On her new reality TV show, “No. 1 Single,” singer-songwriter Lisa Loeb hesitantly typed her personal profile into an online matchmaking service.
The eight-episode series, which premiered last week, chronicles the 37-year-old’s odyssey to find a suitable husband and father for her future children, after finding herself single for the first time in more than a decade.
Since cameras began rolling last fall, they’ve captured her nice (and not-so-nice) dates, her efforts to stay out of the gossip columns, even a doctor’s visit to check out her biological clock.
The Jewish chanteuse was among the first in a new wave of female folk-rock musicians to emerge in a trend that would later include Jewel and Alanis Morissette. Loeb is known for her trademark cat’s-eye glasses, sexy-brainy image and wistful lyrics about ambivalent lovers.
As she awkwardly begins looking for love again, she seems as lost as a character from one of her songs.
She says she hasn’t dated since college, courtesy of two long-term relationships, and is befuddled by 21st-century rituals such as online dating services. With much coaxing from a friend, she finally writes that she’s looking for a “highly intellectual” man who can cry at movies and “is Jewish or not seriously something else.”
“Judaism, for me, is a serious avocation,” she explains as to why she added the religious requirement. When she is at home in Studio City, she regularly attends Ohr HaTorah, a traditional yet progressive synagogue that emphasizes interpreting text. It’s a perfect fit for Loeb, whose songs tend “to be very analytical; to ask questions and to over-question,” she says.
She uses the same technique to find a husband on “Single,” which is smarter and quirkier than other networks’ cheesy reality shows such as “The Bachelorette.”
“Lisa is an Ivy League-educated, nice Jewish girl from Dallas, who happens to be in the public eye,” producer Daniel Laikind told the Sacramento Bee.
“Single” captures the contrast between Loeb’s perky, retro ’60s look and her melancholy lyrics, her pop-diva image and her passion for Judaism.
In one scene, she breezily rifles through the funky short skirts in her closet to find a modest outfit to visit Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the popular but controversial author of “Kosher Sex.” At his Shabbat dinner table, she appreciates his probing questions but is taken aback when a guest appears shocked upon learning her age.
In another sequence, she joyfully prepares a High Holy Day kugel with her mother, then cries about becoming the kind of “older single person” she once pitied. When mom gushes about a wedding party on the street, Loeb wryly asks, “Is this a setup — a Jewish mother, a single daughter and a bride and groom?”
To become a bride herself, Loeb takes a Manhattan apartment to meet new people (“I’m like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn, although in New York it’s called lox,” she quips in the first episode). She repeatedly asks friends and acquaintances to fix her up and forces a smile as one date tries to impress her by croaking a karaoke version of her 1994 hit single, “Stay.” She visits Victoria’s Secret when her sister insists she must “wear things guys can imagine tearing off of you” — and lifts her blouse in the fitting room to reveal a sequined bra.
Boteach is urging Loeb to curb her madcap schedule when she visits him on the show.
“He says you have to experience being lonely so you can be open to meeting somebody new,” the musician recalls.
Loeb isn’t lonely because she frequently tours, has tons of friends and just released a retrospective album, “The Very Best of Lisa Loeb” this month. In fact, as she speaks to an interviewer, a tailor is placing pins in a ruffled skirt she’ll wear while promoting her new TV show. It seems “Single,” in part, is another example of her endless multitasking.
That doesn’t mean Loeb isn’t serious about finding a soulmate. Growing up Reform (she made her acoustic guitar debut at Dallas’ Camp Chai), the message was “you should start focusing on marriage as soon as you graduate from college, and by the time you’re in your 30s, you should definitely have a family,” she says.
Loeb did not follow this expected path as she formed a singing duo at Brown University, burst onto the national scene with “Stay” and released her 1995 debut album, “Tails,” which went gold and made her a Generation X icon.
Instead, she immersed herself in back-to-back, six-year relationships, respectively, with a Catholic record producer and atheist Dweezil Zappa, son of the late rocker Frank Zappa. While the non-Jewish boyfriends did not thrill her parents, they ultimately brought the agnostic Loeb back to Judaism.
“I realized throughout both relationships I was thinking about getting married and having kids and I wanted my kids to be raised Jewish,” she says.
“No. 1 Single” airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on E! Entertainment Television.