“Stay” by Iceage
Iceage is a band which specializes in punk music and hails from Copenhagen, i.e. the capital of Denmark.
This crew has been around since the late aughts and has gotten around to dropping five studio albums between 2011 and 2018.
The third of those efforts, “Plowing Into the Field of Love”, was released through Matador Records on 6 October 2014. Apparently the LP was not meet any chart success, but it was well received by professional music critics. And it is from that project that we get “Stay”, which is the fifth song on the album’s 12-track playlist.
Back when this song came out, Iceage was a quartet consisting of frontman Elias Rønnenfelt, guitarist Johan Wieth, bassist Jakon Pless and drummer Dan Nielsen (all of whom are still part of the band as of this writing).
The group, as a whole, is credited with writing and co-producing this “Stay”, with its other producer being Nis Bysted.
The Lyrics of “Stay”
The vocalist is singing to an unidentified addressee, perhaps a lover, though such is never specified. In any event, he’s putting the onus on this person to, most simply interpreted, prevent him from losing his mind.
That is to say that Elias goes about likening himself to “a feral horse” that “will gallop till its death”, in that he is facing the prospect of his “thoughts… running wild”. But he has identified a solution to this psychological malady, that being the presence of the addressee, which is why he’s entreating this person to “stay a little while”, i.e. not leave Rønnenfelt at the mercy of his own thoughts.
So again, said addressee can be a number of different individuals. For instance, it wouldn’t be out of the way to postulate that it may be the vocalist’s psychologist. But more reasonably, it would be a loved one, someone whom the singer is close enough with to believe that this person can help him stave off his demons, so to speak.
