Songfacts®:

• Canadian singer-songwriter Alessia Cara begs a love interest not to leave her on this electro track.
  
  All you have to is wait a second
  Your hands on mine
  The clock is ticking, so stay
  
  The song continues Zedd's winning formula of electronic beats, bass drops, and female vocals, having already perfected that mix with Foxes, ("Clarity"), Hayley Williams ("Stay The Night") and Selena Gomez ("I Want You To Know").
• Zedd wrote in a post accompanying the lyric video:
  
  "Alessia and I first met at rehearsals for the HALO Awards, where Alessia, Daya and I performed together. I've loved her songs before but realized that she's an unbelievable talent when we started rehearsing together, so I asked her if she was interested in making music with me."
• A number of music fans have pointed out a striking resemblance between the start of this song and Banks' 2016 The Altar track "Poltergeist."
  
  "My fans know," said Banks when asked about the similarities. "That is all I care about."
• Zedd told ABC Radio that when he first wrote "Stay," he immediately thought Alessia Cara would be perfect for the song, as he felt her voice would reflect the feel of the piece.
  
  "I think she has a really moody, breathy frequency in her voice that I really love," he said. "The song generally, sonically, is very dark in certain parts... it's very haunting, and there's something about her voice that just fits the track so well."
• This won for Best Dance Video at the 2017 MTV Video Music Awards.
• The collaboration between the pair was done online. Cara told ABC Radio:
  
  "He just sent me the beginning of the song that was written, and he was like, 'Hey, do you wanna finish this, do you wanna do it with me? 'And just hearing it and listening to the beginning of it, I knew that it was a really great song."
• The song has an electronic dance feel with some frantic beats, a sound that is outside Cara's normal wheelhouse. "It was really different for me, it's a lot bolder than my usual stuff," she said. "But I thought if I was gonna do something [with another artist], I wanna sing on a song that I really believe in and work with on a song I believe in and work with an artist, or a deejay, that I really like."
• The song was included on the soundtrack for the 2017 movie Everything Everything.