Lyrics series | 2 | From “Stay”

“This week dragged past me so slowly
The days fell on their knees”

”Stay” is a song that took years for me to realize how much I like it. It is the next to last song on the album, Station to Station, which though the album is not long enough for any of its songs to truly be buried, this is about as close as it gets. Also, the long, bass-heavy instrumental introduction to the song kind of distracts from the eventual vocals and what Bowie is actually saying.

That said, “Stay” has become one of my very favorite songs, in part because of its opening lines. The image of days falling on their knees is pretty much the best artistic description of the sense of time moving slowly. More than that, the words evoke collapse, as if even though the days are moving slowly, nothing much is happening. For Bowie, and for me, wasted time is missed opportunity, especially when it seems like time is moving slowly. The fault is mine for indecision and uncertainty, not that there isn’t enough time to do what I wanted to do, if I knew what that was and had it together to get it done.

The sense that time is moving slowly teases Bowie as, despite having the time, he can’t figure out what to do. He picks up on this theme later in, “Sound and Vision”:

“Pale blinds drawn all day
Nothing to do, nothing to say
Blue, blue
I will sit right down (waiting for the gift of sound and vision)”

In that song, however, Bowie is resigned to let time wash over him until inspiration reaches him. Here, the writer of an earlier song called, “Quicksand,” is fumbling for a solution.

I have often noted that for Bowie, space is comfortable and a place of isolated retreat, whereas time is the enemy. Bowie is more overt in his contemplation of time in other songs. The phrase, “time will crawl,” oft repeated in the song of the same name, is a more prosaic expression of a similar concept as the opening words of “Stay.” Whereas in “Slip Away,” space brings time to a halt— “Out in space its always 1982” (which, from Bowie’s perspective was the last year of his reputation as a cutting-edge, rebellious young artist, before the release of Let’s Dance, his pop period and long road to reputational recovery). In the song, “Time,” Bowie iterates various corrosive effects of time’s passage, but in the midst of the parade of horrors advises the listener to, “take your time,” which, if you think about it is an admonition to manipulate the speed of time so as to make the best use of it. “The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell,” again articulates how time is corrosive — “they wore it out, but they wore it well.”

Brett Morgen opens his Bowie documentary with Bowie discussing time:

“Time
One of the most complex expressions
Memory made manifest
It’s something that straddles past and future
Without ever quite being present
Or rather, it at first seems indifferent to the present”

Bowie seems to have put quite a bit of thought into the concept of the enemy time, what we can do to slow it down (I’m having difficulty thinking of an example of Bowie expressing the desire to speed it up), and what can be done with the time at hand.

But of all Bowie’s discussions of time, I think the opening lines of “Stay” are his most artistic, if perhaps his most particular. The rest of the song is about indecision and longing. I get the sense that the narrator feels helpless— trapped between what he wants and someone else’s agency:

“Stay – that’s what I meant to say or do something
But what I never say is stay this time
I really meant to so bad this time
‘Cause you can never really tell when somebody
Wants something you want too”

The narrator wants someone to stay, but is unsure if she (he?) wants the same thing. He’s conscious of not wanting to come off as making a demand— he blurts out, “stay,” but then equivocates— “or do something.” He assures her that he’s not ordering her to stay “this time.” There’s the word, “time,” again, which reappears on the next line and then again later in the song in the line, “this time tomorrow I’ll know what to do.” In a song that’s light on lyrics, Bowie manages to work in “tonight,” “tomorrow” and “this time” (which also appears in an earlier line, “this time I know we could get it together”).

Bowie has come a long way in three years from being both confident enough in himself and indifferent enough to his partner’s say in the matter to ham-fistedly blurt out, “let’s make looooove,” in his awful spoken word addition to the Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together” (which, the Stones dialed back when they performed on television by changing the words to, “let’s spend some time together. There it is again— “time”). Bowie has lost so much confidence that he won’t even come out and say why he wants the other person to stay— I always assumed it was for the same reason he was singing, “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” but Bowie never actually says why.

So on the one hand, he’s struggling to know if he’s correctly reading the other person’s signals— does she want the same thing? He’s scared to directly confront her to find out. But on the other hand, he’s also struggling with a concept that he wouldn’t fully get around to articulating until, “Heroes”— “we can be heroes, just for one day.” He’s not saying, as he would later, “be my wife.” He’s saying, give it a try. He wants to take advantage of the moment, even though he knows conditions will change. Happiness is elusive, but momentary satisfaction is available for the taking. Again and again in Bowie songs we encounter parties in the midst of chaos and decline.

But back to “Stay,” Bowie starts the song not by describing the search for the latest party upon removal from an oxygen tent or the search for an autograph amidst a panic in Detroit, but instead— nothing. Time is moving slowly, but nothing is happening. he wants a second chance to “get it together,” but he also needs another day to “know what to do.”

That has to be a common feeling— a slow moving car crash. A sense that time is at once both crawling and running. A head-spinning sense of helplessness. Not the happiest of topics, but I imagine a common one. At least I know the feeling.

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I’m using an unusual cover of “Stay” to illustrate this post. That’s actor David Duchovny singing. Judge for yourself how you think he sounds, but I will say his band is solid. Also, you won’t have any trouble understanding the lyrics. And I have to say, Bowie would have made a great “monster of the week” on the X Files, but that never happened.