Songfacts®:

• This seven-minute, free-form piece of music is the closing track from American rock band Thursday's sixth studio album, No Devolución. Frontman Geoff Rickly told Noisecreep about the improvised song's origins: "I would walk in on [guitarist] Tom and [drummer] Tucker messing around with the first guitar line as they warmed up before recording," he said. "I would always convince them to keep playing around with it once the rest of the band came in. Every day, we'd write a new song around that guitar part before we would get down to the real business of recording. [Producer] Dave Fridmann caught on, and started recording the daily warm up. Some days it would be 10 minutes, others five, once even 20 minutes. The one that's on the record is our favorite live version, with vocals added later."
• Lyrically, the song sees Rickly observing an up-and-coming band making some of the same mistakes the singer did earlier in life. "'Stay True' was about wishing I could talk to my younger self, and in particular what made me think about that was a band called Touché Amoré," Rickley explained to Rock Sound magazine. "They are a great young hardcore band, I put out their record [Rickly runs Collect Records, a vinyl only label] and those kids remind me of us when we started out playing basements. In thinking about what I wish for them, their band and all the mistakes I hope they don't make I recalled all the mistakes I had made."