60 Songs That Explain the '90s - “Stay (I Missed You)”—Lisa Loeb

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

Rob is joined by ‘Boy Meets World’ star and host of the podcast ‘Boy Meets 90’s’ Rider Strong to look back at Lisa Loeb’s 1994 hit “Stay (I Missed You).” Along the way, Rob dives into whether Winona chose the right guy in ‘Reality Bites,’ the ‘Reality Bites’ soundtrack, mourning a high school friend, and much more. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Rider Strong Producer: Justin Sayles Associate Producer: Jonathan Kermah Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

An Instagram post gets an unexpected boost. A TikTok catches in the algorithm. Sometimes that's all it takes to launch someone into internet fame. But then what? This blew up is a new podcast documentary that reveals how social media stardom is made. It's a different kind of fame. That's not always as glamorous as it looks. From Spotify and the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Alyssa Boresnak.

You can listen to This Blue Up on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen, do you want to dick around for the next 10, 15, 20, 45 minutes? Do you want to indulge a series of whimsical digressions? Do you want to perambulate? Or should we just get right to it? Let's just get right to it. Did Wynonna end up with the wrong guy? What is it that you want for me, huh?

What is it? You want me to get a job on the line for the next 20 years until I'm granted leave with my gold-plated watch in my balls full of tumors because I surrendered the one thing that means shit to me. Well, honey, you can just exhale because it's not going to happen, not in this lifetime. Because she ends up with this guy.

Spoiler alert, I guess, for the 28-year-old romantic comedy reality bites. Yikes. Me telling you that this movie is 28 years old is way ruder. Then spoiling it, I do apologize. Reality Bites, 1994, starring

Wynona Ryder as a Shane-smoking, college valedictorian and aspiring documentarian adrift romantically and otherwise in Grunge Era Houston. Love Triangle will Winona end up with Ben Stiller, who directed this movie and also plays a bumbly but kind-hearted yuppie with a carphone and a Peter Frampton fetish and a soulless gig as an empty suit for a lame stain MTV-style network called In Your Face TV? or will she end up with this knucklehead? Ethan Hawk is 23 years old when this movie comes out in 1994.

And if you're wondering why here, our friend Ethan Hawk, is trying to sound like current 72-year-old Tom Waits after Tom sprinted up a mountain with a grand piano on his back. Perhaps there's also a grizzly bear playing the grand piano on Tom's back as Tom sprints. It's called acting. Look it up. This song is called I'm Nothing. N-U-T-H-I-N-A-N-A-Postrophe, because spelling nothing that way is realer. Listen to the way the word man dies in his throat, like a warthog with emphysema. That's pure 1994 masculinity, my friends.

That's a little something called reality. Helen Childress wrote the screenplay for Reality Bites. She says, did you know it's reality bites? as in sound bites. It's like verity little bites of reality and not necessarily reality sucks. Huh.

Ethan Hawk is singing in character, I suppose, as the free loading, smoldering, mansplaining, evocatively goate, provocatively inert. I can fix him ass,

philosopher, poet, leaky dreamboat, who does indeed somehow end up with Wynonna like 12 minutes of screen time after singing this song, which does indeed appear

on the platinum-selling reality bites soundtrack tastefully sandwiched between tracks by Lenny Kravitt and Dinosaur Jr. Chorus. You can tell it to the chorus because after he sings it, he stops singing for a while. Sometimes that's the only way to tell

where the chorus is. I really like Ethan Hawk. Man, first reformed, Boyhood before sunrise. Juliet Naked. Juliet Naked is a rad movie. Sincerely, he sings way better in that one. Ethan Hawk makes great movies.

This movie, Reality Bites, is arguably a semi-great movie. This is a pro-ethin-Hawk shop. Why am I being such a grumpus about this? Maybe it's because Wynonna ends up with the wrong guy. Maybe. Some of their time, perhaps, we will gingerly attempt to address the Wynonna rider of it all, right? the late 80s forward, this staggering and mysterious power that the young star of Beetlejuice, heathers, and Edward Scissorhands wielded. I mean a specific but seemingly quite large subset of

growly but sweet alt-rock songwriters. I don't mean her actual dating history, the tabloid aspect. I mean all the songs people just assume were written about and thirstily addressed to Winona Ryder. Her vibe was exactly half clueless and half the crow is how I will vaguely and gingerly describe my sense of her appeal. This phenomenon spans the decades, I suppose. There is a late 80s Bay Area punk band called the Winona Riders. That's funny and also rude. There's a mid-2010s noisy Canadian rock band called Winona Forever.

That's a tattoo reference. Leave it alone. More to the point, there are anecdotally somewhere between 550,000 rock and roll songs called Wynonna Rider. These songs span the decades as well. though, Unrest, the great Washington, D.C. art pop band, Unrest has one of the better songs called Winona Ryder from the early 90s. And that's before you get to all the songs not literally called Winona Ryder that are nonetheless allegedly about Winona Ryder. Yes,

including the Primus One, leave that alone as well, all with varying degrees of plausible deniability, right? A forlorn power pop ballad from 1991 called Just Winona isn't necessarily about that Wynonna, right? No, I'm sorry, but this is totally about that Wynonna. This is Matthew Sweet. The great, the stupendous, the power pop God, Matthew

Sweet. This song is just called Winona. It's from his 1991 album, Girlfriend, which is my favorite album of 1991, if you want the truth. I'm not joking even a little bit. And I love this song profoundly. Oh my God, the pedal steel. Even if I can also be like,

Hell yeah, shoot your shot, Matthew. I can't believe I'm even good-naturedly mocking this song. I love this song. I don't mind telling you. Seriously, when he sings just I feel alone a couple times at the end, I was 13 when this record came out. This whole record girlfriend is My Abbey Road. Dude, I'm still not joking.

But yeah, the Wynonna Ryder of it all feels relevant here. Reality Bites is not just a mid-90s rom-com with slacker ass all rock overtones. It's a mid-90s rom-com with slacker ass all rock overtones that literally stars literally Winona rider. So in the movie, Wynonna's got a camcorder and she's making this documentary about her friends, right? They're super 90s emotional travails. Janine Garoflo gets promoted at the gap and takes an AIDS test. Steve Zon comes out to his conservative mother. And Wynonna's supportive lamestain boyfriend, Ben Stiller, tries to sell her documentary to his bullshit sub-MTV network.

work, but they botch it and commercialize it, man, and she's betrayed, and Ben Stiller just doesn't get her. In this documentary, it's not about the money or anybody even seeing it or whatever, and Wynonna ends up with Ethan Hawke, even after he angrily sings a violent femme song at her. Dick move, fellas, I cannot in good conscience recommend the song, I'm nothing, but then again, Ethan Hawking didn't write it. Future Cheryl Crowe collaborator, David Bearwald wrote it, and he's cool. So let's say David wrote this song and character. And meanwhile, Ethan didn't write the movie either. At least that line's not in the movie.

All right, my favorite thing about Reality Bites is how mad Roger Ebert got about this movie. God-tier film critic Roger Ebert. Two stars, says Roger Ebert, who goes on to trash Wynona's characters' documentary footage at great length, given that Roger is writing a daily news. newspaper movie review. Quote, the camera operator is no notion of how to frame a shot, how to hold the camera steady, or how to choose subject matter. The result looks like something that might have been obtained by the monkey cam on the Letterman program, end quote, look it up, kids. Furthermore, Winona's footage captures, quote, callow in superficial behavior by kids

who do not inspire us to wish we knew them better, end quote, furthermore, Quote, On the basis of the footage we are allowed to see, why known his character is not a filmmaker, but simply someone who plays with a video camera. Nor are the Frenchy photographs especially interesting. What Ben Stiller's characters people do to the footage is an improvement. And Ethan Hawke's character is a self-centered prig

who is not half as clever as he thinks he is. End quote. In conclusion. Quote, But of course these observations go against the deep-seated prejudices of the movie, which are that anyone who shoots documentary video footage of friends is a genius, anyone who is pushing 30 and as a good job has sold out, and anyone who is simultaneously unemployed and hostile is a reservoir of truth.

What strange force walks filmmakers into cliches and conventions. What unwritten law prevented the makers of reality bites from observing that their heroin can't shoot video worth a damn, that their hero is a jerk, and that their villain is the most interesting person in the movie, end quote. Roger Ebert is the literal best. Let me make two confessions here. I watch reality bites on VHS in 1994 or 95 somewhere in there with my high school buddy Dave. Dave had the coolest mixtape, physical cassette mixtape, that his cool older brothers, even

cooler friend had made for him. Just a fascinating archetype for a 90s teenager. Your friend's cool older brothers, even cooler friend. This dude, if I recall correctly, was crashing on Dave's family's couch at the time. Very cool. He's in his early 20s maybe, and he seemed to spend his days talking about chicks and playing Jurassic Park for Super Nintendo. That's what I have chosen to remember about this guy.

I guess this is growing up. Seemed idyllic. I guess the guy made cool mixtapes, too. The first song on Dave's cool older brothers, even cooler friends' mixtape was by the violent femmes. My first confession is that at 17, I thought this song was hilarious. Have mercy on me.

I got girl trouble up the end. Girl Trouble by the Violent Femmes from the 1991 album, Why Do Birds Sing? This is not the Violent Fem song. Ethan Hawke angrily sings at Wynonna in reality bites. That's added up, of course. Why can't I get just one screw, etc.? The hero is definitely a jerk in that moment. The first Violent Femmes record, self-titled from 1983 with a little girl peeking in the window in the cover.

Blister in the sun is like the fifth best song in the record. That record is unbelievable, dude. But so now you got a picture two Uber knucklehead 17-year-olds, tooting around the suburbs. There's me riding shotgun in Dave's beat-up Honda Civic. I think might put my feet up on the dash and accidentally broke one of his air conditioning vents. Sorry about that, Dave.

And we're listening to Dave's cool older brothers, even cooler friends' mixtape, and we're just tittering our asses off at this shit. Coolest guy I knew when I was 17. My second confession is that Dave and I watched reality bites together, sat on the couch together, and we totally thought Winona ended up with the right guy. Ben Stiller was so lame, man, with his job, and his suit and his convertible, and his respect for Winona's feelings and his less smoldering handsomeness. And we tittered our asses off at the very last scene of the movie when Winona and Ethan Hawk are smooching on the couch.

He's singing a blue song, and she jumps on it. and they're smooching and they ignore a phone call. We get to hear Ethan Hawke's outgoing answering machine message. Please leave your name, number, and a brief justification for the onological necessity of modern man's existential dilemma. And we'll get back to you. As a connoisseur, as a dabbler myself in amusing outgoing answering machine messages at that point in my life, I was just delighted by Ethan Hawke in this moment when I was 17.

Now that I am not 17, I am somewhat less. delighted by Ethan Hawke in reality bites. He uses the phrase Wankarama. He answers the phone by saying, Hello, you've reached the winter of our discontent. He disparages his romantic rival. That's Ben, by saying, did he dazzle you with his extensive knowledge of mineral water? Or was it his in-depth analysis of Marky Mark that finally reeled you in? Very 1994 reference. He describes life as a random lottery of meaningless tragedy and a series of near escapes. He describes his life philosophy as, I smoke my camel straits and I ride my own melt.

Tell it to your blog. He woo's the woman of his dreams. That's Winona by saying, You are the only woman that I could ever commit myself to. And I never had sex with somebody that I loved before. And I'm the only real thing that you have. Jesus. This guy's like if a Drake album could play acoustic guitar. I can't dunk. I suck at basketball in general, but I'm just tall enough that I probably should be able to dunk, but I can't. But I will totally dunk on Ethan Hawk and Reality Bites. I will make an exception. Remember when Vince Carter jumped over the seven-foot French guy at the Olympics? I will do that shit to Ethan Hawk and Reality Bites. There's your fucking existential dilemma. The only redeeming thing about Ethan Hawke in this movie is that his band is named, Hey, that's my bike.

Hey, comma, that's my bike exclamation point. Fantastic band name, truly. Everything else about him, forget it. He has no job. He has no onima. He has no plausible career path. He has no ambitions of any kind beyond smooch wine on a rider, which, okay, but what's the long-term play here, Ethan, what's the medium term? What's the short term play? Having a job at all is uncool. Getting paid anything for doing something, even if that's something really matters to you,

sucks. For that matter, anyone who's nice to you and wants to help you get paid for what you love to do, that person sucks too. That's the explicit thesis of reality bites. Roll the credits. The first song playing over the credits to reality bites is when you come back to me.

by the Urbane and agreeable English rock band World Party. Dig the sax, man. We got Bowie vibes happening, Young Americans era. I'm into it. The best world party song is called Is It Like Today? That's not exactly a hot take, but it's the truth. But I will say that this song is our friend Bill Simmons's favorite song on the Reality Bites soundtrack.

Or anyway, Bill complained to me once that this song is not available on the current streaming service version of the Reality Bites soundtrack. Here in the mid-90s, of course, we're in the golden era of Primo, Alt Rock, Junk Dore movie soundtracks. Teenagers are buying millions of copies of CDs for $20 a pop, so let's just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. And some of those soundtracks stuck, of course. Choose your fighters. Singles, Clueless, The Crow, Judgment Night, still not a real movie. Empire Records, The Crow City of Angels, spawn, Beavis and Butthead, Do America, Train Spotting, Mallrats, Anchors, Anchorage, Anchorage, Anchorage, Anchorage, Anchorage, Anchorage, Anchorage, Anchorage, Anchorage, Anchorage. that's the best one, etc.

But with apologies to my dear friends and employers at Spotify, I must now speak my truth. And my truth is that the very best way to hear the reality bite soundtrack in full now is a cassette rip on YouTube, some hero who directly ripped his or her physical cassette version of the reality bite soundtrack onto YouTube. The physical cassette is in the YouTube image. That's how you know it's real.

That is the precise level of audio fidelity. This specific nostalgic jaunt requires. I may in fact be catastrophically altering that precise level of audio fidelity by playing you Spotify podcast excerpts sourced from a YouTube rip of a cassette tape. But what are you going to do? Here's the Indians doing Bed of Roses. The Indians are nominally based in Los Angeles, I think, or at least the singer is. Looking this band up on the internet is more challenging than I'd prefer.

You know, that's what you get for calling yourself that sort of way. The best song from the Indians, though, is look up to the sky, which I believe appeared on the alt-rock junk drawer soundtrack to the 1993 film, California. It's California with a K. I never saw that movie. I don't know what the deal is with the K. The Reality Bight soundtrack sold 1.2 million copies in America and peaked at number 13 on the Billboard album chart. I don't know that this record as a whole is terribly helpful in explaining the 90s to anybody, including people living in the 90s.

It might explain how the 70s and early 80s still loomed somewhat unnaturally over the early 90s. Very arguably, with apologies to Ethan Hawth, the three most significant musical moments in the movie Reality Bites are as follows. Number one, when Winona and all are young and pretty friends dance in a gas station convenience store to My Sharona. by the knack, a phenomenal power pop song from 1979. Number two, when just Wynonna and Janine Garofalo are driving and singing along to Tempted by Squeeze, a phenomenal power pop adjacent soul song from 1981. And number three, when Wynonna and Ben Stiller trade freckles in the back of his lame convertible whilst listening to Baby I Love Your Way from fucking Frampton comes a lot.

from 1976, none more 70s. Ben Stiller's character literally says, Rampton comes alive, that album might totally change my life, to literally early 90s, Wynonna Ryder in this movie before smooching her.

And if that's supposed to make us think of him as a yuppy, lame-stained villain with no taste, well, jokes on you, pal. Because the most stream song from the reality bites soundtrack on Spotify now, is the reggae band Big Mountains cover of Baby I Love Your Way. Ben Stiller wooes Wynonna with 1976 Peter Frampton.

Ethan Hawkins salts Winona with 1983 Violent Femmes. Ethan Hawk wins. Inexplicable. Nobody smolders that much. Chuck Closterman recently wrote a book about the 90s called The 90s. It's fantastic, of course. And within 25 pages, he's deep into reality bites. And Chuck says basically that at the time,

there was a generational divide, right? Roger Ebert was 51 years old when he reviewed reality bites. And of course, stuffy 50-year-olds would think that Wynonna should end up with stuffy, terminally uncooled Ben Stiller. But all the cool teenagers and 20-somethings would side with cool, lethargic,

and real Ethan Hawke. Right? But in retrospect, across generational divides, I think there is a pro-Benzhiller consensus. Chuck writes, as it turns out, the mid-90s were the only time when the validity of this romantic conclusion was the prevailing youth perspective. It's an isolated freestanding period where a person's unwillingness to view his existence as a

commodity was prioritized over another person's actual personality, an authentic jerk, was preferable to a likable sellout." End quote. Ben Stiller's last scene in the movie with Winona, he offers her plane tickets to New York so she can pay Mitch, the TV executives, her version of her movie. He apologizes profusely. He is super supportive. What a dill hole.

I think even in real time, this movie knew that Wynonna made the wrong choice. So it's got to stack the deck a bit. He smooches with Ethan Hawk, roll credits. But then there's quickly a mid-credit scene where we find out that Ben Stiller went on to produce a trashy TV show that obviously rips off Wynonna's documentary. It's like a Hail Mary pass to make him the best. bad guy. Doesn't work. Bad choice, Winona. Weird movie. Anyway, roll the credits again. My name is Rob Harvilla. This is the 80th episode of 60 songs that explain the 90s, and this week we're talking about Stay. I missed you by Lisa Loeb from the Reality Bites soundtrack. The first song from an

unsigned from an independent artist to hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100. You know the next song from an independent artist to hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 Maclemore's Thrift Shop in 2012 make of that what you will anyway I apologize for all the dicking around One super annoying thing

about watching movies on streaming services now is that they try to stop you from watching the credits within like five seconds they try to kick you to another movie real quick I rewatch reality bites on peak The not exactly first-tier NBC streaming service Peacock. And right after Lisa Loeb finished just that line, like 15 seconds into this song, Peacock tries to punt me to a 2020 rom-com called My Best Friends Bouquet.

I haven't seen that movie either. I got no opinion on it one way or the other. But like, don't interrupt me while I'm listening to this song. Matter of fact, I digs so all the time. around for so long, we're just getting right to it. Again, the most compelling thing to me lately about the song, Stay, I missed you by Lisa Loeb, that stay parentheses, I missed you, close parentheses, is how oddly it's structured. There is no chorus as such, or there are multiple parts of this song that could plausibly

be called the chorus. But even lyrically, the verbal structure, the syntax of this song is beguilingly odd. 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? I'm only hearing negative, no, no, no bad, and it fits perfectly in this song, musically and syntactically. That part perfectly ramps us up to one possible argument for the chorus.

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. If I promise 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. Well, well, throwing throne. Great song, weird song. weird song whose greatness is enhanced by its weirdness. All right. Can we mix it up, possibly? Shake up the format and whatnot. I wonder if we could actually do this in reverse chronologically. Start at the end. Let's try it. Lisa Loeb's doing great. Married, couple kids, actress, reality TV veteran, food TV veteran, got her own line of coffee, got her own line of eyeglasses.

She co-wrote and co-produced a musical called Together Apart. Her charity sends kids. to camp. That's dope. She seems great. Her last album from 2020 is called A Simple Trick to Happiness. Here is a tender piano ballad called I Wanna Go First. I saw that song title and I thought, is she saying, is this about, yep? Trampled by rhinos or crushed by a train. It might sound extreme, but it's really quite sane. I did not predict that Lisa Loeb would sing the phrase trampled by rhinos, however, just to clarify. I wondered if it was a love song about how she wanted to die first, but that's as far as I got. The image of Lisa Loeb trampled by rhinos, I did not anticipate having to deal with this image today.

Wow. That's a failure of imagination on my part. That's on me. There's a video for this song, dude. There are no rhinos in it. true is definitely worse. However hard you think it is to write a song this goofy, but also this achingly sincere, it's like 500 times harder. Great song, weird song. A simple trick to happiness is Lisa Loeb's ninth album for adults. She's also put out six children's albums, six albums of kids' music, starting in 2003.

Her last children's album from 2016 called Feel What You Feel won the Grammy for Best Best Children's album. Me, I'm partial to her 2008 kids album, Camp Lisa, if only because it includes a song called The Disappointing Pancake. It slipped upon some syrup and the butter ricocheted. Then it rolled, and it rolled, and it rolled, and it rolled, and it rolled a disappointing pancake. Great song. Steve Martin on banjo.

This isn't working, though. Reverse chronology is too weird. What the hell? Sorry, that's on me. Also. So let's start over. Let's get right to it. Let's get right to it for the last time. 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. They call themselves Liz and Lisa. They get quite popular on campus. They make a few records. Liz sang lead vocals more often than Lisa, but here's Lisa singing lead on a song from 1989 called Bowls and Fishes. That's funny. They graduate from Brown. They keep at it for a while, but eventually Liz and Lisa cordially split up. Elizabeth Mitchell, in fact, goes on to co-found the New York City indie rock band Ida. Lisa Loeb, meanwhile, has also moved to New York City. and constructs her own spotlight and then steps into it.

Here we got Lisa Loeb on our first solo release, The Purple Tape from 1992. Cassette only. She sold it at shows. A little more polished than a plain old demo, but still bone simple, just vocals and guitar. Near as I can tell,

the actual cassette tape is not purple, just the cover, which is too bad. But I hasten to add that this is three years before Rayquan's purple. tape. You best protect your neck. This is the first song in the purple tape. It's called Snow Day. 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. She worried any woman with an acoustic guitar was immediately pigeonholed as a folk singer. She wanted to be known as a singer-songwriter. Down the line, that would give her more freedom to push her sound more toward rock. alt rock, whatever. She could form a rock or an alt rock band. The stylistic freedom of being a singer-songwriter was important to her. The songwriter part was especially important to her. As for the song she was writing, they weren't raw and totally transparent diary entries, but they weren't exactly oblique either. Listening to this song, Snow Day, you already know what a snow day feels like. You remember what a snow day feels like. And I think a lot of the images I use are the sun,

the moon. And it's kind of like the vocabulary you learn when you're a child. And so I feel like a lot of those clouds, stars, moons, those are very concrete and symbolic. And I think that makes it feel less abstract. I will be honest and say that at first I found the purple tape to be unnervingly not abstract. 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. Man, Lisa's clear, bright, buoyant, mournful voice. Lisa's clear, bright, deft and crystalline acoustic guitar.

Election Day, right? My polling place was a student union type building in a tiny university in my town. There's classrooms, meeting rooms, whatever, but also a coffee shop right in the front. Tons of collegiate ass college students milling around with their laptops. Two baristas clinking bottles, grinding beans, spraying foam. And as I'm standing in line to vote, I'm not listening to Lisa Loeb at that 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.

I'm transported. Like I warged into a college student's body. 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. Like, ah, I guess that's preferable to any other reaction. Depending on your personal history, be careful with this purple tape, is what I'm saying. That's from the next song called Train Dreams. And I will be honest and say that my first reaction was like, well, this isn't exactly

Ani DeFranco in terms of scouring literary bare-knuckled hostility. But Lisa's deliberately childlike vocabulary and imagery, it gets to you. It grows on you. in you. 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. Great song genre. My favorite song on the Purple Tape. And in a later iteration, my favorite Lisa Loeb song overall is called Do You Sleep? I don't know and I don't care. You used to be cool, but now you're really dumb. Here's something else, she said in that Purple Tape interview that really stuck with me.

It was funny because after this song was written, Grunge became very popular. And there were a lot of angry women singers, you know, that were considered the angry women singers or, you know, more bold. I was quiet and acoustic. And these other women like Liz Fair or Courtney Love were more strong. That's quite an appealingly broad anger spectrum already, the distance between Liz Fair and Courtney Love. And you can decide who's on which end of that anger spectrum between the two of them. but sorry, please continue. I would always say, you know, they might write a song,

they stub their toe and they write a song about the pain they feel when they stub their toe. But as a writer, I would write about, oh, gosh, I should have seen that coming. Oh, how does my toe feel now? You know, like all the different sort of obsessive and neurotic thoughts all about that subject. Oh, I felt so much better before I stub my toe. So we got a young, quiet, but quietly quite bold singer-songwriter, gigging constantly in the quite vibrant early 90s Manhattan acoustic cafe type scene, handing out copies of the purple tape and making industry connections and learning about the music

business and going to seminars like CMJ and shit. And also she's got an apartment down in the village on Mercer Street near NYU. And in fact, she lives across the street from young famous actor Ethan Hawke. And they get to talking. And Ethan's got this movie Reality Bites coming up. And it's not that simple, but it's kind of close to that simple. Apparently, first, Lisa was invited to take a shot at writing the song, I'm Nothing.

Apparently, they really wanted a song in this movie called I'm Nothing. And I'm guessing her version was better, but they didn't use her version. But then so later, Ethan goes to see Lisa play another show, and he likes another song of hers. And he passes a tape of that song onto Ben Stiller, and boom, it's playing over the end credits to reality bites. and it's the number one song in the country. And yeah, relative to the usual convolutions of the music industry, it's all pretty simple. She wrote it initially for Daryl Hall, as in Hall and Oates. Hall and Oates is in like Sarah Smile, speaking of rad classic rock songs from the mid-70s.

She heard Daryl Hall was looking for songs for a solo album. That makes sense. Daryl Hall singing, Stay I Missed You, makes sense. But this was destined to be Lisa Loeb's song, her breakout, her historic, unprecedented, somewhat shockingly chart-topping breakout song, recorded in a two-bedroom apartment on 52nd Street between 9th and 10th with her band 9 stories. It should be clunky, but I always dug how that name flowed. Lisa Loeb and 9 stories to J.D. Salinger reference. Her sound, as exemplified by the purple tape, doesn't need a ton. of embellishment. Just a tiny, tasteful amount of embellishment sounds just miraculous.

The harmony on the word naive, man, I can't believe this song isn't in the movie itself. Just the credits. There's that whole montage right near the end of the movie where Ethan Hawk and Winona Ryder are torn apart and missing each other. And he's smoking in a hospital right next to a giant no smoking sign. And she's smoking and moping over a beer at the cool rock club. And this is a set of circumstances that calls quite explicitly for a song called Stay I Missed You. But no, the montage song is U2's All I Want is You, which, okay, that's secretly a top 10 U2 song. But even that song's from 1988. It's from another movie.

Along with Stay, you know the other truly great song on the Reality Bites soundtrack that's actually from the 90s? Spin the Bottle by Juliana Hatfield. Everybody's looking She's such a sucker He don't want to fuck her I'm so mad that I can't find the radio Edit of Spin the Bottle Which I cherished in high school

Because it just hilariously Obliterates the word fuck There It's one of those space laser Beep edits that draws way more attention to the word Than just singing the word He don't want to beep her Just delightful

Juliana Hatfield from Boston, the less gilded other armpit of New England. Julianna Hatfield, formerly of Blake Babies. She's more or less solo now leading her band that Julianna Hatfield 3. If we hadn't already dicked around so much, it'd be fun to try and plot her on Lisa Loeb's quiet and acoustic versus angry and bold scale with Liz Fair and Courtney Love. I got the Julianna Hatfield 3 record,

Become What You Are from 1993 in a Columbia House transaction, if I recall correctly, Spin the Bottle is on that record as well. And I have to say that Juliana excels at quiet but remarkably angry opening lines. That song's called Supermodel, and that's how this record starts. The next song's called My Sister.

It was a big hit on Alt Rock Radio, and I suspect that's why I got this record from Columbia House in the first place. Unbelievable. First ballot, first line, Hall of Famer, My Sister. by the Juliana Hatfield 3. This sounds a little dangerous for me, though,

sentimentality-wise. So my senior year of high school, a close friend of mine died in a car accident. Four kids died in a car accident. My friend, her close friend, another girl, another junior from my school, and two boys from the next town over. I remember somebody calling me and giving me the news.

I remember calling other people to give them the news. And it was awful. It was devastating. I believe that's the one and only time I've been a pallbearer for someone younger than me, which by default arguably makes that the worst day of my life to date. It occurs to me the very recent Lisa Loeb song I Want to Go First is about that idea. But I go to the wake, right? I think possibly the joint wake for both girls.

and it's held in the packed basement of the funeral home, and I walk in, I descend. And it's, you know, this 360-degree panorama of sobbing teenagers. And my close friends, younger sisters, there deep and unimaginable mourning, surrounded by sobbing teenagers, desperate to console her. And so now any 90s all-rock song with the word sister in it anywhere is still potentially quite destabilizing to me. But yeah, here I am.

at this wake, and I too am a sobbing teenager, and also Lisa Loeb's stay I missed you is playing on a loop, because that was my friend's favorite song. Now, first of all, I very much doubt this song was playing

on a loop the whole time. Right? That sounds quite melodramatic. That's a sobbing teenager's embellishment, I suspect. I wonder even if it was the basement of the funeral home. That feels melodramatic, too. I dissent. I don't know. A joint wake, a dual wake? I don't know. They played Stay I missed you at least once.

And okay, possibly they played it a couple times, two or three times. The whole time, the whole night, I don't think so. But you'd think playing at once is enough, right, to bind this song to this singularly terrible moment in my head forever. certainly until the end of time whenever I hear Lisa Loeb's voice in any context I will now picture my friend alive, alone, happy, oblivious, traipsing around her bedroom

listening to her favorite song. You'd think that, wouldn't you? I thought that. I'd assumed I'd never want to hear this song again. And that's all the detail I think is appropriate here. And the longer I'd talk about this, the more melodramatic it's going to get. But what I'd like to know is why that's not necessarily the first thing I think when I hear this song.

Logically, Stay I Missed You by Lisa Loeb should be, I don't want to say destroyed, but yeah, inextricable from this cavern of grief and despair, synonymous in my head with a funeral home basement, maybe, full of sobbing teenagers, myself included. but it's not. And sister songs don't always trigger it either. They usually don't trigger it. I can hear the opening riff of Stay I Missed You and listen to this song in full and think medium hard about this song semi-professionally and simply indulge in some good old wistful

nostalgia and not think about any of that terrible shit at all for quite a long time. And I'd like to know why. If you've gotten this far into this episode, let alone contended with the previous 79 episodes of this show, you are aware that 80% of this show is just me going, I remember once I was eating a salad and this song came on and it was raining. I'll never forget eating that salad. Listening to the song was raining. And it's like, what? Why, bizarrely vivid and insultingly mundane personal reveries? That is my brand. Never could cut it at no corporate job. Destroyed is the right. word in a melodramatic sense. I am wired for destruction. Stay I missed you should be destroyed for me. And it's not. This leads me to the conclusion that I've got some kind of subconscious defense mechanism. It's tempting to say that this song is masterfully written and durable enough to withstand all that emotional baggage or whatever. But quite frankly, I don't think the song or the songwriter is anything to do with it at this point. It's just that there's an individual personal threshold for melodramatic.

and tremendously painful memories triggered by old songs. It's not quite denial. It's not quite a repressed memory. But the Lisa Loeb song comes on in some deep, mysterious, clandestined sleeper cell in my brain that I'm truly grateful for

activates and just whispers don't. And most of the time I don't. You don't have to tell me if any of that resonates for you with any other song and any other awful situation. Of course, I hope none of that resonates for you at all. I do wonder, though.

How hard can we pivot out of all that do you think? I wonder about that also. Recently, I tried manifesting something just to see if that whole thing worked, manifestation. It didn't work. It's all bullshit. But I tried to manifest a Lisa Loeb episode of Mark Maren's WTF podcast. I suspect you're familiar with the sweetheart, grumpus comedian interview podcast, WTF with Mark Marin. There's no father to his style podcast-wise. Suddenly, I just decided that Mark

Marin needed to interview Lisa Loeb, just for the fantastic dissonance between their personalities. The steely bubbliness meets the cuddly grumpusness. Mark Marin going, who were your guys and so forth? Nope. There is no such WTF episode. That's the last time I try to manifest anything. Great consolation prize, though. Lisa appeared in the spring of 2022 on the lovely childhood nostalgia podcast. How Did We Get Weird? Hosted by Vanessa and Jonah Bayer, Vanessa, of course, the actress and Saturday Night Live alumnus, her brother Jonah, the esteemed music journalist. They talked with Lisa Loeb about landline telephones for 20 minutes. It was enthralling. I am 100% sincere. Lisa describes meeting Craig Robinson, the actor and comedian, and Lisa says,

when we shook hands, his hand was like a donut. His hand was like a warm bear claw. Tremendously charming. But they started out talking about Lisa's quite distinctive in large cat eye glasses. And her Betsy Johnson dress from the Stay I Missed You video, shot in one take by Ethan Hawk, and her personal style, which he summarized as cute but evil, and her brief summer sojourn at the Berkeley College of Music, surrounded by hardcore guitar players who are all shredding.

They all wanted to be shredders. And at this point, Vanessa Bayer has a question for Lisa Loeb. And shredding, just for those of us who, a little less. It's like tweedily-de-de-l-de-le-dee. Okay, okay, got it, got it. Got it, that kind of stuff. Okay, okay, cool. That's all I got, hard pivot-wise.

That's my best attempt to burn some sage in here. Rock stars, pop stars who peak immediately, whose first hit song is by far their biggest hit song, sometimes they spend the rest of their careers, and often quite short careers, explicitly and thirstily chasing that first peak, and they never succeed. And that futility doesn't diminish their initial glory exactly, but it's a little sad, maybe. Whereas other overnight success type stars seem far more content with peaking early, and they settle into long, odd, adventurous, unpredictable careers, heightened by this ease, I guess, this refreshing lack of angst about whether they'll ever have another hit half as big.

This is some hardcore, no data, just vibes analysis I'm laying on you here. But I got that relaxed, contented, adventurous down for whatever vibe from Lisa Loeb immediately. The first major label album from Lisa Loeb and Nine Stories comes out in 1995 and it's called Tales. T-A-I-L-S. There's a drawing of a cat on the cover, a blushing cat, cute but evil. The best song is a full band version of her old song, Do You Sleep? I told you this is my favorite Lisa Loeb song, and I meant it.

Do You Sleep? And this alt-rockish version, especially, is about how Lisa Loeb stubbed her toe, and it hurt, and it made her angry. It's a good look for her anger. I think the first time I heard the whole Tales album I was still in high school and visiting a friend of mine who was now in college. Might have been my first time ever in a college dorm room. We're sitting on the floor of her dorm room. We're playing cards or something. She puts on tails.

We're listening to Lisa Loeb. And we get to a boppy little upbeat song called Garden of Delights. Moonbeams and stars. Childlike. Not too abstract. And we're into it. And sitting there playing cards on the floor, I become aware all it wants them. my friend and I were both nodding our heads rhythmically in a very pronounced, corny,

hey, this is pretty good sort of way. And in the moment, I feel this brief flash of embarrassment for us, even though it's just us, even though we're both doing it. I can't explain it. Just a bizarrely vivid and insultingly mundane moment in time that I remember every single time I hear this song now. I've got millions of ultra mundane moments like that. and I'm grateful for all of them,

and especially grateful to them for the other way less mundane moments that they might be blocking out. Our guests today, we're so honored to welcome Ryder Strong, actor, filmmaker, podcaster, star of the classic 90s sitcom Boy Meets World. His podcasts include Pod Meets World

and literary disco. Ryder, it's great to talk to you, man. Thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me. I'm a huge fan. I discovered, I discovered this podcast. I discovered this podcast this summer, and it became, like, all I was listening to, just going through song by song.

And, you know, what's really cool is, like, I thought I knew stuff about, like, bands from the... But there were so many, so many facts I didn't know. So I've learned a lot from you, Rob. You've been a great resource for me. Well, that's tremendously fun. I just make everything up. Okay, I tell you. Sorry about that, but thank you anyway.

So, Rider, let's just get you on the record here. did Wynonna end up with the wrong guy? Yes. This is, oh, the thing is, I was the biggest reality bites fan. I was the right age. For whatever reason, it was the movie. I had a laser disc player, and I only had a few laser discs that I owned, and this was one of them, Reality Bites.

And so whenever I had a circle of friends, and whenever we had nothing else to watch because we hadn't gone to the video store or whatever, we would end up watching reality bites. And it was like one of those movies we always quoted within our friend group. I remember I used to make mixed tapes and I would actually include clips from the movie. Like I would record

scenes. Yeah. So I loved it. And it wasn't until I guess maybe my 20s or 30s that I rewatched it and realized I don't get this movie. What is this movie saying?

Right. I think, you know, I think at the time when I was 14, 15, I was in love with Winona Ryder, and I wanted to be Ethan Hawk, right? Like, you want to be the smart, cool guys kind of above it all and critical of everyone. Right. But now I look at it and I go, what the movie ends up doing is sort of like personifying, you know, in the love triangle, it personifies the 90s obsession with selling. out and like the elevation of being a slacker, right?

And that doesn't really make sense to me anymore. Like, why in the 90s was everybody so into like, oh, you don't want to be a sellout? In retrospect, I'm like, why not? Do what you love. Make money. Go, you know, be successful. And so I think the movie kind of is weird in that way. I mean, it still is a fun.

I mean, mostly what I realize now looking back on it, too, is Janine Garofalo and Steve Zon. are wonderful in it. They are. They really are. And that they're, you know, the comedy is still funny. But certainly the values of the film, I question. It sort of defines selling out as having a job at all. It ends with them, like neither of them have a job or any aspiration at all.

They're just making out on the couch, which is great. If you're Ethan Hawke and one out a rider. But like, yeah, it's like selling out the term is broadened to include receiving money for doing anything ever. Well, I think the implication, which I think the real failing of the film, is that the implication is that he's a musician and she's a filmmaker. But we only see him perform one song, and it's okay. But like, we don't see him like working hard at his art.

We don't, and she is a horrible filmmaker. That's the central problem. She's awful with the camera. She's just filming her friends. She has no angle, no structure to what she's doing. She has no plan. She just thinks that, like, I'm just by running around with my crappy VHS camera, I'm being a filmmaker. And it's like, no, you're not.

Like, if you're an intern at a TV show, like, talk to the camera guys. Like, start learning how to be better at what you're doing. But she doesn't want to get better. She just wants to do less work. I remember, and I read the Roger Ebert review. And this was his criticism is he's basically like, Ben Stiller's re-edit of Winona's footage is the best version of her footage. And it's true. And that like that that that just deflates the central argument of the movie, right?

It's like if she were a great artist or she had a point of view within her filmmaking, that was a good argument or something interesting to say about the world, I could I could say like, oh yeah, there's value there. But instead it's just kind of like, no, man, just sit on the couch and make out and play your guitar and be cooler than everybody. Don't worry about it. Don't have a job. It was like the one.

window where that was a job. We're not having a job or any desire to do anything ever was like the coolest possible thing you could do. That was 1993 and only 1993. Right. Where does this movie set for you in like the pantheon of 90s rom-coms? Are you a clueless guy, a can't hardly wait guy, a city of angels guy? No, you know, clueless, funny, I hated it when it came out because I completely missed the

levels of irony. Like, I just thought that it was sort of celebrating a Valley Girl, which is the dumbest thing. And so sad to have to admit. Yeah, you were a teenager. But yeah, but then I saw that in my 20s in college. I actually watched it in a film class in college. And I was like, this movie's brilliant. No, my favorite would be before sunrise, the other Ethan Hawk rom-com.

That, I think that that movie, I loved that. That was another one that I was really into around that time. And then I think the sequels have been, even. better. I think the second one is one of the best movies ever. So that I still like still think that's a great film. But no, I never actually never seen Can Hardly Wade. Yeah. So I don't know. I got more into yeah. So before Sunrise was probably my favorite of the of the era, definitely. It's like the nicer version of his reality bites character because he doesn't really have anything going on professionally and before sunrise either. And he's just sort of yakking away the whole time.

And he's like kind of insufferable, but in a loving way. Like it's interesting. Well, there's also her, she's there to sort of deflate him and like poke at his like, you know, pretentiousness. And they like, they do that to each other throughout all three of those films. And I think, I also just think that he, he is smart. Like, they give him good arguments. They give her good arguments. Whereas like reality bites, it's like, it's just quippier and sort of more superficial, you know, whereas like before sunrise, it takes it there. It's like, if you're going to be the pretentious, you know, Hemingway quoting guy roaming around Europe, like give that person two hours to do that and like make that the whole story.

Yeah. Yeah. The full reality bite soundtrack is like a very strange animal for me. Like a lot of the songs are 70s and 80s. Like it doesn't have the maximum 90s feel that I get from like the crow or waiting to exhale or whatever. Like did any soundtrack from that era especially speak to you then or speak to you now? Well, at the time, I think I think the ultimate like what takes me back if I hear it and

and I remember just in every car we'd be hearing was the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. I feel like that, you know, because it was also, it had quotes from the movie in it. And so I just remember listening to that start to finish all the time. And everybody's car, whenever I was getting a ride with somebody and that was just it. But, you know, similar to this sound to reality bite soundtrack, it doesn't actually have many songs like from the 90s or it's, you know, it's all over the map as far as like totally. So the real album I was thinking, about that is the ultimate 90s album is Empire Records. Yes.

And what's funny about that album is, I've never seen the movie, but I know every song on the album. And we just listen to it. And it's also like a compendium of 90s bands, but not their biggest hits. You know, so it's like, but I know every word. I know every line. And yet like it's not the big hits from those bands. And like I said, I've never seen the movie, but I know that soundtrack inside out.

So I feel like that's the ultimate. it was like clearly a soundtrack looking for a movie, you know, like that's, that's what it, that's why it exists is to just get a bunch of 90s bands together. Yeah. I was going to say, knowing the soundtrack that well without having ever seen the movie, that feels like a very deliberate decision on your part. Like, did you go out of your way to avoid the movie, to avoid it ruining the soundtrack for you? I don't know. That's a great question. I don't know. I just never got around to seen it. You know, it's so, it's so hard to, like, wrap your head around.

now, the concept of like content being hard to find. But like, you know, if I didn't get it at the video store, I didn't, didn't come by. Like, you had to seek out stuff. And I think by that time, because that came out a little bit later, you know, I was starting to become a really pretentious film snob. So I would be seeking out older films. As you do. Yeah.

So at that point, I probably stopped, you know, renting things that were more contemporary. Or, you know, I would be either going to see stuff at the movie theater or like going back into the deep, deeper cuts from. back from generations past. Right. I don't know if they ever put that one on the laser disk either. So maybe it was a format issue. Yeah.

It seems like for millions of people like boy meets world was the signature iconic fictional rom-com of the 90s. Like did you watch these movies and think like, this is terrible romantic chemistry? Like my show is way better at this stuff. I'm a way better best friend. No. No, not at all. I mean, I always put movies on a pedestal like above television.

Sure. So, and I never watched my own show. So I would never have said that. I, you know, I have, I mean, that's what my, my podcast, Podmeets World has sort of been all about is like me re-evaluating the show and appreciating it because I didn't. At the time, I had fun, I loved the job. Like, it was fun to work on, but I, you know, I wanted to be doing Ethan Hawk movies. Like, I wanted to be, I wanted to be in film. I wanted to, you know, or on stage.

Like, so I was kind of a snob about my own work. work. I was pretty dismissive probably of Boy Meets World. The one time I did feel something similar to what your question gets at is, um, oh, you're jumping on the Ethan Hawk bandwagon. Again, when Boyhood came out. Ah. I remember watching Boyhood and I really, I enjoyed it. I thought it was, it was good. Um, but then it, you know, it occurred to me that the entire project was built on this conceit of like, we're going to get the same cast and we're going to watch them grow over. the years by coming back every year and filming with them. And I remember thinking, well, that's a TV show. That's what we did for seven years on. But that's not that remarkable. And I get it.

Like it is because the compression, the compression of time is the point and the fact that it ends up being a movie. So the end product is totally different. But like to think that it's remarkable that they were able to get the same cast together every year to play the same characters. I'm like, yeah, that's what every TV show does. And like, you. Oh, my God. You know, and the fact that, I mean, I think part of the reason why people like Boy Meets World is why they liked boyhood, too, is it you do get to see the same people age, you know, and we were growing and going through real life changes and looking awkward at times and whatever. And I, you know, so that was the one time I was like, I think this has been done before a lot. Like, I think this is as special as everybody thinks. But no, I do like the movie. It's good. were there music what were you into musically at the time boy meets world was on the air like were you trying to get music into the show or is that not really that kind of show where there's needle drops all the time and yeah it wasn't yeah because it's a multi-camera sitcoms so we weren't like dawson's creek or party five which had good you know good music um so yeah no i um i was i mean i was obsessed with singer songwriter's uh lyric it was all about lyrics it always has been for me um and you know What ended up happening, it actually worked more the other way around. I wasn't trying to get music onto the show because when you're a kid actor, you end up being surrounded by adults all the time.

And so I sort of took advantage of that and I would ask for recommendations from the writing staff or the directors. And I gained a lot of appreciate. So in reality, like at the time of Boy v's World, I was listening to, I was going back. back to the 60s and 70s. So I was listening to a lot of Dylan, Van Morrison. I was obsessed with Van Morrison. And then Tom Waits. I became a huge Tom Waits.

Oh, God, yes. Fan. So, yeah, it was all about lyrics and, like, people with unique voices, which is still kind of what I like. I, you know, I was a ridiculously huge Counting Crows fan that was like the first, like, August and everything after just, like, pierced my heart and I was never the same again.

And so they actually wrote that into the show, my character at one point they made a reference. Like Feeney makes a reference to like my character being a counting crows fan. So to this day I still have people recognize me and then they're like, oh, and I also like counting crows. You do too, right? It was like the blurring the lines between my character and real writer. Yeah.

I'm going to rewash the show now. And like when the cameras turn off, like everyone starts listening to Tom Waits immediately. It just starts playing over the studio PA. And that's just, that's going to be the framing. for my boy meat tour, we watched. What happened was one of our lighting designers for two of our seasons

had been Tom Waits lighting designer. Oh my God. And so he had gone on tour with him and he had all these great stories. And I just, I had never heard, you know, he knew I liked Springsteen or similar people.

And he was like, you need to listen to Tom Waits. And I was like, the second I heard that voice, I was like, what is happening here? And then of course, you know,

you either go one of two ways with weights, right? Like there are people, like my wife just can't get over the voice. It's like she will never, She will never be able to appreciate him as this great songwriter because the voice is too much. And for me, the voice is like what I loved and it got me into it. And then you get into the lyrics and they're just some of the best poetry out there.

You know, it's so beautiful. And so I became a huge, obsessed Tom Waits fan. I started like, you know, whenever he would have a concert, I would like literally fly wherever to go see him in the late 90s, early odds. Yeah. I got to imagine that Stay was your introduction to Lisa Loeb. Like, I think that's true for most of us. Like, what did you make of her overall? How did she slot into, you know, that's a good through line, you know, from Van Morrison to

Counting Crows to Lisa Loeb. Like, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. I just think that, I mean, I think the lyrics for stay are incredible. I think it's one of those examples of just, you know, I've listened to the song. I know every word. I still can't tell you what's happening in the relationship.

Exactly. And I think that's great. You know, I think that that's like, it's like at different stages in my life, I can relate to different parts of the song. You know, it's like, because it's a confusing, romantic mess. And it's, I love songs, too, that have too many words, you know, like where it feels like, it feels like somebody is like, they can't get it out fast enough. And then the singer's like, this breathless quality of like, but I have so much to say. And the song just emanates that. And it's just beautiful.

I mean, it's just melodically beautiful. But her expressiveness is a truly beautiful song. And recently it's come back into my life because my wife is a great singer and she sings to our son every night, putting him to bed. And this entered the repertoire. And it was so nice to hear this. And so like my son, who's seven now knows stay as well as he knows the landslide or, you know, whatever. But it's just a gorgeous song. It's kind of undeniable.

Yeah. Thinking about the video, I get that, that idea that she's so frustrated by everything she can't get out. Like, she's sort of running around the apartment, right? It's like the one take thing. And, like, I think that conveys that sense of their being, if it being overstuffed, it's overstuffed lyrically, it's overstuffed emotionally in this really effective way. And she's sort of scrambling to keep up with it. And, like, that's what makes the song so good. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, I really only stuck around with her through Firecracker, her next album. And I think, you know, what's interesting is I still, I really, I think she's a great singer. I think she's a good lyricist. But her songs get more polished or more, they get tighter, you know, and they get, and what I like about Stay is that it has this more to sort of rambling quality to it. It feels a little more open-ended. It feels a little less determined. Like, it's almost like, if she's, she had had more time to write a better, you know, quote unquote better version. It would be a worse song. It would be worse. But because it feels slightly like, you know, demo or like a first pass at something,

that's what I love about it. I love, I love songs like that. I do watch her later videos and they're so produced, right? You know, like they have budgets, you know, and they have backup dancers and just it's artie or whatever it is in the mid-late 90s. And it doesn't have the effectiveness of this day video itself. I think, again, like, the video mirrors that aspect of it. Like, she came from a singer-songwriter, like, acoustic background.

And, like, she wanted to be a full band sort of situation. She wanted that freedom. But, like, the starkness of the song and the rawness of the song is, like, crucial to what makes it so great. Yeah. You know, she sort of fascinates me as a person. Like, she rockets to fame in an instant. But, like, unlike other people in that situation, she didn't seem to have a lot of anxiety about getting back there, right?

Like she had this super prolific, weird, varied career, like, TV shows, you know, like she's put out a bunch of records, you know, but she doesn't seem at all concerned about hitting number one again. And I was wondering if, like, that's a hard mentality to have as a young person once you've gotten, like, kind of suddenly famous, like, to not have that anxiety about staying on top or whatever. Yeah. No.

I mean, if she really is chill about it in her, in her personal life, man, I envy that. It seems like she is. Yeah, well, then that's amazing. No, because, like, you know, when you're young and you have success, you know, speaking from my personal experience, there's this pressure, you know, the incredible pressure because. Yeah. I mean, now I don't feel it, but it's taken me a long time. And I think when you're young, there's, and you have any success in the arts at all, I feel like there's this idea that there's a trajectory you're supposed to follow, right? Like, your career is supposed to go, like, well, you were young on this TV show.

Now you're going to go into bigger and bigger movies and you're going to, you know, become whatever. And that's just not the case, right? Like, you can be a different, whatever kind of artist you want to be. And for me, like, I really retreated from acting after Boy Meets World. Like, I wanted, I really loved school. I loved writing. I wanted to, I retreated to academia and, like, kind of put my head down and, like, move to New York and went to college. and, you know, in some ways that was like a mistake in the sense that, you know, now I'm back into

the industry. I'm writing and directing and like, it probably would have been better to stick around LA and like keep up my context and like, but I didn't really want to be an actor anymore, but I felt this pressure that if I, you know, and so I stayed way too long sort of auditioning and doing this when I really didn't even like it anymore. And I, and I had, you know, I felt a tremendous amount of pressure. It was like, I would say, like, most of my 20s were felt feeling like a failure in a way that, like, when I look back at now, I was like, no, I really, I liked myself. I like myself. Like, I was a good guy. I was doing cool things. I was writing all this stuff and exploring new parts of my life. But because, you know, I don't know, I had a friend once say, he's like,

writer, it's kind of like you were an Olympic gold medalist. And then, you know, there's like a depression that follows that. And I was like, oh, you're right, because you know, you're young and you just sort of go on this adventure. And in my case, you know, it turned into this one TV show. Like, I liked acting as a kid,

but then it turned into one TV show lasted seven years, defined me to the world in such a profound way. And then, of course, you know, I also got put into this sort of like teen beep pinup, like version, which I was never comfortable with. Like, I just didn't want to be there.

that guy. And, you know, so I don't know, because I feel like there are some people who probably could have just been really happy and been like, hey, the girls love me. I'm on TV. Let's just enjoy this. But for me, like, that was never going to be my thing, you know, it just didn't fit my personality. And like, I used to feel really bad about that. Now I can just say, no, it just wasn't my thing. And that's okay. But, you know, I used to feel really bad about it. So if she really is like totally cool with just making her music and doing it on her own terms, then that's awesome. And that's the way to be, right? Yeah. I mean, she put out a bunch of kids albums. She still puts out adult albums.

Like she had a big food TV run. She got her own eyeglasses line, you know, of course. Like, you know, she diversified. You know, she just did interesting things. And I just don't get that anxiety. And this is all just me sensing things or whatever. It's bullshit. But like I just, you can tell when someone who had a number one hit is trying to have a, another number one hit, you know, and you can sort of feel the flop sweat when they don't get there. And like, you know, I listened to her albums immediately after stay. Like, that was her first song. That was her introduction to like the world.

Yeah. You know, and she, they had bigger budgets and she went for it to some degree, but it just doesn't sound desperate the way it sometimes can when somebody peaks, like, immediately the way she did. Right. Yeah. So she wasn't worried about being a sellout? that was not one of her concerns it did not seem to be a concern no it doesn't seem like she put herself into that dichotomy it was like yeah she just let herself be whatever she was going to be and that's

that's super healthy i was always i was always the agonizing uh even hawk so always concerned just don't want to stay cool so the way the story gets told like lisa lobe and ethan hawker neighbors in new york city like ethan passes a tape to ben stiller and boom she's in the movie you know, and this song's number one. Like, even back then, did you have a sense of how calculated or not that process was, like what songs get picked for TV and movies, like how strategic it is, or is it not strategic at all? No, it's pretty, I mean, at the studio and TV level, it's pretty corporate or at least then.

I mean, now, but there's usually a music supervisor, you know, a producer, and it's very, you know, it's like, that's like a little insider, you know, like every musician I know is just desperate to have those connections. And because they're really are gatekeepers, taste makers, you know, and they're great at their jobs usually. So the fact that she was able to sort of pierce that process and like, you know, thanks to Ethan Hawk in this relationship is wonderful. And I think that happens in indie film a lot, you know, like, I think an indie film, you're just

trying to get whatever music you can for free. Elliot Smith. Exactly. So you're always going after your friends. Like I always cultivate relationships with musicians and use my friend's stuff in like my short films and whatever. Because I, you know, you just want access to good music. And if you like somebody's music, like I don't hesitate to reach out and be like,

can we work together someday, please? Because I, you know, you want good. It's important to me. And obviously it was important to Ben Stiller as a director of Reality Bytes. But yeah, I think that that is pretty. that was pretty rare, and I think it still is. Unless it's an indie film, like on the studio and TV, a lot of that stuff is sort of determined by a very elite group of music producers.

Or an algorithm at this point. I don't know. Just to wrap up, I'm really curious, like, when Prestige TV now wants to evoke the 90s, I'm thinking shows like yellow jackets, right? Or like a big part of the appeal is the 90s needle drops. Like, for you, like, how does the current prestige TV vision of the 90s compare to the actual real-time TV 90s? Like, do you remember the 90s the way TV shows now remember the 90s? Well, I haven't seen Yellow Jackets, so I can't really comment on that one in particular.

But my, I don't know, you know, I feel like, I feel like we're in a phase right now of kind of making the 90s pretty, great, seem really awesome. And I think there is a lot of greatness there. Like there are, I think, you know, the number one thing is that it was the last gasp of a monoculture, right? So we can all, we can all sort of have the same touchstones. And that's actually really community building. Like, and I've noticed with my podcast that Podmeets World, like, oh, this is a really positive. We did a live show and it's just like people, it's like, it's like church. Like we all in this together. Like, I have these personal memories. And these people were there watching, and we all kind of feel like, oh, this was a really good time in our lives when we were teenagers.

And it's cool that there are those touchstones because I don't know if, like, my son's generation will have that because they all are so fractured and listen to so many different things. And they're all over the place. And, you know, even like your podcast is an example of, like, this is really, it's, it brings people together. It's nice that we all have these things. But I will say, like, when I think about the 90s, and I'll bring this back to Lisa Loeb, one of the things that I. one of the things that I don't think has talked about that much is like how much casual misogyny and sexism there was still. Absolutely.

We, you know, we sort of look at the 90s now with like, oh, this pop song and this great TV show and didda, da, da, but like there was a lot of problems. And there was a lot, you know, I remember, like, you know, in the last few years, I would say the last 10 years, has been a lot of like, oh, right, racism wasn't fixed by the 90s, right? Right? Sexism wasn't, but I kind of grew up thinking it was. And so for me, re-evaluating my own attitudes and the way I, you know, treated women or talked about women and the way it was reflected back to me in the 90s is pretty intense when I think about it. Like, I remember even in grad school, so this would have been like 2008, 2009, somebody had a guitar and they started playing stay. and we all sang along

and I got mercilessly mocked for that. Like I got made fun of, yeah. And like to the point where like one of my friends was like left a note on the dorm room door the next day like, you know, we're gonna remember that you sang stay. And then I remember like I would have songs like, you know, I was a big Anni DeFranco fan

and I would like have, I would have or Indigo girl, Beth Orton was a big one for me too. And like if I was, I remember having guys over for poker one time in the early aughts and like one of those songs came on and it was like oh writer got a joe change your tampon do do do do do you know there was this insinuation it's like this raucous insinuation that like singer songwriters like male singer songwriters like if you're a guy you should only listen to male singer songwriters like if you listen to women that was for uh you know

the lilyfair crowd like basically you have to be either a gay female or you know and i just hate that Like, now I think we can accept, and I remember hating it at the time and kind of being, like, embarrassed for liking Lisa Loeb or Honny DeFranco. And, like, I'm glad that that's over. And I don't, you know, I don't feel like that gets talked about as much, like, when we're, now we're just sort of in this, like, the 90s were great. And they were great in so many ways. But that was one of those areas, like, you know, like, I think I don't, I don't think I could, like, proudly blare Lisa Loeb while driving down the street in Los Angeles in 1996. You know, I listened. But I don't think I did.

And that's a bummer. Yeah. Don't read Fiona Apple press coverage from the 90s, if this is your mentout. That's the worst. Really? That's the ugliest that gets in terms of what you're talking about. Right. Absolutely.

I know exactly what you're talking about. Righter, this has been fantastic. I really thank you for your time. And thanks so much for talking, man. Thank you, man. Thanks very much to our guest this week, Ryder Strong. Thanks to our producers, Justin Sales and Jonathan Kerma. And thanks, as always, to you for listening.

And now I heartily encourage you to go listen to stay. I missed you by Lisa Loeb. We'll see you next week.