Image Credit: Justine Ungaro
Lisa Loeb first ascended to national prominence in 1994, when her single “Stay (I Missed You)” (from the soundtrack to the grunge-era comedy Reality Bites) made Loeb the first (and to date, only) unsigned artist to score that top slot on the chart.
Since that breakthrough, Loeb has released a steady stream of top-shelf singer-songwriter jams that have evolved along with her but still maintain a certain amount of that classic pre-millennial angst.
Her latest album, No Fairy Tale (out today), is her first grown-up album since 2004′s excellent The Way It Really Is. (In the interim, she released two albums’ worth of songs aimed at kids.) It’s perhaps her punchiest album, buoyed by the lively, brisk production at the hand of New Found Glory guitarist Chad Gilbert.
Entertainment Weekly: The title of the album No Fairy Tale sounds kind of dark. Is it meant to be?
Lisa Loeb: It’s not the intention at all. I wrote the song called “No Fairy Tale” with Maia Sharp, and I think the whole point of the song is that life with all its ups and downs is better than this perfect life that a lot of us are raised to think we’re supposed to try to attain—a storybook life, which, who knows what that even means anymore? It doesn’t really mean anything in the end. What really gives you a rich life is living the ups and downs of a normal, real life. So it’s more about the boldness of how much better real life is than a safe fairy tale life. And you have to be sort of adventurous to live life that way. I like to make the album titles somewhat philosophical even if I’m the only one who gets it. Like my album Cake and Pie, with “and” underlined. Yes it’s cute that I get to put cake and pie in a title and it’s delicious sounding, but also it’s the idea that you can have everything. You shouldn’t have to have one or the other.
This is your first proper album since 2004. Since then, you’ve produced a reality show, did a bunch of voice work, put out two kids’ albums, got married, started an eyewear line, and had two kids of your own. What got you back into a place to make this kind of album?
I had never really stopped making these songs. READ FULL STORY »
