The world is a cruel and miserable place, consistently finding new ways to accelerate those concerns, and sometimes all we wanna do is crawl up inside a song and hide. Providing sonic shelter this week is “Stay,” a gauzy new everything-‘gaze tune from Seattle’s Sea Lemon.
The warm and expansive dream-pop track dropped on Tuesday (March 25), the latest from Sea Lemon’s forthcoming June album Diving For A Prize, complete with a video that takes us for a calming walk by the water alongside the project’s Natalie Lew. It’s a divine experience that has us mentally dropping out, at least for an exquisite three minutes and 24 seconds.
And turns out that checking out is embedded in the song’s DNA.
“‘Stay’ was the first track I actively wrote for my record, and is a little vignette of a man I saw in a local thrift store,” says Lew. “This older guy, probably in his 70s or 80s, was acting as a security guard at this thrift store near my house, but he was basically asleep on the couch the entire time I was there. I couldn’t stop thinking about him after I left, and wrote ‘Stay’ as a reaction to seeing this guy who I felt deserved to take a break. The song became a short story about him, and about how important I feel it can be to have someone in your life willing to tell you to take a step back and just relax.”
Most days, we are all that security guard asleep on the thrift store couch of life. And today, tomorrow, and into the scary beyond, Sea Lemon supplies the lullaby.