Annie Lennox : 100 BEAUTIFUL SONGS

Number 15 : Stay by Me by Annie Lennox from Diva in 1992

Stay By Me — Diva’s ninth track — and, clocking in at 6:29, by far the longest, “Stay By Me” is certainly one of Annie’s most-unabashed love songs. Curiously it is the only song from Diva not to get a video. An Annie Lennox love song, though, is never without a touch of cautionary tale, and so goes its glorious and descriptive final lyrics: “We’re standing in a thunder cloud dark as your hair.” (And if Annie’s second husband, Uri, was the inspiration for the dark hair, the thunder cloud may been apropos to the storm that rages on Bare several years later.)

Top 15 voters

Daniel T. Davis1
Matt Lee Newby1
Alexander Barton3
Ener Daniel6
Stewart Lennox6
Alfredo Ramos7
Mark Page7
Rob Dziubek7
Xaque Gruber7
John DesJardins8
Kyle Barber11
Eddie Davis13
Jaume Brunet14
Ben Rawson-Jones17
Christopher Fayol18

Stay by me
And make the moment last
Please take these lips
Even if I have been kissed
A million times

And I don’t care if there is no tomorrow
When I could die here in your arms
Even if the stars have made us blind
We’re blind we’re blind
So blind in love

Sweet darling
Don’t you know that we’re no different to anyone
We stumble
We falter
But we’re no different that anyone

And all the winter snow has melted down
Into a pool of silver water
And we’re standing in a thunder cloud
Dark as your hair
Dark as your hair

The quintessential love song by Annie, and featured on ‘Diva,’ a song of pure unadulterated beauty, “Stay By Me,” captures that blissful honeymoon phase of all really good blooming relationships.

It is a song about “the perfect” moment with your lover, a moment we want to last forever, unconditionally. No pain, no hurt, no darkness, except for the beautiful darkness of the lover’s hair.

No anger at the big sky, even the thunderstorms are perfect moments of gorgeous, true love.

– Dan Mueller

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