Lisa Loeb – Snow Day (1994)
Of course, this isn’t the song she’s known for.
Just one or two light-rotation ditties away from a one-hit-wonder, Lisa Loeb is remembered for a single single. And some single it was.
Stay (I Missed You) has several distinctions. Out of the chute, it was the first-ever Number One song by an artist who had no record deal (Ben Stiller ran it on the closing credits of box-office smash Reality Bites, and Lisa was off to the races). Next, the accompanying video was at the time and remains to this day one of the most astonishing productions in the genre: the entire video is a single continuous shot, captured in just two takes. And last, if Lisa had her druthers, she’d never have recorded it at all; she’d submitted it to Daryl Hall, who was looking for some contri’s from other writers for a forthcoming project. And he turned the song down.
Snow Day hails from Lisa’s same debut album, Tails, released in 1994 on reliable ol’ RCA. Commercially, the the song was a nothingburger. Only her hardest fans who bought the CD – and spun it with addiction – know it. Fewer than that can even hum it.
And musically, it’s as unremarkable as it gets. It’s in cut time, the changes are tentative, the melody is shapeless and choppy. The leaky guitar that dribbles all over the intro is pleasant, but short-circuited; a full complement of instruments overwhelms that comely texture for most of the song. There’s no refrain to speak of, and if you listened to it ten times and then someone said ‘Snow Day: how does it go?’, you’d probably struggle to capture its spirit in word or in tune. It’s pretty pedestrian stuff.
Until.
It’s a slow dive down, it’s a fast distraction
It’s a strange fall forward, it’s a lame reaction
It’s a bad day…
Jayzuz. Slow, Fast; Strange, Lame; Down, Forward; -action, -ACTION. All in perfection scansion.
It’s pretty athletic too: try singing that passage along with the recording without taking a breath (as demanded by the phrasing of the previous couplet) and still have enough in the oxygen tank to let the hook “It’s a bad day…” soar into the nethers. Even Lisa herself, a skilled chanteuse and seasoned troubadour, can’t always pull it off in live performance.
But never mind the Cirque du Soleil. This is a jolting lyrical passage. A riot of consonants with rhythmic syncopations that slavishly follow the pattern of syllables, this passage would draw the envy of Jay-Z. And all by itself, it saves this ordinary song.
I wonder if J’s ever heard it?
