Tyler’s version of “STAY” is now available on iTunes, Apple Music & Spotify.

I’m nowhere near an expert on myself. Why I do things, why things connect with me… I have no idea. I feel just as much a member of the audience as I do the performer most the time. What I think might “work” for me often doesn’t. And what does end up connecting with me usually comes out of nowhere. It’s like this jack-in-the-box that can explode at anytime with something unexpected and wonderful and can’t be forced, but only waited for patiently. Ugh…patience. My least favorite thing haha.

All this is to say, why I started singing “Stay” I’ll never know. It was a kind of musical happy accident that happens when I’m lost in space. I’m a professional “space cadet” btw. Literally NASA might as well make it official for how often i snap back to reality wondering how much time has passed haha.

To me, “Stay” is a sleeper classic. A simple, meditative, very direct tune I didn’t realize I knew until I was singing every word. And when I sing a song, my relationship to it changes. Maybe you’ve felt this before, you don’t recognize it right away, but a change does happen when you go from a silent observer to an active participant in music, see “singing along at a concert” or “Xmas caroling”. But there’s another step after even singing along. And that’s singing alone. It’s one thing to observe, another to participate, but to do it alone is magic. And the more this happens with a song the more it becomes your own. This is how it happened with “Stay”. Though I had sang along countless times on the radio, it’s when I accidentally started singing it on my own that I found where it lived in me, a corner of isolated loneliness. A place I may not have had the courage to write from, somewhere I may not have known was even there. But there it was, in a place I least expected it to be. And now it’s mine. And your’s. And Rihanna’s. 🙂

-Tyler