Some songs are carefully engineered in studios over months of refinement, while others arrive all at once, sparked into existence by a single surreal moment that refuses to leave the mind. ‘The Lisa Song’ by Melbourne’s Reetoxa belongs firmly to the second category as a track born from chance encounter, romantic projection, and the kind of obsessive inspiration that can completely reroute a life.
What makes the story behind the song so compelling is how strangely cinematic it feels. A crowded Forum Melbourne show. A missed date. A stranger stepping accidentally into a photograph beneath stage lights that suddenly make her appear almost haloed. By the end of the night, Jason McKee is walking home through Melbourne with his entire future rearranged in his head. Lesser writers might have treated that kind of story with irony or distance, but Reetoxa leans into it fully, allowing the emotional intensity to become the song’s entire gravitational pull.
Musically, ‘The Lisa Song’ captures the rush of infatuation and creative ignition with a rawness that feels refreshingly unfiltered. There is a looseness to the emotional delivery that suits the material perfectly, as though the song itself is still trying to keep up with the speed of the thoughts that created it. And that sense of immediacy becomes one of its greatest strengths.
The track also acts as the emotional cornerstone for ‘Soliloquy’, Reetoxa’s sprawling double album project. Knowing that this encounter effectively pushed McKee toward abandoning university and finally committing to recording decades of accumulated material gives the song an added weight.
And that tension between romantic fantasy and artistic desperation runs throughout the wider ‘Soliloquy’ project. Produced by Simon Moro and featuring an impressive supporting cast including musicians connected to Savage Garden, Jet and Men at Work, the album swings fearlessly between grand orchestral ambition and deeply personal emotional collapse. At times it feels overwhelming, but intentionally so.
And yet ‘The Lisa Song’ remains the emotional spark at the centre of it all. It is the myth the album keeps circling back toward. There is something beautifully human about that. Most people experience moments like this privately and let them fade away. But Reetoxa turned it into an entire creative universe.
But what ultimately makes ‘The Lisa Song’ resonate so much is not whether Lisa herself was real, symbolic or somewhere in between. It is the recognition that inspiration often arrives suddenly, irrationally and without warning. One conversation, one glance, one half-finished thought can alter everything.
In Reetoxa’s world, a stranger at a Spiderbait gig became the catalyst for decades of hidden songs finally clawing their way into the light.
