Stay
by Kygo

Album: Cloud Nine (2015)
Charted: 20
Play Video

Songfacts®:

  • This song features vocals by 18-year-old LA-based singer-songwriter Maty Noyes, whose voice you might recognize from the closing track "Angel" on The Weeknd's Beauty Behind the Madness. "She sent me over the demo. I loved it," Kygo told MTV News. "Loved her voice. It was so unique. I just liked the idea and gave it a try. It was actually kind of a quick process. I feel like when I get the demos - I get a lot of demos - but when I get the right demo, I get very inspired. I produce around it, and it often goes very fast."
  • Noyes envisioned working with Kygo on the tune as soon as she'd penned the demo. "I actually co-wrote the song in maybe two to three hours, laid the vocals and thought to myself, 'The only thing it's missing is a drop from Kygo,'" she told MTV News. "We thought, let's try and send it to him, and within days, he almost had it done. It came so easy, was sort of unbelievable. Having not met him during that process, a month later my friend invited me over to hang, and Kygo was there along with his crew. It was totally serendipitous and such a special way to meet. Some things are just meant to be!"
  • Maty Noyes sings here of the hard decision to leave a lover, when a big part of her still wants to stay with him. She explained her lyrics in a Genius attribution:

    "I'm usually not the kind of person who will stay and stick around but in this case it was with someone that I really really really liked and had a lot of hope for. It was just enough power to make me stay but even though I knew it wasn't the best idea. Every now and then someone will come along that makes you stay."

    Noyes added: "Everyone has their ways of getting over things, some people write in a journal, some people go talk to someone, but for me the only way to get over things is to just write a song about it. After writing 'Stay' for like an hour or two it started pouring out, and after that I was pretty much over it. I could go on and say 'okay you know what I wrote this song it's time to move on to something else and get over this.'"

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