Songfacts®:

• "Stay" is a song recorded by David Bowie for his Station to Station album in late 1975 at Cherokee Studios in Los Angeles. It began life as a reworked version of "John I'm Only Dancing," but quickly evolved into something altogether different. As guitarist Earl Slick later recalled in his memoir Guitar: Playing with David Bowie, John Lennon, and Rock-and-Roll's Greatest Heroes, Bowie came to him with a simple directive: "Come up with a riff." The result, Slick proudly noted, "turned out to be a total monster."
• This was a time when Bowie was rumored to be consuming more cocaine than the GDP of a small country, and the lyrics to "Stay" reflect a certain paranoia that only such a habit could inspire. There's a palpable sense of yearning, of a man caught between desire and despair, trying to articulate some kind of plea for companionship but never quite managing to spit it out. "Stay, that's what I meant to say," he croons, as if just realizing what he wanted all along but couldn't muster the clarity to express until now.
• Co-produced by Bowie with American producer Harry Maslin, "Stay" is a veritable gumbo of genres that kicks off with a two-minute instrumental introduction showcasing the skills of the rhythm section. Bowie's guitarist, Carlos Alomar, in his interview for David Buckley's biography, Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story, nostalgically described the recording process: "We had a field day with that one… It was pretty funky and pretty much straight ahead."
  
  The track was laid down amid what Alomar referred to as a "cocaine frenzy," but, somehow, they captured a sound that was both raw and polished, chaotic yet coherent. "I wrote out a chart and said this was pretty much what we wanted to do," he recalled. "That song I think David did on the guitar. He strummed a few chords for me, and then we gave it back to him. The rhythm section really liked that one, and then Earl Slick covered some of the lines I had laid down with a thicker sound."
• Bowie played guitar, Mellotron and Moog synthesizer on the song. The other musicians are:
  
  Carlos Alomar: guitar
  Earl Slick: guitar
  George Murray: bass guitar
  Dennis Davis: drums, cowbell
  Warren Peace: backing vocals, conga
  Roy Bittan: piano
• "Stay" was released as a single in July 1976, initially as the B-side to "Suffragette City" before making its own bid for glory in the United States as an A-side. While it didn't exactly set the charts ablaze, critics and fans alike have come to praise the track for its deft musicality, and it went on to become a staple of Bowie's live performances.
• Over the years, "Stay" has been remixed, remastered, and generally buffed to a fine sheen, including a new version, "Stay '97," recorded during rehearsals for Bowie's 1997 Earthling Tour.
• An edited version of "Stay" was included in the soundtrack of the 1981 film Christiane F. Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo, which is about a teenager in West Berlin who becomes addicted to heroin.