On first listen, Brothers Osborne’s “Stay a Little Longer” could be an ode to the one-night stand, a simmering meditation on questionable late-night activities that explodes into a gnarly guitar solo that had to be hacked by nearly two minutes for radio airplay. But underneath the masterful shredding of John Osborne and his brother TJ’s melting vocals is a yearning rock ballad about the tortures of love and one question that’s stumped us all in relationships: What the hell are we doing?
“There are a lot of songs that are about being in love and a lot of songs about heartbreak, and this song is about that in-between stage,” John Osborne tells Billboard. “And that’s actually the hardest part of a relationship — when you don’t know.”
The Jay Joyce-produced single, which the Osbornes wrote with Shane McAnally, reflects on the ever-frustrating cycle of thinking you can live without someone but then realizing you can’t. The goal of the song’s brand-new video, TJ Osborne explains, was translating that tug-of-war visually without being too literal.
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“Sometimes you watch videos and they do exactly what you think they would, exactly what the song is saying — at that point, you don’t even really need to watch it,” he says. “We wanted the video to drive and hone this idea that we’re all really the same in this feeling of uncertainty.”
So the Osbornes handpicked five real-life couples who represent a cross-section of today’s relationships: young and old, interracial and same-sex, high on new love and facing a crossroads.
“We didn’t want it to be about one person or one couple,” TJ Osborne says. “We wanted to nail down the narrative that it’s really about something that we’ve all felt and been through.”
In the video, shot in an abandoned warehouse in Murfreesboro, Tenn., director Peter Zavadil follows the couples as they cycle through all-too-common scenarios: waiting alone by the phone, biding their time with whiskey, arguing heatedly, making out heatedly. The Osbornes, nominees for vocal duo of the year at next month’s CMA Awards, pop in to deliver essential moments — including that epic guitar solo.
“Everything Brothers Osborne has done to date has been very honest and very real — we’re not bullshitting, we’re not lying, we’re not making it up,” John Osborne says, with an unfiltered attitude reminiscent of his former tourmate Eric Church. “We wanted this video to be genuine as well.”