The Making Of Post Malone’s “Stay” With WATT | Deconstructed

Music in its purest form is raw. Production is cool and it can take a record from good to great and amazing but the way you hear an amazing song is just with a guitar or something just very simple so the words and melodies hit you without all the fancy stuff. And you know, that’s this record. I grew up with a computer in front of me and I had so many different types of music at my fingertips. I listened to Nas and Wu-Tang Clan as much as I was listening to the Chili Peppers and Nirvana. Right now in music, it’s all blurred. You hear amazing guitar in urban records and you hear 808’s in pop music. People want live instruments again and there’s a cool way to use it all. Post is the millennial and he’s influenced by so many different types of music. He called me and he was like, “I wanna go in and I wanna make folk music." "And I want to make some stuff with guitars and live instruments.” So we started playing guitars. And it’s a really cool thing that happens when two guitar players are playing the same thing. You’re a couple milliseconds off from each other and it gets a lot thicker, the sound. In an effort to do something completely different than he had done at that point, we recorded it live. I’m going to play you first and foremost the guitars from “Stay.” I’m on the left playing 1946 Martin O-18. Post is on the right playing a 1953 Gibson J-45. Very Bob Dylan. You listen to one, it sounds cool. You listen to the other, it sounds cool. But the magic’s in two of them together. Those were the guitars and the record starts with the vocal right away. There’s no intro. There’s no guitar intro so you get Andrew left, Post right, and Post center vocal right from the jump. You can hear the natural grit coming out of his voice. So after the guitar was recorded and we had the reference vocal, melodies, and that first verse lyric, I wanted to put a bass on it that was very Beatles, kinda Bowie-ish. The bass comes in for the first time on the chorus. The bass is recorded on a 60s Höfner Club Bass. It’s a hollow bass and it’s very dead sounding. Very very punchy and to the point. So from there, let’s listen to background vocals. The best thing to do is listen to the acappella lead which we already listened to in the chorus and the background vocals themselves together. I mean… That’s so beautiful. We get into verse 2. So this second verse was written like literally a year and a half after. Yeah so that’s everything kind of working together. I wanted you to hear how the bass is following that vocal and those backgrounds are just so beautiful. And then we get into the slide solo. I brought so many instruments to the studio. One of which was a 1957 Gibson Ultratone slide guitar. Let’s listen to the third chorus now. It’s the biggest moment of the song after the slide solo. We have both of those acoustic guitars, Post lead, those awesome backgrounds, an extra layer of backgrounds, his ad-libs going through and it’s probably the peak of the song. So that’s “Stay.” Very very simple. Not a lot of parts but the parts that are on there mean a lot. As creative people, we do everything hard. Work hard. Love hard. And relationships can be very straining. I think Post was really going through something at the time with someone that he loved dearly and cared a lot about. You can hear the rawness and tell that it’s a great song and it doesn’t need much because of that. So we’re having a conversation about George Harrison and we just started playing these chords and actually “Stay” for about a year and a half was called, “George Forever.” ‘Cause it just reminded us of George Harrison. So we called it “George Forever” until it was time to put it on the album and we were like, “It’s kind of weird if we have a song named George,” so we chose “Stay” because of the end of the last line.

Channel: Genius

Views: 1,243,204

Rating: 4.9752278 out of 5

Keywords: genius, rap genius, verified, official lyrics, lyrics, lyric video, Lyric videos, pop music, hip hop, rap, new pop music, stay, post malone, post malone stay, watt production, beerbongs and bentleys stay, beerbongs & bentleys, post malone live, producer beats, post malone beat, gbwc0

Id: tDbS6GEsNKc

Length: 7min 0sec (420 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 26 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Sandurz]

It’s a 50/50 shot with these whether it’s gonna be “yeah I took this MIDI loop and put Gross Beat on it, then I added drums” or not lol. Interesting to see an entirely guitar track on here. Not the most amazing thing in the world or anything but still cool.

[u/TrumpsMoistTaint]

"Music in it's purest for-" BYE.

[u/WadNasty]

Such a nice fucking song, I like that producers are throwing live instruments in there a lot recently.