Hello Lisa: An Interview with Lisa Loeb
By Allison M. Counasse, Music Editor
Singer-songwriter Lisa Loeb has a new album called Hello Lisa, a tribute to her love of Sanrio's "Hello Kitty". It's also a greeting fans across the country will be saying as she tours with Buffalo's Goo Goo Dolls. Hello Lisa, the new CD
ErieEntertainment.com: How would you describe the creative environment brought about by your switch to Artemis Records for the Hello Lisa release?
Lisa Loeb: The fact is, more artists are switching to smaller, more boutique labels. I know I did that. That's why I wanted to switch from a major label to a smaller label because the label that I had originally signed onto, which was Geffen, had been taken out by Interscope and it just became this huge conglomerate. I felt like it was getting a bit too impersonal and there was not enough focus on the music or even creative ways of marketing.
At Artemis, I thought of the fact that I wanted to put Hello Kitty on my album cover. I was looking on my fan site and I saw that they were talking about whether or not I'd sold out by putting Kitty on the cover. It's funny because I never even thought about that. I just thought, "I love Hello Kitty," and I called the people and asked them if I could put her on my album cover and they generously agreed and helped me out with that. So, it's just like I can do what I want to do over at Artemis. I can make the records I want. When I recorded the new songs for the record, I didn't have to check them with anybody to see if they were OK, which is what you have to do with a major label. And, it gets kind of invasive sometimes. That process, even when you don't care what the major label has to say, it's still there. Even when you don't necessarily care whether or not they approve it, you still feel a slight disappointment when they don't approve certain things or they want you to do more music and, as an artist, it's just not a very helpful part of your growth. I think you need to be able to make music that you like and let your fans hear it, you know?
EEc: Much of Hello Lisa was released as the CD Cake and Pie earlier this year. Was it hard to decide what songs should remain on the new release?
LL: It was really hard actually because I liked the way the album was. At the same time, I had a lot of songs that I had made that we didn't put out, so there were a lot of songs. The record went though so many transformations on the way to being released as Cake and Pie. There was a whole set of songs that I thought was the album, and then that record company said that the album would be released. Then a few months later, they'd ask me "When are you going to start recording the album?" It was really freaky. So I kept recording, but I had so many songs that we recorded that I would like people to hear. In a way it actually turned out to be cool because we were able to put more music out.
EEc: Was tracking and the order more difficult as well?
LL: It was just different. Although again, it was really fun because I didn't have somebody breathing down my neck insisting upon certain songs being towards the front of the album. Like the record company before wanted certain songs towards the beginning of the album and I didn't think it was the best song order necessarily. I wanted it to be in a different song order but that's a small compromise that you make sometimes being on a major label. They want the songs that they think might be singles toward the front of the album.
EEc: When will the video be released?
LL: I think it should be released within the next couple of weeks. I think we might even have it up on our website or linked to our website even before you'd see it on TV.
EEc: Oh, that's cool!
LL: It's really cool. It's really exciting. It was filmed in my house in LA. In my kitchen.
Touring
EEc: How's the tour going so far?
LL: It's going great. It's just a lot of fun. The audiences are really enthusiastic!
EEc: How do you think they're receiving your new material?
LL: How are they reacting to it? Good. They're reacting well. I think the audience, in some cases, is more of an audience that listens to the radio a lot so they're much more familiar with the singles that the Goo Goo Dolls and I have. Considering they've probably never heard my new music before, I think they've been doing a very good job at listening. Sometimes certain places that we play are more conducive to listening than others. If we're playing at an arena where like two or three thousand people are smashed up against the stage or with a bar in the back of the room, sometimes it's harder to keep a completely silent audience that I like to have. But when people are sitting in chairs, it's like a normal audience. Every audience is different.
EEc: Do you have a preference on types of venues that you play? You played a lot of colleges and festivals earlier in the year. Does the exposure differ?
LL: I prefer seated theatres or seated arenas, anywhere where they have seats whether it's a small club or a huge arena, just because if I'm playing acoustically, that's what I like. It attracts an audience that's quieter. In more of a rock setting, people feel the tendency to want to talk and it's like they're watching TV. They don't notice there's someone on stage as much whereas, obviously, if you're sitting down, it's like you're in a movie or something; you're supposed to be quiet and listen. So I like listening spaces the best, but any space is fine. They all work out.
EEc: Are you performing songs from throughout your career?
LL: Oh yeah. From way back in the 1800s 'til... from the 17th century up until the future! I always play the songs that were on the radio just because you have to do that. That's what people come to hear actually, I think. Then I play other songs. I take requests over the Internet so if people want to hear certain songs, like if there are fans coming to the show and they want to hear a particular song, I'll play that. I play a bunch of new songs, too.
EEc: You're playing acoustic on the Goo Goo Dolls tour?
LL: Yes, I'm playing acoustic. The Goo Goo Dolls are the full band.
EEc: Will Dweezil be joining you on tour at all?
LL: I hope so but I don't know when. We're so busy, it's really crazy. He has so many projects he's working on! It's just incredible. We're trying to figure out a time for him to visit. I'm not in a tour bus, I'm in a van. We're in this little minivan and then airplanes, so there are a couple of legs where there are a bunch of flights and we have like tons of luggage and it's just really hectic and that's not a very good time to invite somebody to come visit you. But there's a chance he'll be with us in Texas for a few dates. So far, it just hasn't worked out because he has so many projects he's trying to finish up and we've got the crazy travel schedule.
EEc: What do you most like about being on tour?
LL: What do I like about it? I think just the work part, like playing shows and meeting fans. That's the best part. Otherwise it's just really hectic. Sometimes if you're on a tour bus where the schedule's a little slower, being on tour can be cool because it simplifies your life completely. You only have a couple of suitcases of clothes and you only have a couple things. I'm able to focus on projects. Even on this tour, we're starting to focus again -- on listening to "How to Speak Japanese" tapes because we're driving all the time or working out or doing things.
EEc: Is there anything you don't like about being on tour?
LL: I don't like gross carpets in hotel rooms. Sometimes even if it's kind of a nice hotel room, sometimes they just can't help it, but they have really gross carpeting. You just have to wear shoes or socks all the time. But when you do get the fancy hotel room, like we stay in pretty nice hotel rooms in some cities, you try to, for a moment in time, pretend you're on vacation. A couple hours, you know?
Writing
EEc: Could you give me a little background into your writing process?
LL: Part of it's a process and part of it's a very immediate thing. There's a part of it that's inspiration which I get either randomly when I'm talking to somebody or walking around or whatever. It's almost like you've remembered something that you need to buy from the grocery store. That's how the ideas just come into your head, like a little phrase or a little lyric or a little melody. That's one way to get inspiration. Another way is just when I'm sitting around playing guitar, practicing or whatever, I find a little cool instrumental type of thing that I want to write a song around.
EEc: Do you write in other formats aside from songs? Some of your songs seem like poetry.
LL: I don't. I mean, not really. I write little tiny stories but those are really writing exercise stories. I'm always surprised how something that seems so silly can turn out to be like a little story and that inspires me. Writing seems to be very mysterious to me, it seems to be a big deal, and it's not such a big deal in some cases.
EEc: Or Japanese?
LL: Yeah, Japanese. I wish. I don't know how to do that yet. Completely. I have to work on that.
EEc: Do you prefer to write solo or with a partner or are they just two different entities?
LL: They're really two different things. I like writing by myself because I can get more into my head and I don't feel exposed because it's just me in a room. On the other hand, I like writing with another person because I find that songs get written much more quickly. Also. I learn more about giving a clear lyrical message because when you write with somebody else, you have to be able to talk about the meaning of the song even between yourselves. I find that helps, creating something that listeners can understand. I learn a lot from other people. So I like writing with other people and by myself. I think it's a good way to break things up.
EEc: In your opinion, what makes a good song?
LL: I'd say that a good song is something that people like to listen to. I know that sounds really stupid but, even though I like to focus on the lyrics, I don't necessarily listen to a lot of the lyrics that other people write. I'll get a vague sense of what they're talking about but unless they're really blatant, I just like hearing certain phrases and words. I think a good melody is really important to a song because I think that's the thing that really gets stuck in your head. I also like when songs are original. They don't have to be super bizarre or anything but I'm not a huge fan of songs sounding a lot like other songs.
EEc: Do you think that your partnership with Dweezil Zappa has affected your music?
LL: Yeah, I think it's reinforced my attitude about music. Ever since I started, I liked writing music. I don't do it so that I'll be the center of attention or anything like that. Part of the side effect is that you end up on stage playing music but Dweezil likes playing music just to play music. He makes a lot of music that he doesn't even put out, that you never will hear. He has tons of music that he just makes. It doesn't have to all result in a product. It can be just something that you do. I think, in having that sort of attitude that makes music part of life and not such a scary, mysterious thing that you hold on a pedestal, you end up being able to make music that's more interesting because you don't feel so much pressure. You're just making it. It can be really simple or it can be complex.
The Recording Industry
EEc: How do you think the recording industry and the climate for performing songwriters has changed in the past few years?
LL: I think that singer-songwriters just now with John Mayer and Norah Jones, people like that, are definitely coming back into the focus. But, for about four years, actually the years that I was being held up from putting my record out from Interscope, that was a bad climate for singer-songwriters. I think it's getting more popular again on a mass commercial level.
EEc: What do you think about MP3s and file sharing?
LL: I'm a little concerned with the fact that the CD sales are going down because of it. Unfortunately it's an inevitable thing. If you're a kid at home, you don't have to ask your mother to go drive you clear across town to go buy a record. You just download it.
EEc: And you don't like concert bootlegs, correct?
LL: I don't like them, but you know I own some, so what am I? It's not the best when people make money off of your music but if, on the other hand, people are sharing it because they like it, I think that's kind of exciting in a way. It shows people's interest, you know?
EEc: Do you own some of your own?
LL: Oh yeah. Well, when we know that someone's bootlegging the show, we take the tapes, so I have some bootlegs because of that. In other cases, we do tape almost every show just because we end up using some of that stuff for CDs and things like that.
EEc: Do you think there might be a live CD down the road?
LL: There should be, shouldn't there? There should be. There have been bonus live portions of CDs and things like that in other countries but we should do a live CD.
Creative Marketing
EEc: How important do you think creative marketing is in promoting a new release?
LL: I think it's really important because marketing a record in a normal way costs a lot of money. You know when you walk into a record store and you see the record right there in front of you, that costs a record company a ton of money. So for labels that don't have as much money, you have to figure out different ways to let people hear about the music and that's the difficult part. I think that if major labels spent less money and more time looking at what they have, figuring out who might be interested in it and trying to focus on those people, rather than just spending a ton of money on mass marketing, musicians might have more appropriate fan-bases, They might have a higher sales result for those CDs from the people who should be hearing them. I don't know, it's just there're so many people putting out records. You have to figure out a way to let people know what you're doing without it just blending in with everything else. That's the catch, how do you do that?
EEc: Do you think the Hello Kitty aspect will help with that?
LL: I think it's a fun additional thing to do. I know that so far, just meeting fans, there are so many people who are really excited because they also love Hello Kitty, so it's a fun thing for them to have an album cover with Kitty. If people don't know who Hello Kitty is, it doesn't seem like it's put anybody off from buying the record. You know there're guys who are like "I don't know who Hello Kitty is" but they still buy the record.
EEc: Are you selling the CD at your shows?
LL: Yeah, we're selling a bunch of CDs at shows. It's great. One great thing about playing shows is that a lot of people, maybe they don't know I have a CD out and this is a good opportunity for them to buy it.
EEc: I'm told you like to hang around after the set and sign autographs and meet fans.
LL: Yeah, I totally do, I feel like that's a fun part of what I do, connecting personally with people. It's such a unique situation when you are on the road. You can meet hundreds and thousands of people. It's crazy. It makes it feel like it's something real. It's not this generic thing that you go every day and go on stage and play some songs and get off the stage and leave.
EEc: Are you actively involved in your website content development?
LL: Oh yeah. There's somebody I hired named Hal Paris who's the webmaster and we talk every day. He helped me design the website and all the content. I write a journal every day. Hal gets questions from the fans and I answer tons and tons of questions. I help design what everything looks like and the information that's on there and also, we try to take photographs and films wherever we can to put up on the site
EEc: Do you release merchandise or music exclusively through your website?
LL: Oh, we do. We have a lot of merchandise that we have just on the website. In fact, we have some Holiday Specials coming up where if you buy certain things, you'll get a huge discount.
EEc: Is the EP still on the boards for people who bought Cake and Pie?
LL: They're actually, I think, putting together orders right now. So if people want to order it, Hal is working on getting that all together.
EEc: You have a street team? How is that working?
LL: Yeah we do. We've had a street team for awhile called the E-Clairs and I've gotten to meet a lot of those people on the road. It's just really cool. They're so supportive and helpful and I think it's just a good relationship. I get cool stuff because they help me out and I try to give them cool stuff. I think it's also based on my experience being a music fan growing up. I was a huge fan of a lot of different kinds of music and I went to a lot of concerts. My friends and I even had pen pals based on certain bands that we liked and stuff like that. That was way before email. But I just know how fun it is! If I were in eighth grade or tenth grade or in college, it's such a fun thing to be a part of! I understand that you can be a fan without being a groupie or some weird person. You can get along with other people who like the same kind of music that you do.
Diversions
EEc: What are you currently listening to?
LL: I'm listening to CNN Headline News (laughs). I listen to a lot of different things because I get a lot of CDs and stuff. People give me them and then I buy them. At home, I was listening to Travis, The Beatles, Zeppelin… Dweezil and I were listening to some Frank Zappa. There was a concert recording that he was working on that they're going to be putting out on their label. I've been listening to my friend Judith Owen. She's great, a great singer-songwriter. She's awesome! I listen to classic rock radio a lot and I listen to a lot of talk radio also. Talk and rock.
EEc: In your tour diary, you mention your new obsession with the SIMs. How's your SIMs family doing?
LL: One of the boys got sent off to military school. The father and daughter are just freaking out. They're really upset all the time. In my other one I started with Dweezil, he wants me to try to kill all the family. The other SIMs family, they're doing pretty well but I think I put too many people in the house so I have to figure out how to get them all jobs and get more rooms on their house (laughs). It's pretty cool. It cracks me up.
EEc: Aside from Hello Kitty, do you have any other favorite Sanrio characters?
LL: I love Badtz-Maru but they're phasing him out. I like Chococat. Chococat is really cute. He's like a black cat. He's got a surprised look on his face.
EEc: He's my favorite.
LL: You like Chococat? He's so cute, right?
EEc: Yes, he's adorable.
LL: In fact, on Satuday I just emailed somebody that I want to get the new Chococat zip-up sweater. They have a zip-up hoodie sweater that's really cute that I need to get. I'm going to play at the Sanrio store (Saturday, November 16th). See that's what's cool! Before I made this album cover, Sanrio called me up to see if I would do an interview with USA Today about how much I love Hello Kitty and I love Hello Kitty so I was like, "Yeah!" So I took a few minutes and went over to the Sanrio store. They had a photo shoot and I got to buy all the stuff. I was just so excited! It was so crazy to be able to go into a store and be like, "I want this, this, this, this, this!" I got suitcases and appliances, watches, boomboxes and it's so cool! It's not like some dumb corporate thing where you're like "I guess I like these shoes." It's like the coolest thing!
EEc: I was just at the New York store this past weekend.
LL: Wasn't it exciting?
EEc: I was surprised at how small it was. I thought it should be bigger!
LL: It should be bigger! You know the one in LA is bigger! In LA, we have a couple stores. They have huge stores. I think San Francisco has the biggest one because that's where the US version of the company is based. But I know the New York store is a little bit small. The actual front of the store looks like it's going to be really big because it has a big Kitty head on it but there's still a lot of really good things. Oh my god! Or if you go on the website, you can find all these really cool things! I love it!
EEc: Do you collect anything else?
LL: I collect slidey pens, those pens that have little things that slide around in them, although I haven't seen any new ones for awhile.
EEc: What are you going to be doing when this tour with the Goo Goo Dolls wraps up?
LL: I think I'm going to be getting ready to go out on tour again. I think I'm going out on tour again in January or February. There're a bunch of projects I'm working on other than music so I'm waiting to hear back about those. There's a pilot TV show that I'm working on and if that happens, we'll be working on that show. If that doesn't happen, I'll be having some house repairs done because I'm sure Dweezil's not going to get it together to get them done. I need a heating system properly fixed. Key work is just not being distributed very well.
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Since I liked all the songs on the record, I basically asked the new record company if there were any songs in particular that they might need because they might want to promote to the radio or whatever. I was happy with what they chose and then I chose a bunch more that I just felt were so much a part of this collection of songs. Then we added a couple songs, recorded some songs, and then put the acoustic bonus track on the end because we had taken off the acoustic songs from the album.
It was hard though. It's hard when you make something and you finally see it as a whole and then have to take it apart and put it back together again.
Luckily on this album, the single that we're picking to get played on the radio is "Underdog" and I love that song. I'm really excited about that and so I definitely put that near the front of the album. But, again, there wasn't any compromise. It's like, I like that song, we got to make a video for that song that I directed with Dweezil Zappa. It's just so much more hands-on. It's so much better.
You can set little goals for yourself in that six-week period of time. It's always fun to have a little period of time to set a goal to do something because you can achieve a lot of things in six weeks, little by little. I practice guitar every day and I do a bunch of knitting, but unfortunately again, a lot of the things we planned on doing, we just don't have time for. It's just all waking up and getting food and driving someplace and doing some interviews and getting some more food and warming up my voice for my show and putting together a setlist and making 7000 business calls and checking my email…
Or, on the flip side, I do a lot of writing exercises. There's a teacher named Natalie Goldberg and she has some books about writing called Writing Down the Bones and another one called Wild Mind. She really talks about doing writing exercises so that you don't need to wait for the perfect moment of inspiration. You just need to write and when you do some of these writing exercises, you find yourself taking away all of that scary importance that we place on writing. If that's your job, it's like "Whoa, I need to come up with the perfect idea and say it perfectly." It takes that away from it and makes it more mundane and more like an everyday activity. And, then the other part of it is sometimes when you do take that importance away and you write a lot, ideas come out that you never would have expected, that you couldn't have planned for. It's almost like the inspiration comes through just practicing. So I do a lot of those kind of writing exercises to try to find things to write about because I don't love writing autobiographical songs that much. I like using some of my personal experience, of course, to give perspective in a song but I don't like my songs to be like a journal entry or anything. So it's fun to be able to go far away from myself, starting with myself.
I don't really write poetry, I don't think. Not on purpose. I think it just has that abstract quality sometimes. I think I'm aware of poetry. I studied poetry a lot in high school and college and just from that young age, was always taking things apart and was very aware of how words fit together and all the different little things like similes and metaphors and end-rhyme. We studied a lot of poetry in Spanish actually, which is awesome. It just makes you more aware of all the different things you can do with words and even if it might just sound like a simple phrase, I get the satisfaction of knowing that there's alliteration in this part of it and it has three different meanings and if you translate it into Spanish it would mean something else.
Also by working with Dweezil, I get the satisfaction of having more electric guitar in my music. I always have loved rock music and electric guitar and he's one of the best guitar players I ever -- well, he's the best guitar player I've ever known. So it's really cool to be able to work with somebody like that. Also, he just isn't a very judgmental person, again which takes the pressure off the music. When we record, we're not trying to record hit songs, we're just like "Yeah this sounds cool, let's keep making that song." It's just a very healthy attitude towards making music.
Being a musician is a hard job. For the most part, it's not something that most people have crazy success in. If you look at the charts, there are very few people on the charts, it's like 40 people,"The Top 40". I think that people always want to express themselves through song. There are great songwriters actually, even in the rap field and things like that. There's a lot of experimentation and different ways that people can express themselves through songs that aren't even traditional songwriting and I think that's exciting when that's happening also. A lot of people work with singer-songwriters, like Pink worked with Linda Perry and Linda's a songwriter and she had a band (4 Non-Blondes). It's not manufactured music. It's a creative person working with another creative person.
I don't know what the solution is. Hopefully at some point, it'll be more like the radio where any time there's any action on any song on the Internet, there's some kind of code that you get paid 5 cents or whatever like when you get your song played on the radio. There needs to be some kind of encoding and if that happens, people will just have to pay a fee to their server or however they're getting access online, just like radio stations pay a fee to BMI and ASCAP. Whenever your song is played, money comes out of that fee. It's a whole system where somebody's paying money to somebody at some point and then the artist gets a small amount based on when anyone listens to the song. So, hopefully there'll be some kind of performance royalty set up for the Internet. It's kind of out of control.
Right now the record company I'm with hasn't spent the money on putting the record in record stores in special places where you could actually see the album cover. The record is in the bins. So unless you're actually looking for the record, you're not going to see the record cover because the record is filed in the bins. Maybe we'll see one day, if they put more money into putting up posters and stuff, if Hello Kitty actually gets people to buy it or not.
I have a bunch of regular life things to do. I have to go kiss my cats on the face. Also, my little brother's wife's (just had) a baby. That's the first family baby so I'm going to have to go to New York and visit the baby. I want to go to Hawaii. And I want to get my hair done (laughs). And get some clothes made. I want to do everything! I have so many things I need to get done.