Listen to Stay in full - for a limited (yet, AMR's generosity oblige, it should be considerably long) period at www.alvaromrocha.com.
It's a very spontaneous theme, as most things tend to be in my latest work.The chords just flowed in a few minutes and the melody topping was done in first take as if I was channeling the whole thing, I just went after the music in auto-pilot.
Later on, to add an emotional substract to the thing, an idea surfaced to add some simple lyrics and a depiction of a summer-like beach romance. I needed a voice that sounded as if, although asking to stay, it felt out of that environment. Ideally an english-accent pronounce, such as australian or south-african so I needed a voice, and one with a pitch towards the high-treble so not to conflict with the background electronic pads going on. And a fantastic lovely voice appeared, by Anna S., with all of the above plus an excelent emotional tone and with a delicious feminine-fragile quality to it. The music came to life.
And the lay down...
It all begins with a woman asking a man to Stay, to relax, to enjoy her company. Then the piano, the voice of reason, acts as a soundtrack to a mind-movie montage where all goes well, with all the bells and whistles of summer passion, to return again to the vocals where "Stay" becomes a mix between a want and a need.
Then again surfaces the piano, with the background becoming more dinamic and intense, depicting the rise of conflicting emotions and powerful sentiments growing to the last chorus where the want becomes need, the freedom becomes enslaving and passion becomes suffering, with a thundering "Vangelis" brass acting here as the mediator and judge and, by the end, sucumbing to fear and antecipating loss. It all ends with the metamorphic-male banging the door in the face of unsecurity, doubt and needless suffering - summer ends abruptelly as do these passions - and in the end you just want to start over as fast and intense as possible - thus being what the music is trying to convey - the vice, the adrenalin, the beauty and traps of Cupid's arrow.
Everything sprayed with a sex remanescence beat and off-beat bass representing one thousand and one nights of intense pleasure condensed in a Summer...
Enjoy
www.alvaromrocha.com
