Lisa Loeb doesn’t remember Generation X having earned the “slacker” title that she and friends like Ethan Hawke and Robert Sean Leonard were once bestowed with.
“These were the most hard-working people I knew!” she insists, as all of their subsequent careers can attest. On this episode of Soul Sisters, Loeb tells us how Hawke helped get her song “Stay (I Missed You)” onto the Reality Bites soundtrack, which made Loeb the first artist to ever have a No. 1 single before being signed to a label.
We also chat about how vastly the industry has changed since those days — the difficulty today of making money off album sales and radio play feels like “having a retirement fund that went away” — and how much people still love to talk about those iconic cat-eyed glasses.
“One of the things I love about Elton John, David Bowie, some of my huge heroes… it’s their style,” she says, having now come to appreciate fans’ obsession with her frames. “It’s the Police’s blonde hair.”
Listen to the full episode below, hosted by Jessie Katz and Darah Golub, which includes a live performance in the Billboard office of “Stay,” and catch Loeb’s run at the Café Carlyle in New York from June 6 to 17. And be sure to subscribe to the Soul Sisters iTunes channel for all upcoming episodes!