voice rang pure and unobstructed by other noises. She also interacted with the audience by having a live stream of comments and questions that she responded to between songs. It was surprisingly intimate.

Lisa became my favourite singer 25 years ago when I fell in love with this album, Tails. The song Stay was a massive hit from this album and I connected with its raw feeling and emotional angst immediately. All the other songs on Tails and subsequent albums have all struck a chord with me (pun intended).

The music and Lisa’s voice both conjures such emotion, but the lyrics are often what strikes my heart. They are mostly obscure lyrics that can be interpreted many ways, and I’ve certainly interpreted them in different ways at different stages of my life, so they’ve always been relatable.

Stay

The first song I fell in love with (as did most of Lisa’s fans) was Stay.

I related a lot to the line: I’m only hearing negative, no no no, bad

It was like Lisa was singing my thoughts. Although I wasn’t actually hearing negative things at the time I was often interpreting everything as negative. I was struggling with depression and wasn’t talking to anyone about it so hearing these words spoken allowed, where I could sing along, was a release for me.

The song finishes:

And you say,
“Stay”
You say
“I only hear what I want to”

And it always broke my heart. Was she so inflexible that she couldn’t hear that she was loved? Was her partner actually negative and it was a good thing she didn’t ‘hear’? Is she saying that she did hear despite that her partner accuses her of not hearing? I had so many questions. The questions didn’t need to be answered or absolute, in fact, I found it more appealing to imagine it all myself.

Snow Day

Snow day starts with the lyrics:

It’s a bad day,
It’s a train ride
It’s a bad day
You’re my medicine.

Oh yeah, could I relate to that! It’s a bad day… a day where everything seems to drag on like a never-ending uncomfortable train ride. What was my medicine? Books! Escaping to other worlds in books; and, obviously, music! Lisa Loeb was my ‘medicine’.

The song ends with:

You’ll say, “You’re not too tire for this life,
And it’s not gonna matter if you fall down twice.”

It was a reminder that on my bad days I can still find strength in myself and if I ‘fell down’ I could find the strength to stand again. It’s no wonder that I often listen to Lisa Loeb’s music (and particularly Snow Day) when I’m feeling low.

Garden of Delights

I love this song for its slight evilness. Just check out these lyrics:

You are my Jesus boy, you’re laying on a bedly cross,
I’ve got you taped up to the wall.
But really don’t feel bad, ’cause you do to me all the things I do to you,
I do to you.

They are sung with a bit of a snarl in her voice, a bit of contempt, and I love it!! She then breaks into a fun scat that feels sort of sinister but fun at the same time.

That’s just the one album!

If you’re interested in having a listen (which I highly recommend) you can click the links above which will take you to youtube. Let me know what you think.