Stay

Last month I was painting my new apartment, which for me was a great time to catch up on my top 40 radio. A song I heard endlessly and loved was Kelly Rowland’s “Unity.” The melodic hook for the chorus is just great even if the lyrics are pretty standard:

Stay with me
Two hearts forever
You were the spark that lit the flame
Only if you'd

Stay with me
This love's forever
And in my heart you will remain
Until we meet again

I’m a bit confused about why her lover is away. He seems to have left her because she’s “picking up the pieces of a life [she] once knew.” However, the pre-chorus has this interesting tidbit: “I got your message yesterday.” What did he send her?

This conundrum, I think, makes the song kind of excellent. But it got me thinking about other “Stay” songs. The classic is of course Lorraine Ellison’s 1966 song “Stay With Me,” the song Bette Midler memorably died onstage to in The Rose. There are a million variations on this theme, but I thought I’d concentrate on the subgenre of the poetic aubade.

An aubade is a song sung at sunrise as two lovers must part (and a French lingerie company, as you can see above). The earliest examples come from those medieval tunesmiths, the troubadours. Such a song was called an “alba,” which of course is old Occitan for “cartoonishly attractive actor/eco-vandal” “sunrise.”

But the best examples of the genre come from the metaphysical poets. John Donne wrote a number of aubades. They usually begin innocently enough:

Stay, O sweet and do not rise.
The light that shines comes from thine eyes.
The day breaks not, it is my heart,
Because that you and I must part.

The best thing about Donne’s poems, though, is how he’s always scolding the sun. Sometimes he’s canny and incisive: “light hath no tongue, it is all eye.” Other times he’s just cruel: “Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide / Late school-boys and sour prentices.” Them’s fightin’ words.

We all learned about this tradition when we studied Romeo and Juliet in high school. One strangely irritating scene (Act III, scene 5) finds Romeo debating with Juliet about whether “day / Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.” He of course has to high tail it out of there before he gets caught. I’ll summarize:

Juliet: Come back to bed, it’s still night.
Romeo: Nope, I’m pretty sure the sun’s about to come up. Look.
Juliet: I know daylight when I see it. That isn’t it. Come back to bed.
Romeo: Yes, dear.
Juliet: Wait...no, you’re right. Get the hell out before my Mom sees!

Just imagine elegant metaphors about candles and meteors and such.

Last November I had the good fortune to see Billy Currington perform his new song at the Grand Ole Opry, “Don’t.” It has a catchy retro-soul kind of groove. Its lyrical conceit is likewise a throwback to our now familiar scenario:

Don't you just hate hearing that clock on the wall chiming
Saying it's time and
Don't you just wish we could stay here together all day long,
You know it wouldn't be a crime if we
Crawled back in the bed got as close as we could get
Try to figure out where this thing is going

The clever part of the lyric is the internal rhymes (wall/all; time/crime) and assonance (bed/get), which are stressed with long notes in the musical phrase. The actual line ends don’t rhyme at all.

But the modern aubade par excellence has to be Sugarland’s “Stay” (2007), which they performed at the Grammy’s this past year. The song, like Currington’s, features a “clock on the wall”—a sign of the times. Humans are no longer slave to the sun, answering Donne’s question: “Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?”

No, but they still run to phone calls from the wife. Sugarland’s song, unlike any other, isn’t addressed to the either the sun or a lover. It’s an internal dialogue of a woman who imagines begging her lover not to leave when his wife (or girlfriend—the song isn’t specific) calls.

But after an impassioned bridge in which she summons her courage to leave the bastard, the chorus repeats with almost the same lyrics, but this time imagines the wife begging her cheating husband not to leave. This sets up the triumphant repetition of the hook as the former lover suggests: “why don’t you stay.”

Video: Sugarland, "Stay." (YouTube): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIyxkZod2cM

The video is superb. Check it out, and if you can, check out Sugarland in Toronto next month!