One of the most remarkable things a musician can do is make a moment that belongs to them feel familiar to someone they’ve never met. A promise made to a loved one, a goodbye we weren’t ready for, or words we wish we’d said sooner can suddenly feel like our own. Paul Jarmer does exactly that in his latest single, Stay.
Behind this is Minnesota alternative singer-songwriter Paul Jarmer. This release finds him at his most vulnerable, drawing from his own history to explore the difficult overlap between keeping promises, confronting regret, and learning to live with loss.
It started with strings that immediately established a sense of ache in just seconds, before all the layers burst around Jarmer’s opening plea, “Stay, stay, stay, stay with me mother.” There’s a certain rawness to it, not for the sake of performance but more like grief spilling out in a song, unpolished and unguarded.
The lyric deepens that feeling more. For some reason, Jarmer beautifully captures the complicated nature of grief and regret, all coming from a son trying to make peace with the things he can still change and the one thing he cannot.
There’s only so much you can say about a song like this without feeling like words are somehow falling short. It’s not something you can neatly explain, analyze, or try to make sense. You just listen to it and realize the genuineness of an artist laid bare, with his past, people he can’t keep, and the version of him that seems to come a little too late.
Perhaps that’s what makes Stay linger. You’d get no neat ending, no attempt to make everything feel easier to swallow. It just makes you think of your own people, the words that never quite made it out.
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