"Stay (I Missed You)" — Lisa Loeb
A woman in a green dress and cat-eye glasses pacing an empty apartment, singing one long run-on breakup argument straight into the camera. "Stay" closed Reality Bites, went to number one in August 1994, and made Lisa Loeb the first artist to top the Hot 100 without a record deal.
Lisa Loeb had been playing for years before anyone outside New York heard her. After Brown University and a summer at Berklee, she formed the band Nine Stories in 1990, named for the Salinger book, and by 1992 was selling a violet cassette, the "Purple Tape," at gigs and mailing it to labels. "Stay" dated to 1990; at one point she meant to sell it to Daryl Hall for a solo project, then kept it when she heard he no longer needed songs.
Her break came from across the street. Ethan Hawke, a friend from the New York theater world who lived in the apartment opposite hers, gave a tape of the song to Ben Stiller while Stiller was directing Reality Bites. It went over the film's closing credits and became the lead single from the soundtrack on RCA in 1994, first as plain "Stay," then retitled "Stay (I Missed You)" as it climbed radio charts, to keep it apart from the older hits with the same name. Hawke also directed the video: a cat on a chair, then Loeb in a forest-green dress and tortoiseshell glasses wandering the empty apartment, shot as two long continuous takes with no effects. Spin named it video of the year.
The single entered the Hot 100 in April 1994 and reached number one in August, holding for three weeks and staying on the chart for 30. Loeb was not signed to RCA or anyone else, which made her the first artist to top the U.S. chart without a record deal, a distinction nobody matched until Macklemore & Ryan Lewis in 2013. It went gold that July, sold about 900,000 copies in the U.S., hit number one in Canada and the top ten in Britain and Australia, earned a Grammy nomination and won a Brit Award for best international newcomer.
The glasses outlasted the chart run. People later wrote that Loeb was probably as well known for her eyeglasses as for her singing, and in 2010 she launched her own eyewear line with frames named after her songs.
Similar items
Winona Ryder
The dark-eyed patron saint of Gen X — Beetlejuice's goth kid, Heathers' reluctant mean girl, Reality Bites' adrift twentysomething. From 1988 to 1999 Winona Ryder was in seemingly every movie that mattered to anyone under 30, collecting two Oscar nominations along the way.
Alanis Morissette
The Canadian teen-pop star who reinvented herself as the voice of 90s female rage. Raw, oversharing, absolutely unapologetic about her feelings—she gave the decade permission to be a mess and call it art.
Jewel
Folk's answer to the underdog dream: Jewel went from a coal-heated Alaska homestead to living in a van in San Diego to 12× platinum. Her breakthrough Pieces of You rode a slow burn to the top, and by the late 90s she was unavoidable — poetry collections, platinum albums, two generation-defining radio ballads that felt permanent.
The Cranberries
A Limerick band fronted by Dolores O'Riordan's unmistakable keening wail, The Cranberries seemed to come out of nowhere in 1993 and then were impossible to escape — "Linger," "Dreams," and then "Zombie," the stadium-sized protest song that outlived the decade.