The Kid LAROI is officially putting to bed any “misconceptions” regarding “Stay,” his smash 2021 duet with Justin Bieber.
“I wrote every single lyric on that song apart from Justin’s verse,” he said during his The Road to Before I Forget Twitch stream on Tuesday. “Justin wrote every lyric of his verse. There’s been some, like, misinterpretation somewhere along the line that the song was pitched to us. People think Charlie [Puth] wrote the song and gave it to us. That didn’t happen. I wrote every single lyric of that punch-in style.”
“Stay” ruled the summer of 2021, reaching No. 1 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and Global 200. In addition to its five wins at the 2022 Billboard Music Awards, including top streaming song and top collaboration, LAROI and Bieber’s runaway hit became the first song in Hot 100 history to spend its 40 weeks on the chart in the top 10.
In a 2022 SiriusXM interview, Puth, who co-produced “Stay,” explained how he constructed the chords for the smash. Some online commentators interpreted the “See You Again” singer’s explanation to mean that he wrote the entire song without input from LAROI or Bieber.
“I definitely did get bummed when I started seeing people say I didn’t write [‘Stay’] because I was so proud of that,” LAROI reflected on-stream. “I was 17 years old. And I’m still so proud of that. … That’s an accomplishment and something to be proud of. … Like, ‘Damn, people think that this song was just given to me?’ That’s so crazy. Shout-out to everyone who worked on that song. There was a lot of work that went into [it]; not trying to make it sound like it was just me. Equally, everyone contributed, but every single lyric on that was me.”
On Jan. 6, LAROI is set to drop his sophomore LP, Before I Forget. The new record is the follow-up to 2023’s The First Time, which reached No. 24 on the Billboard 200. LAROI has already shared a pair of songs from the forthcoming record, including lead single “A Cold Play,” which many fans speculate is about his former girlfriend, Grammy-nominated pop star Tate McRae.
In 2026, Puth will perform the national anthem at Super Bowl LX (Feb. 8), and Bieber will headline Coachella for the very first time.
Check out some clips from The Kid LAROI’s The Road to Before I Forget Twitch stream below.
