Songfacts®:

• Before her song "Stay" became a huge hit and earned her a record deal, Lisa Loeb sold a homemade recording of her songs at her shows. This being the early '90s, it was on a cassette and was known as "The Purple Tape." This is one of the songs from that tape, and it was never officially released until 2008, when The Purple Tape was distributed on CD. Says Loeb: "I like the song 'Airplanes.' It's very simple. It feels like the kind of song like "Jake" is, like a short story. Like a little glimpse into a life. And it was literally inspired by being in a songwriting class at The New School. I decided to take a songwriting class, because I thought that would be an interesting thing to learn more about. I was trying to get some more points of view on writing and how theory plays into chord progressions, and also just have a structure, to be challenged to write different kinds of songs than I normally would write. And the teacher told us to write a specific kind of song, which I ended up not doing, but it inspired me to do that. And my mother at the time was literally scared to fly, and literally we were told not to throw rocks in canyons, because we lived in San Diego when I was really little, and my brother, he says he didn't do it, but I think he used to throw rocks in the backyard down the canyon." (Check out our interview with Lisa Loeb.)