Flashback Friday: Stay by Lisa Loeb was released 30 years ago today
Click to view"Stay (I Missed You)" was officially released as a single on May 17, 1994, but the song had already been heard in movie theaters and CD players before that day because it was used as the song played over the closing credits of Reality Bites (which hit theaters on February 18) and was featured on the movie soundtrack (which was released on February 1).
When Lisa was a student at Brown University, she met Ethan Hawke through an actor friend who had been in the movie Alive with him. After graduating, she moved to New York and found herself in the same circle of friends with him along with other actors, musicians, and creative types. They lived across the street from each other and she wrote music for some of his plays.
Lisa Loeb began writing the song "Stay" in 1990 when she heard that Daryl Hall of Hall & Oates was looking for new songs for a solo project. When she was about halfway through writing Stay, she found out that Hall was no longer looking for new material. She later finished the song and began performing it at her shows.
A few years later, Ethan said he was working on a movie where his character was in a band and sang a song called "I'm Nuthin'" so he asked her to write a song with that title. Several other musicians were also asked to submit songs with the same title and the movie ended up selecting a version by someone else.
Ethan thought some of Lisa's music would work well in the movie and he particularly liked "Stay," so he gave some of her songs to the film's director, Ben Stiller, which is how "Stay" ended up being used for the closing credits. The original song title was simply "Stay," but it was later changed to "Stay (I Missed You)" to avoid confusion with British group Eternal's single "Stay," which was released in September 1993 and was still receiving airplay in 1994.
"Stay (I Missed You)" hit #1 on the Billboard charts, making Lisa the first unsigned artist to score a #1 single. Ethan directed the music video which was shot in just two takes and featured his cat.
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