first round game

(4) Lisa Loeb, “Stay (I Missed You)”
PASSED
(13) Lee Ann Womack, “a Little Past Little Rock”
111-49
AND WILL PLAY IN THE SECOND ROUND

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/6/26.

austin grossman on Lisa Loeb’s “Stay (I Missed You)”

[Any resemblance between people's lives or events in this essay and actual events or lives is purely coincidental. I have never met Lisa Loeb but a friend of mine did and says she is very nice.]

Lisa—

Lisa I didn’t—

Lisa I—okay yes I did say approximately that.

We were over at the big apartment on Highland Avenue, the usual crowd and that girl Lisa that Jeff had been seeing for a while now, except now they were in some kind of argument. Which was none of my business except we were stuck listening to them again. Maybe it could go in my novel.

Lisa I get it, it’s not really about the restaurant.

All of us were writers, practically, or musicians, or actors. Jeff was doing poetry at NYU in the fall. None of us were getting much of anywhere. Except Lisa actually. She’d gone to Brown for one thing and did music theory at Berklee. Plus she knew Ethan Hawke. Well a bunch of us knew Ethan but he actually paid attention to Lisa. She wrote music for one of his theater things, the kind people actually went to.

We’re late already and—please don’t make this about us.

It wasn't just that Ethan helped her make that video in his billion-dollar apartment. It's not like any of us could have done it. She had a pretty decent voice, yeah, although it was more stuff it was hard to quantify. It was going to come out soon, that one song she wrote, the way the kick drum hit and that little guitar riff leads off and then stops, quiets the space like the lights dimming at the start of the play, of the first line she sang like the words were just coming to her, the way it leads off and then breaks. Then in the vacuum of that pause we're sucked into the moment Lisa struggling to get the truth out, halting, failing honestly like any of us would.

Lisa I can't understand what you're saying. "Dying since the day they were born—" is that an Ethan thing? Well, I’m sorry but yes it does sound like a little him.

More people were showing up and it was harder to hear but she was talking over him, backing him up against the Bukowski section on the cinder-block bookshelf, where the red candle had dripped its wax, and one of those plastic Garfield phones that were always washing up on that beach in France. Not that I blame her, we were all a little tired of hearing from Jeff.

Did I have a little crush, fine, sure, who didn't? She was charming as hell the way she’d look at you and it was awkward but it was kind of like, yes, live in this awkward moment. When she talked she’d lean forward a little like she was trying to give the words an extra push because she needs them to get to you. She didn’t know what to do with her hands but it's like, who the hell knows what to do with their hands? Fuck those people. Who even needs to write a chorus?

Okay, about the glasses. People roll their eyes at the glasses now, but if you were not there for the glasses you do not understand about the glasses. They told a story. About how you used to watch sixties comedies and the smart best friend would wear those glasses to signify nobody would ever care about her, but you secretly knew she was the best character because you weren't like the others, you saw things differently. And then she's there saying hey we're grownups now, we can just be that character if we want. That's who we are.

I missed you too, Lisa of course I did but it was only five days. I didn't even want to be in the Poconos.

By then there was no question of going to a restaurant so we ordered Thai and all tried our hardest to ignore whatever godawful song they had on in the kitchen—please please just break up already. We watched an old Mary Tyler Moore episode and all sang along to the credits and mimed throwing our hats in the air, You're going to make it after all.

Yes you’re clever—it’s part of what I love about you—not every guy would say that.

Oh, god. Certainly Lisa and Jeff didn’t seem likely to make it. Jeff had feelings too, how he was running and running and nobody ever noticed, but we only wished he really would shut up because we'd rather hear her talk, words tumbling out in broken rhythms, the way she could stop just a fraction of a second between "I" and  "—don't understand if you really care," and hold the whole room up as she checked herself, thinking on her feet.

We had our Predator 2 re-watch going so I don't even know if she took off or if they broke up or what. Maybe she didn’t leave after all, she was pretty into Jeff, and after all he really was good-looking and he’d published that poem about the bird except it was a metaphor—for Lisa probably—but still anyways it was a knockout. It never came to anything in the end but he got in early at Yahoo and he's fine now, that’s what I hear.

We’re all fine, or almost all who were there. We all went to good schools, and there never was a better year to graduate, 1994, right before it all took off.  I never got my grad degree but fuck it, I wrote a couple of novels. The IT work keeps me afloat til I write the next one, and one of these days I'll break out. You'll see. 

I just looked to see how Lisa's doing now. The one of us who made it, the first unsigned artist ever to get a number one song. She had two more in the Top 20, got a Grammy for a children's album. Her and Ethan’s video is still up on YouTube and will be there til the end of time. No more VHS, no more MTV but there’s Lisa still there in her plain black dress and singing, flickering between tenderness and challenge and grim determination, still figuring it out as she goes.

Thirty-nine million views. It's iconic, yes, but is it actually good? You certainly can't dance to it. Those lyrics in the middle make less sense the more you hear them, and at 3:04 it's pretty close to outstaying its welcome. You can call it a novelty but all that means is, I'd never heard anybody do it before, and for a moment it felt the only way anybody should be singing, ever. I guess I had a lot of feelings in the early nineties, we all did, the early years, when it was all a fraud, when I was never going to make it, back when they told us even history was at an end. Never such innocence again.

Austin Grossman is the author of Soon I Will Be Invincible, YOU, Crooked  and, most recently, Fight Me. He is a professional game designer and writer on many games including Deus Ex and Dishonored.

amy barnes on lee ann womack’s “a little past little rock”

My mother sent me what I call “the boyfriend book”, without context as a Christmas gift. The book is carefully curated with photographs of the boys I dated from 16 until I met my husband, who is incidentally not in the book. I have no baby pictures of myself, just this random photo album. It feels like a vacation slide show gone wrong, the kind where you don’t invite your neighbors to your house for a watch party.

“A Little Past Little Rock” feels like the perfect theme song to reminisce about past young loves. It would have tugged at my post-break-up heart as I played it over and over to heal from puppy love, danced to it at prom, and added it to a 1980s mixed tape. The photo images are a mix of fading Polaroids and original 35mm film pictures. They feel like the end notes from an album, songs like Womack’s ballad that came out in 1998. I had met my now-husband by then, a long way away from Little Rock.

My connections to Arkansas and the song go beyond young love to a regional connection too. I grew up in Wichita, Kansas and had penpal friendships with sweet boys in Oklahoma and Arkansas. While we wrote back and forth on lined notebook paper, there are no notes on the back of any of my mother’s photograph collages. I’m left to guess who they are, try to remember who stood on my porch, and who wrote me letters in wonky cursive. My mother apparently does have her own notes (unspoken) about my teenage dating history that I can feel through the plastic sleeved images.

I am way beyond all of those Midwestern boys. I want to stand on my mother’s front yard and play the Womack anthem out of a boombox to remind her I’ve been married for nearly three decades. I’m past the geography of those boys too, having spent my adult life in Southern states. While the rest of the country pronounces Kansas’ neighboring state Arkan-saw, I knew it as Arkan-sas. I did leave without looking back; I’ve only been in my childhood home state once since I left the Midwest. When I went through literal Little Rock for the last time, it was on a Greyhound bus on the way to North Carolina. It was days after the Oklahoma City Bombing, only a few years before Womack’s song came out. I rode that bus a long way past Little Rock, past Oklahoma City, past the first half of my life.

Now, I find myself paging through the Polaroids and 35 mm film photographs, because I’m apparently not all the way past Wichita, or really Arkansas—just the boys I left beyond, like Womack’s song laments. However, there are peripheral gifts in the photo album. I find my grandparents and great grandparents there, my first car, early dogs, my much-younger parents and sister, and mostly myself—broadly smiling and always posed, with big 80s/90s hair, big teeth, and a big wardrobe. My daughter tells me she loves my wacky vintage clothes, but is also jealous I lived in that time period, with that wardrobe, with that hair. She is dating now and we half-joke I’ll make her a boyfriend book some day too, complete with printed iPhone images. I make a mental note to NOT do that.

I haven’t been in Little Rock since I was 20 and yet, Womack’s chorus still feels poignant. I remember boys from cross country meets, the almost-men, the prom dates, graduation peers, lost friends, the college boy who skated on an icy river with me. Thanks to my mom’s clear-outs, I also have tangible things from the photos: my prom dress, first bike, wall art, gifts. The physical things, people, and images drag me back to a place and time that was very close to Little Rock, but that feels far away.

As I write this, I hum the Womack song and think of the boys and Farrell’s ice cream parlor and my 1976 Volvo, all present in the shadows of the album’s boys. My life journey took me all the way to Nashville, the land of sappy country songs about love and loss, and sometimes, Little Rock. There is an irony there as Womack was in Nashville for a while too. We were even in the same space. When my daughter was younger, I attended a special Girl Scout event where keynote speaker Womack spoke eloquently of love and heartbreak, Thin Mints and thin women, finding and losing herself. She sang a little too. I’m a little past lunch banquet chicken breasts and boxed cookies when I remember (and quickly forget) the first face and name in the boyfriend book.

I did a little digging online and found out Womack eventually left her Nashville recording label and went back to her Texas roots. Recently, she’s returned to recording (after nearly a decade) with the release of “Middle of a Storm” for the Paramount+ series Landman.

When I left the Midwest, I wasn’t driving to escape like in Womack’s song, but I am a long way over my own past, those boys in their dusty photo album, my own country western song complete with dogs and first loves. In my mid-50s, I wonder what I will see in the proverbial rearview mirror. Where will I be a “little past” next? I do know that every day I’m a little more past Little Rock. The boyfriend book, not so much.

Amy Barnes is the award-winning author of three collections: Mother Figures, Ambrotypes, and Child Craft. She has words at The Rumpus, SmokeLong Quarterly, X-R-A-Y Lit, and many other sites. An editor at Fractured Lit and Gone Lawn, she also reads and teaches for Narratively. A recent empty nester, she lives in Tennessee with her husband and their very stubborn Labrador rescue dog.