Lyrics
"Stay"
Stay
And be a little girl
Don’t go into the world
They’ll hurt you and they’ll try
To tear down what’s inside
If you try to find your way
Pay no mind to what they say
No-oh-oh-oh
No-oh-oh-oh
Ah-ah-ah
Stay
When dark clouds fill the sky
And you hear that lullaby
When you’re drowning in the rain
From the secret of your name
If you try to reach the sky
Well you can’t let them deny
No-oh-oh-oh
No-oh-oh-oh
Ah-ah-ah
I’m like a bird that never flew
These broken wings won’t leave the ground
I’ll be ok right next to you
I promise I won’t let you down
Ah-ah-ah
Stay
The world is turning blue
When the sunlight can’t get through
All the scars left on my face
From the things I can’t erase
Will you help me make it through?
'Cause I’m nothing without you
No-oh-oh-oh
No-oh-oh-oh
Ah-ah-ah
© 2021 Andrew J Stenehjem (ASCAP)
Lyric Video
Background Information
This song was one of the first acoustic guitar based song ideas that I had and it was named “Acoustic #3” for a while (the song “When You’re Leaving” was “Acoustic #5” during that time).
The initial musical idea was to play something simple along with the steady kick drum beat, in the vein of Bon Iver. The verse melody came pretty quickly and along with it, the first verse and the theme “stay”. That led to the idea of a parent who wants to protect their child from the inevitable hurt that comes in life.
This is something I relate to because I love the innocence of children. One of the few things that can make me emotional quickly is the idea of a child being hurt; particularly by people being cruel to them. However, as a parent, you need to be able to temper that desire to protect a child from all of the possible cruelties that they could be exposed to in order to let them grow.
That was the starting point for the theme in this song. As the song goes, you realize that this parent has gone too far in their effort to protect the child and it’s really more about their own pain as they use the child to try and fill their own void. One of my favorite lyrical lines from the album is in this song: “All the scars left on my face, from the things I can’t erase”.
This is a contrast to the song “When You’re Leaving”, which is about a parent or person who has a healthy recognition that they need to let the person go off into the world in order to grow. I like the fact that these two songs serve as bookends for the album, and as someone who’s always been drawn to melancholy themes, I like ending the album with this song rather than one that ties things up nicely. While it serves as the end of the album, it’s also a prelude of musical areas that I’m looking forward to exploring more deeply in the future.
As with all of the songs on my debut album, I wrote, performed, recorded and mixed myself it in my 104 year-old house. Below is a picture of me getting ready to record acoustic guitar parts early during the recording process.
Recording Acoustic Guitar
Recording Acoustic Guitar