or better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old is often discarded, deemed too old for publication, a relic in the internet age. That's why each week at Stylus, one writer takes a look at an album with the benefit of time. Whether it has been unjustly ignored, unfairly lauded, or misunderstood in some fundamental way, we aim with On Second Thought to provide a fresh look at albums that need it.

All music that has ever been consigned to wax eventually boils down to one of two things: drugs or ex-girlfriends. Tails is certainly not a drug album. It’s an album devoid of any of the so-called “bad stuff” that we associate with rock and/or roll nowadays: anger, lust, and sin aren’t a factor. It’s WASP-pop by a fly-in-the-night singer-songwriter who nepotised her way into a couple of fluke hits in the mid 1990s and has spent the last ten years feeding off of that residual fame. It was the first album ever bought for me by a significant other. And, you know, when the light hits it just right, it kinda looks like the best album of the 1990s.

The back-story to her career is overplayed, but for an album that is so rooted in formality, it makes a kind of sense to bow to tradition when writing about it. Lisa Anne Loeb, Ivy League educated and a graduate of the same boarding school attended by the Bush twins, was playing her moderately twee, 10,000 Maniacs-influenced folk-pop in the coffee houses of New York City to no interest from the labels at all when she was rescued by a bit of neighbourliness from the guy in the apartment next to her. That neighbour was pretentious razorphobe Ethan Hawke, who took her away from a career of soundtracking mocha lattes and cantuccini and instead got her to soundtrack the celluloid Gen-X inanities of Reality Bites instead. And, just like that, Lisa Loeb became a star. She was the first unsigned artist to have a number one single, and there was a clock on the wall that was just starting to count down from “15:00.”

Except Loeb wasn’t concerned by this. Tails was released fifteen months after “Stay” found its way onto crush-tapes nationwide. Any chance she may have had of riding the coattails of one-hit wonderdom with a cash-in album was now dead. It was a wise move. In the fifteen months she’d been away, Generation-X had finally given in, cut its hair, and got a proper job, leaving Loeb free to go back to the one permanent fixture in the musical sphere: adult alternative.

So, Tails. We can talk about “Stay” first if you like, even though Loeb hides it away at the end of the album, almost like a bonus track. You know about it though, you know those arpeggios at the start, the way they judder instead of flowing smoothly like they’re supposed to, sounding like there’s a fault in the wiring. The opening line: “You say, I only hear what I want to,” sighed with a timbre that suggests she’s managed to stop crying for four minutes in order to knock this song out in the studio. Then the least powerful drum kick to signify the move from intro to song proper in history turns up, hesitating as if it isn’t quite sure it should be intruding on a girl and her guitar. And then, after a minute, Loeb grabs a hold of herself, she’s got her girls with her (on harmony vocals, admittedly), and she will survive. So she turns the radio on, she turns the radio up, and we start being manipulated. In the same way that the incidental music from Jaws works because it mimics and orchestrates your heartbeat, so “Stay” works as it mimics and empathises with the same self-pity endemic to all parties when a relationship breaks up. Bland generalities, hopeless optimism, and at the end of each verse, there’s the crushing blow of reality. The resignation at the end of the song, the same line with the same sigh that starts the whole thing off let’s you know she’s gonna go back to crying now, some things are more important than music. There’s no chorus in this song: she’s not feeling up to writing it at the moment.

But what of the rest of the album? What do you get from it? You get comfort. You get nothing to worry you at all, comfortable music from a woman who has lived a comfortable life. Chicken soup from the earlobes, put together from a master chef (any chance of a “Dweezil & Lisa” DVD boxset anytime soon?).

Opener “It’s Over” follows the same pattern as “Stay,” it’s best not to worry the punters on the listening post that you’re doing anything different too early in the album. A soft beginning, an occasional rise in tone, and then back down to where we started. It’s coffee house music: you can’t drink alcohol to this album at all, but you can only assume Loeb drinks decaf, though.

As for the lyrics, she does her Lilith Fair contemporaries proud. Lots of mixed metaphors, wilfull obscurity, and references that will have you scrambling to Wikipedia in order to understand what she’s going on about. “I may not be a Quaalude living in a speed zone” she wisely intones at one point, and you then understand what the key is to this brand of singer-songwriter: it’s about the music, stupid. It’s wrong to take anything from the lyrics of these artistes. Especially Loeb, who has always been a soundtrack artist—whether she was soundtracking coffee shops or Hollywood movies. It’s about the sound, not the lyrics.

And there are enough sounds on here to convince you that it’s an overlooked masterpiece. The kicks into a slightly more energetic mode are what make the album, the moderate exhilaration that brings on the line “It’s a sinking feeling pulls me through the seat of chairs,” on “Snow Day” is more than beautiful enough to make you forget that the line makes absolutely no sense at all. An entire song is based around the concept that telling the truth is a bit like the production of salt-water taffy, and you can forget this conceit because the moment she fixes you with a steely glint and utters the phrase “pulling taffy,” the guitars suddenly awaken out of their ennui and you hear the smallest amount of rock necessary for it to register on the chart (0.1 Malsteems).

The entire album is basically a masterpiece of pacing. Everything comes in at the right time, it’s no wonder the woman got her own cookery show, she runs the album with the orchestration of a hotel head chef, everything has to happen at the correct moment. Nothing chimes, nothing jars, nothing goes wrong.

But there’s another reason to love this album, a reason why it needs to be re-evaluated as a great piece of work, and that’s because like all great pop it is just a moment in time. Despite the number one single, despite the platinum sales, Lisa Loeb’s contribution to the development of popular music ends with this album alone. Nobody copied the Loeb sound, A&R men didn’t sign up thousands of “New Loebs” to unleash on the public eighteen months later, she didn’t send a stampede of unsigned acts to rampage all over the charts. Nope, any chance she had of shaping the future of music was put to rest by the release of Jagged Little Pill a few months prior, and Alanis Morissette became the thalidomide to a whole new generation of chicks with acoustics.

So, Tails. Like a first girlfriend, great fun at the time, occasionally worthy of a revisit when you’re in need of an emotional prop-up and, if you are to have any chance of leading a productive life, you can’t allow it to weigh heavily on your mind. Dweezil knows what I’m talking about.