Fans of commercial/ Indie pop, look no further than Nick Kandler’s self produced song, Stay.
Sitting at just shy of 3 minutes and with a stinger ending, this is the music of radio presenters dreams!
Lyrically, this is a song about the end of a toxic relationship (amazing how many songs about this subject have come out in the last couple of years!). Kandler’s “Stay” takes on a slightly different approach – in that, like the end of many toxic relationships, he’s left yearning for the other person, and probably not really knowing why. Remembering the good times and almost begging the person to stay.
Very clear and present vocals dominate this track. Kandler’s falsetto is particularly impressive. Whilst being commercial pop, this song doesn’t suffer from too much vocal tuning (we’d not be reviewing it if it did!). Kandler is clearly an accomplished vocalist with some real character and vibrato in his voice that would be lost with some modern production techniques.
Stay has very genre appropriate instrumentation and of course, the obligatory super-catchy chorus! The repeated “I want you to stay” rings around in your ears and pans from side to side, just begging you to stay to the end of the song. Which we happily did of course!
Despite the subject matter, this is an insanely positive feeling song that I honestly think we’ll be singing for days here at Send Me Your Ears.
There’s a couple of frequencies in the low end (around 45 and 135Hz) that are dominating and giving a pitch to the kick drum. Personally, I’d just notch these out a touch to even out that all important low end sound. I do also feel that for the genre, the song is just slightly quiet and could do with an extra couple of decibels to push against the limiter.
There’s something about a song like Stay which just seems to cross age groups. Whilst commercial pop normally sits firmly in the teenage girls market, Stay is so super-catchy that we feel this has huge potential for commercial air play.
We wish Nick Kandler the very best of luck and give this song 4 ears out of five.
