How to Play Lisa Loeb’s Enduring Pop-Folk Hit “Stay (I Missed You)”

“Stay (I Missed You),” Lisa Loeb’s chart topper first released in 1994 with the movie Reality Bites, is in the long lineage of breakup songs, but in many respects is far from a conventional pop song. It has no real chorus and doesn’t even follow a repetitive pattern of verses or other sections, as it goes from a quiet intro to a full-band groove, back and forth several times. Meanwhile Loeb’s acoustic guitar part uses extended chords and atypical voicings that reach the high altitudes of the fingerboard.

In this interview, from the March-April issue of AG, Loeb recounts some of the inspirations and choices that shaped the song. With this transcription, you can try out her guitar part—a great example of out-of-the-box guitar arranging.

“Stay” is played with G shapes and a capo at the sixth fret, so the song sounds in the key of C#. (If you play a 12-fret or non-cutaway guitar, you may want to try a lower capo position to make the highest chord voicings more accessible.) While the chords boil down essentially to G, Am, C, and Em, Loeb doesn’t use any open cowboy-chord shapes in the song. Check out the chord library, and you’ll find a variety of barre chords, sus chords, extended chords, and inversions.

Start with the song’s four-measure signature riff, as shown in the tab, a series of arpeggios mixing fretted and open strings. First play a Gsus2 on only the top three strings, then move to a fifth-position Em7, followed by a two-finger shape that goes up the neck for A7sus4 (the implied harmony is minor, but the chord has no third), Gmaj13/B, and Csus2. For the Csus2, your pinky is all the way up at the 16th fret (or ten frets above the capo).

With the A7sus4, Gmaj13/B, and Csus2 shapes, lean your middle finger (which is fretting the sixth string) against the fifth string to mute it. Notice that these chord grids include open strings that aren’t played in the intro. When Loeb strums the same shapes later in the song, she sounds all the strings indicated. She plays “Stay” mostly with a pick but says she sometimes uses hybrid style, grabbing upper notes with her fingers while holding the pick.

When you hit the verse groove, you could opt to streamline the Am9 chord and play only the fretted notes (bottom four strings) for a simpler Am7.

When you’re playing the Gsus4 barre chord, which pops up at the end of verses 1 and 3, try to mute or not play the fourth string, which would make the chord a G7sus4. The important note to sound is the sus4 on the third string; Loeb sometimes uses a pull-off with her pinky to accentuate the change from Gsus4 to G major.

As for the song’s idiosyncratic form, I’ve labeled the sections according to how Loeb describes the structure, with an intro that pops up three times (the last as an outro), three verses, and two bridges. These sections don’t repeat exactly; they expand and contract like an accordion—or, as she characterized the song in the interview, like chapters in a book. “Stay (I Missed You)” is a book definitely worth rereading.

Due to copyright restrictions, we are unable to post notation or tablature for this musical work. If you have a digital or physical copy of the March-April 2025 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine, you will find the music on page 51.