I Am all In again, Luke's Diner with Scott Patterson an iHeartRadio podcast.
Hey Everybody, Scott Patterson, I Am all in Podcast, one of them productions. iHeartRadio Media. I heart podcast. Luke's Diner with the one and Only. Yes, we have our Lisa Lobe. Lisa, how are you welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
It is a pleasure. We're excited to get into it with you. Let me tell everybody a little bit about you if they don't already know. You're a Dallas native, you are a Grammy Award winning singer songwriter, and your first number one hit with your platinum singer goal Stay I missed You from Reality Bites making history. Is the first pop artist to top the charts without a recording contract.
I did not know that. What an accomplishment. Back in two thousand and four, Lisa co hosted Food Network show called duezl and Lisa with fellow rock musician diezl Zappa. She recently teamed up with Any nominated Voice actress Debbie dry Berry on the single The compost Been as an eco friendly anthem promoting composting. She's a lover of music, obviously, food and our beautiful planet Earth.
Welcome, Lisa, thank you so much.
Let's get into this with your Food Network show. That was your idea, right, the show was our idea.
It was really strange. At the time I was dating deuesel Zappa, it was a million years ago, and he and I were both obsessed with the Food Network. I think it was like sort of early not early days, like middle early days of Food Network. Literally just watching Food Network all the time. It was probably the TVO years, you know, it was before it was after VHS, but
before the crazy streaming binge watching we're doing today. But there were so many shows we both loved cooking, interested in cooking, and I put out a record called Cake and Pie with the word and underlined, and which was really philosophical. It was like, if somebody offers you cake and pie, I mean it's also real. If somebody offers me cake and pie, I always just usually want both. I want all of it, and that's like life. I
want all of it. If I can, you know, you might as well say sure, I'll have cake and pie. So it was philosophical, but it also really connected us with a chef that we were friendly with named Mark Tarbell, who's a well known chef in the Arizona area. He's also been on Food Network a lot and has won many Emmys for his shows in Phoenix. But we talked to Mark and we were like, oh, we should do a promotion where we may we play music and then we also make make cake or pie on stage and
everybody gets to try it. And Mark was going to be our pie of an roadie and uh. We presented it to Innerscope Records, which was the record company at the time, and they didn't want to support it. They didn't they didn't want to pay for that, uh, interesting marketing thing. We went ahead and did it a couple of times and it was actually very successful and it was really really fun, and so we decided, you know what, let's see maybe the Food Network could fit us in somewhere.
We could be a guest on a show, because there's the whole food theme and the baking theme and it's one of our big interests. And so we had a meeting with the Food Network with a producer we knew from Broadway Video, and instead of fitting us into another show, they said, why don't you guys have your own show? So we got our own show, and it was at the beginning of like Info infotainment, you know, we were
going to be to us. It was a way for us to get into the kitchens with all of these profession amazing sometimes world famous chefs go to different cities. Food Network wanted it to be reality based as well. So you see us on tour, playing concerts, doing golf tournaments, you know, and we learned how to bake my mom's
special cookies or his mom's special dish. We met with famous chefs and sometimes other celebrities like Bill Murray would come with us down in the basement of this amazing restaurant called Sugar that used to exist in Chicago, and we'd work, we'd cook together, and it was just this great. It was a lot of eating, but it was It was a great experience and a good experience learning about TV and production and how that works as well.
Wow, So this is the traveling series change the way you cook or eat it home?
Yeah, I mean everything, because we learned so much from everybody, from fred Eric, who's a great chef out here in la There's just such a camaraderie between musicians, like the creativity of making something and chefs, and like chefs like my friend Mark Charbell. You go to his restaurant, you always want to get the chocolate dessert, you always want to get the meatballs. It's kind of like when I
play concerts. There's certain songs I always have to play, and they always have to be fresh, and they have to be feel like now and engaged, and then you've got some specials that you have, and so it just it Definitely I still have like a lot of the tools that I bought during the making of the show, lots and lots of special things I use in the kitchen. And it just made me realize that there's nothing too simple or too complicated in the kitchen and standing next
to someone. Although YouTube videos are helpful, but standing next to somebody in the kitchen can really teach you a lot.
Right, do you cook with your children?
I do a little bit. I cook a lot for them. I do cook with them, especially my son likes to get in the kitchen these days, and sometimes he'll cook for us. Really yeah, well, I don't eat steak, but he loves making steak, hands on steak. He had a friend over and for fun they made nyoki and steak from scratch. I mean, they didn't make the steak from scratch, but.
You know what I mean, you personally and as a family, what kind of cakes and pies do you dream about eating?
Ugh, I made the best cake for my birthday. One of my traditions is I like to make my own birthday cake or order it an ice cream cake from Baskin Robins, a chocolate chip ice cream cake, because that's what I had when I was like five or four. I still have the little ballerinas that went on top of that cake. I love that cake. Oh, they're so good, so good. The frosting what is it even made out of? Like the ice cream? The cones that are clowns? Yeah,
the red frosting. It tastes so good. I don't know what that is.
We just polished one off. We're going to get an I told my wife, I said, reload, reload on this. This is fit. It's like desserts for a week.
Yeah. And it's dangerous too, because you can literally I realized after rushing around them for other kids' birthdays and things like that, and trying to order in advance and getting the perfect cake. You can literally walk in and they have a whole freezer full of beautiful cakes. We even got a strawberry one recently a strawberry ice cream cake. But anyway, for my birthday, I like making cakes also, and I had just been to oh coincidentally outside of Chicago.
I was right near Northwestern and my friend Aaron and Scott and I ordered in from this Italian restaurant pizza. But we got a dessert that was like a polenta cake, like a polenta pound cake, and so I sort of replicated that cake. I found a recipe like it, and I messed around with a little bit. But it was like a polenta pound cake with whipped cream that's mixed
with mascropones. So it's like this kind of heavier, not super sweet whipped cream with like a tiny bit of powdered sugar inside of it, and then also stewed peaches, so you get this like, oh, it was so good. It's so dense and buttery and heavy because of the polina, and it's got a sweetness from the polenta, but it's not super super sweet. Oh that was so good.
Okay, I want to go back. And this isn't necessarily a food question. It's a question you've heard a million times before, but I don't know the answer to this, and it's food for my soul because I'm a songwriter as well. And take us back to before you wrote Stay, how did that come about? And tell us about recording it and then releasing it and the sensation of having this hit.
What was that like?
How old were you and what was that like?
I think I was about twenty two or twenty three. I was like a couple of years out of college, a year and a half out of college. I had been writing music since I was a little kid, and writing music with lyrics since I was in about eighth GID. It's funny. I was just going through some old stuff. I found the lyrics my friends. I got my two best friends and I to write this song for our graduating class that we all sung together on stage when
we graduated from high school. But it's always been something I do, is write music. And I was in a band all through college and we made a lot of music in a couple records. But I'd always liked writing songs. I was a fan of David Bowie and The Cure and the Police, a lot of classic rock. I was not a big singer songwritery person per se, even though that's what I do, I used, you know, I got an electric guitar I think is my first guitar, and then I got a Yamaha acoustic, or maybe one right
after the other. But I was really into like The Who, and I don't know, I didn't see myself as like a girl with an acoustic guitar. But then little by little after lugging around a huge vox I mean a jazz chorus amp, because that's what Andy Summers used, that huge j ass chorus amp. And my really heavy strat case, you know, not the soft case, but the hard case.
They're very, very heavy. I'm at the teat five to two person and just slinging an acoustic guitar and a soft shell bag on your back or one of those really cheap kind of almost cardboardy cases. That became more of my thing. It was quieter when I would shyly write songs in my room, even though I still love electric guitars and playing them. But I sort of became
a singer songwriter with an acoustic guitar. Although when you listen back the Cure and led Zeppelin and The Who and everybody else have a lot of big acoustic guitar.
Rock songs that hole Who's Next Is it pretty much an acoustic album.
That's beautiful, a lot of and rock with acoustic. But yeah, I love music so much. But anyway, so I sort of avoided writing personal songs. My point is I avoided writing songs that felt super super personal. I thought I was being oblique, somebody else said to me the other day. I thought I was. When I look back at some of my early songs, they're pretty obvious. But I didn't know that. I thought I was being kind of poetic
and abstract. But for the first time, I kind of let myself write a song about something that was going on in my life that was kind of straightforward about a relationship, about the relationship I had. It was actually with my producer boyfriend. He was my producer and my boyfriend for many years now. I still am good friends with him, and he does most of the photography you see if me, the professional photography you see he does.
But anyway, that's on a side. I wrote something that just like we were having an argument and I'm like ah, and it was like writing about that, and that's where it started. Lyrically, at the same time, I had just signed with BMI a couple of years earlier, the organization that helps to collect your royalties and when your songs were played on the radio. And they're a great resource for up and coming musicians as well, because it's just it's a place that's not a record company or a
publishing company. That's great community of professional music people. But anyway, so I heard through one of the people I worked with there that Daryl Hall was looking for solo songs for a Daryl Hall record, and I'm a huge fan of Hall of Notes as well, and I was trying to write a song that was like one of those R and B kind of Sarah smiles, Sarah smile kind of songs. So that's where the music groove came from. I very soon thereafter found out that opportunity was not
happening at all. So I started putting my lyrics to those chords, and the song lyrics go off in some different directions, but that's where it started. I finished writing it when I was at Berkeley Summer School in Boston. I went to summer school there weirdly as a grown up, you know, I thought I was so grown up. I was in my early twenties, but mostly it's teenage kids
and honestly mostly teenage boys at the time. And I finished the song there and I and then there were some record companies interested in New York City that were getting interested in signing me. I was doing all the different music festivals and south By Southwest and things like that, and so one of the record companies had given me a demo deal, where they give you some money to
make a recording. So I was recording a few songs with a producer named Kevin Salem, and we did a version of Stay that was kind of more rock because I just wanted to. I'm like, why is all my music so acoustic? You know, can't I make it more rock? And I had a band and everything. But then Juan Fatino, who is the producer I was talking about, we had made it. We had made a recording of a bunch of songs already. He's like, let me take a let
me take a stab at this with you. So we took the band to his apartment in New York City on fifty second Street, his one his two bedroom apartment where he had set up a little studio which was sort of unusual at the time, and we recorded, you know, with the drums in one room and the bass in the other room and this New York City apartment and recorded to a DATS, which are basically like VHS tapes or Beta tapes actually, and then I recorded my vocal in the closet with those kind of barn do that
kind of wiggle on their hinges that hang down from the ceiling. And we did get a really nice mic, a C twelve that we rented. But we had been doing a lot of recordings and so this was We did a handful of songs, including Stay, and so that's how the song was recorded and mostly recorded and written. And then the opportunity came up for Reality bites Ethan Hawk, who was a friend of mine. I had met him
through another friend from college, some actor friends. I was doing a lot of acting in theater in college as well, and one of our common friends introduced me to Ethan Hawk, and he was one of my neighbors, and we just there was just a huge group of us that hung out all the time. We were involved in Ethan's theater company. I wrote music for his plays. We all went to go see each other play music and do theater and film openings and whatever, you know, playwrights and so there
were a lot of different things that happened. But along the way, Ethan asked me for a copy of my song's Stay to pass along to Stacy Cher and Ben Stiller and Karen Rackman and the people involved in the movie Reality Bites, and they decided to put my song into the movie in the final credits. And then RCA Records was making a film what's it called again? Soundtrack? A soundtrack and Ron Fair, who was very successful in soundtracks, he asked, if you know, we could put the song
Stay on there. So that's why I'm an independent artist at the time, because we licensed the song to them, we did not sign with them, so I was a person without a label in a good way.
And then.
The movie came out and this a radio station down in Houston called KRBE wanted to put the song out as a single, and so we did that and it started going up the charts. And then RCA really jumped on the bandwagon and are really great radio reps headed off by our friend Skip Bishop, who good friends with the head of the radio department. They pushed it and they did the thing, and the song kept moving up the charts, and it went to number one. Wow without a label.
Wow.
And actually right now it's the anniversary of it going to number one three weeks in August thirty one years ago.
Oh, that's fantastic.
It's incredible. That's incredible. It was so exciting. And luckily, I have so many friends and family, really good friends that I've had since I was once, since I was born.
Literally our moms were pregnant together. But I have a really solid set of friends from all eras of my life that I keep up with, and so to be able to have that, and also Juan, who I was working with, is a very nostalgic person who also loves the history of music and the excitement of having a number one song, So we got to it was good to have all those friends and family around to really remember that it was actually happening. Because I'm a person
who's like, Okay, now what's next. Okay, now we're going on tour. Okay, now I'm going to get the record label. It's hard to sit and be in the moment. Those people really helped out with them.
That's fantastic. You know, I too, am a huge fan of Bowie.
Which is your favorite? What are your favorite records?
You know, Ziggy start Us for me, I mean they're all great, but the early stuff, yeah.
Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust.
Yeah, just fantastic stuff. But the songwriting for such a young guy, you know, and these beautiful songs that he wrote were just remarkable. And this I even listened. I even listened to the stuff when he was sixteen seventeen that he was releasing, all these.
Very childlike Jones things.
Yeah, they're very yeah, wow.
Like when I'm five, right, right, I'm five. It's so cool. But I love the it just takes me to a place that's so mysterious and it's other world. It's otherworldly, and I don't always know what he's talking about. I got to meet him once and I read you really yes in the studio and I really really wanted to ask him about the Beuley Brothers, and I didn't because you know, our time was short and it was just small talk. Hi, how are you doing this to meet you?
It was before cell phones really, so there's no little photo or anything. But I can't believe I got to meet him. I wish, yeah, you know, he's so talented.
I know, I can't remember an artist or someone in the entertainment isn't passing away and having it affect me so deeply. I mean, it gutted me for three days, and I didn't know why. So I called back home my buddies in my old band in high school and growing Where are you from? Southern New Jersey, PHILADELPHIAA okay? And and they agreed they were gutted the same way I was. There was just something about Bowie that was different from everybody else.
I think. Also, we didn't really know he was really sick, right, I didn't really know. I didn't get the time to mourn the lung goodbye. And yeah, and he was so young, you know. Also, I mean, like Stevie Rayvaughan, that was terrible. I remember crying in the kitchen when that happened. That was just horrible.
There's there's a great video of him on Jules Holland from and.
He played with David Bowie.
Yeah.
I got to see him play with David.
Bowie, Stevie Rayvaughan and David Bowie.
Yeah, from the Let's Dance Tour, the Left Dance Record.
Yeah, and I got to say that duet with Freddie Mercury is probably the best duet in the history.
I don't love it. I'm I don't love it, and I love Queen. Oh my god. I was at I was at Live AID in nineteen eighty four in London. I saw it. I saw saw it. I was in the audience. Oh, I saw all of that. I was there. I was there, and I was studying theater. And then I dragged a couple of friends. I'm like, We've got to go see this thing.
You witnessed that duet.
I was there. I was like halfway back in the.
In the just blow your hair back.
Yeah, I couldn't believe it. Yeah, but I mean I still I don't. It's not my favorite song. I mean I've gotten to love it, but yeah, I don't know.
That song kills me.
Freddie Mercury. I never got to see them live other than Live Aid.
I saw Queen at the Tower Theater. I think at the Tower Theater in Philadelphia when I was a kid, Wow, Tower Theater. Everybody the Tower Theater was a small, like you know, thousand thousand theater fifteen hundred, yeah, maybe more, but everybody played the Tower Theater. They came through Philadelphia. If they didn't play the Spectrum, they played the Tower Theater.
It's so much better seeing someone in a theater than in an arena. It's just so much better. There's an excitement. And if you have really good tickets, like you're up in the first five rows, basically it's okay. But you get so far back in those places and it's just the people are these tiny little dolls. You can't it's like you're not there. It's it's, it's it's and the sound it doesn't. You know, it's really hard to make those concerts in those arenas. They're not set out for music.
Some people play well like a Foo Fighter's plays well in an arena, but still like to see them in a smaller space is really exciting.
All right, back to cakes. Okay, let's shift gears. So you also love coffee. What's your perfect coffee order? And do you eat cake with the coffee?
Sometimes? Yeah, although I will say sometimes after I've eaten the cake with the coffee, I'm like, that was too sweet because I put sugar in the coffee. You know, it's too sweet. It's too sweet. Like you want to get one of those, like really grainy scones, which I'm not a big scone fan. I like them at the British like Tea House plays down in the West Village. They make a really good scone, but sometimes they're too they like coat the roof of your mouth in this
gross way. But there's a scone that they used to sell it Pete's Coffee that I think came from. I don't know where it came from because I got one recently. Where was I where they sold them? But they it has like dried cherries and flax seeds and it's like whole wheat, so it's like sweet but not too sweet. But anyway, my favorite coffee order is when I go to Starbucks. It's a flat white with two percent milk, a short like the tiny size or if the coffee
is really really good at Misto. Basically I want to get six ounces of espresso or really strong coffee, and I want to have a half a cup of steamed but not frothy. That's why the flat white is good because it mixes in with the coffee. It's not like the cappuccino or it sits on top of the coffee. It really bums me out. Even though it's really cute looking. But I want them the hot milk to be mixed with the coffee and then I want a tea spoon of sugar. That's what I want. What do you want?
What do you want?
I like it. I like coffee with a bit of honey and tea with some honey. And you're right. I can't eat anything sweet with it because it's too much sweet.
It's like it's just like it kind of hurts your throat. I do like maple every once in a while, I do my maple syrup. I don't love honey in my coffee. I don't like honey a lot. I just realized I was eating something the other day, like a cake, and it was sweetened with honey. Oh no, I know what. It was one of those. It was one of those snack bars that's like like a real I don't like
protein bars. I don't eat any of that. But there's one that's made with just like peanut, butter, honey, chocolate chips. It's the and I was eating one of those, and I was like, this is so good. It almost tastes like tastes like cookie dough, except it has that honey flavor like I don't.
I'm not a Fanny flavor. I'm a big honey guy love.
I know it's good for you. I put it in warm water if I need to soothe my throat.
Yeah, especially going to say the flavor, I have.
It a like Russia Shana. They're sweet New Year, but I don't love the taste of honey.
Let's talk about compost ben your eco friendly anthem, just does that mindset show up and how you shop and how you cook at home as well?
Yeah, I mean it's funny. I made this song with Debbie dry Berry, who's a very well known voiceover artist, especially and she started getting back into music. She started in music, and she was making an album of all like eco friendly songs, and so I said, we got to do it, but we can't hit people over the head with it. It has to sound like a real song.
I've made so many children's records myself, and it's a real thing for all of us to always make songs that you know, sometimes have a lesson like I love Free to be you and me, and had all these great lessons and values imbued and embedded in the songs. But it was I don't know, it was just like in a fun good way, not in that annoying like teacher eway, but anyway, So yeah, I am kind of obsessed.
In fact, I want somebody to create an oprah I call it an oprah app where you can actually because I'll stand in front of grapes for like three minutes wondering, like the real the grapes that are not organic there actually taste better than the organic ones today? How far did you have to drive to the grocery store to get the organic thing? You know, making these decisions what's better for the earth, And I wish there was a way you could like plug all that into a computer.
And they're like, you know it, just get the regular Colgate toothpaste at the drug store two blocks from your house. It's better for the earth than you know, making your own toothpaste that you had to drive thirty miles to get the salt from the salt lag or whatever. I don't know, I'm just making that up, but I really it really affects me all the time. I get kind of obsessed. But there's so much information out there and so many variables, I can get a little stuck. But yeah,
we have our compost bin under our sink. It's like an easy one where you just like put all the things you're supposed to put in the compost bin and we could put them in the green garbage bin.
There you go. Yeahs all right, here's here's another. You are a rock star, you simply are, and you have been for over thirty years. If you could sit down for dinner, okay with three rock musicians? Yeah, what kind of food would you serve? And who would you want at that dinner?
I hate this question, no offense.
That's why we ask it.
I don't. I don't, that's so hard. I mean, we just talked about David Bowie. That would be great. Oh gosh. Like I love the police, but I don't know if they need to be at the dinner. I love talking to Stuart Copeland and he's really interesting. But and Andy Summers too.
About Joni Mitchell? Would you want her there?
Uh no, wait a minute, Joan Bi Prince Prince really would be really interesting. I'm curious what he has to say. He may not talk a lot, though. That's the other thing that people I like, Prince Freddie Mercury, oh, Brian May. Some of these folks are very introverted. You know, like the cure. If you're talking to Robert Smith, he's so introverted.
Mm hmmm.
Ricky Lee Jones is great. She wrote a great autobiography, Oh so good. A lot of voice, the Go Gos. I'm singing with the Go Gos in a couple of nights. Those guys are really fun to talk to.
Where are you going to be with them?
A fundraiser for an organization called muzak. You can find it online and they have guest singers singing with them as well as Robin Hitchcock with Lowell toll Hurst playing drums. It's going to be in Larchmont area, but I'm looking to see if I can find some of the music I listen to. This is the I don't I this is too hard of a question. I can't even you know what.
We don't want to stress you out.
It's stressing me out. And I'd probably at the meal there'd be some kind of like I'd have to ask to see what kind of protein people eat, you know, like m because I could do like a fish thing or a veggie thing.
What about like McDonald's McDonald's with Ozzy Osbourne, you know Ozzy.
So it was so sweet Junia is really interesting, how I like. I enjoyed speaking to a Steve Vai. He's a really interesting, interesting guy, really kind, really smart. But I'm mentioning people like that. I have spoken to it great linked like, uh.
Have you met Neil Young?
I have met him a couple of times. I met him a couple of times. He was he was nice. We didn't talk a lot, but he was very nice.
What about Steven Stills?
He's also nice. Yeah, I'm friendly with his son, Chris Stills. And I met Stephen Stills a number of times along the way as well.
I was in Hawaii and he in Lahaina and he walked into the bar restaurant in the afternoon with a guitar and starts and played a set.
That's so cool. What restaurant were you at?
Oh?
I can't remember.
This is just like the Earl just there the other day. WHI It was really great.
He was fantastic.
Musicians are so interesting to hang out with and talk to. They've they've been everywhere. They often have a really great sense of humor. Not to like, not to like generalize, but there's so many great people to talk to and hang out with. I don't it's too hard of a question.
We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna get by that question. Thank you appreciate it. I'm gonna wait any longer.
I know. I can't. I can't.
All right, you walk into Luke Steiner. Okay, if there was a Lukes diner and you're walking into it, Okay, what would you order? Where would you sit?
Oh that I'm between a counter and a window?
Okay, good?
Yes, Like I love a booth, but these days my hips, I don't know. It's not always comfortable sitting in a booth, even though I love booths. I would say counter. I love counters. I would order. I mean, I'm trying to think what I would actually like to eat, Like things, certain things look great on camera, but I don't actually feel like eating them, like chocolate chip pancakes, but like I don't actually love eating a bunch of pancakes at one sitting, I really do.
Like.
The first thing that's coming to mind is just like a cheese sandwich with like bread, iceberg, lettuce, mayonnaise, lettuce, like not shredded iceberg pieces of lettuce. Do I have an aversion just shredded lettuce on sandwiches, tomato, coca cola potato chips nice, that would be good. Maybe some carrots. I always have to have some vegetables on the side.
Lisa, thank you for your time.
We'll have to figure out the dinner.
Yes, and you know we'd love to have you back on and good luck with all your future projects. Thank you and latest updates for Lisa's project new music tour dates. Visit www dot Lisa lobe dot com and follow us on social media at Lisa Lobe. Lisa. Thank you so much, best fans on the planet. Thanks for all your downloads. Keep the cards and letters come and remember where you lead, we will follow.
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