Watch Brothers Osborne’s Unorthodox ‘Stay a Little Longer’ Video
“It’s not the same regurgitated bullshit,” John Osborne told Rolling Stone Country earlier this year, talking about the new wave of honest, rule-breaking artists poised to take over the charts from the Queen Bees and King Bros of country music. With a sound that owes as much to rock & roll’s guitar-driven crunch as country’s blue-collar twang, Brothers Osborne are proud to be at the crest of that wave, ready to sweep across an audience that’s grown thirsty for something new.
The guys are putting their money where their mouths are, too, releasing a new video for their Top 20 single — the arena-ready “Stay a Little Longer” — that steers clear of all things regurgitated.
A nightly highlight during the band’s cross-country tour with Eric Church, “Stay a Little Longer” captures the rush and disorder of a relationship that’s too new to be defined and too fiery to be forgotten. The plot thickens significantly during the Peter Zavadil-directed video, which expands the story to include five real-life couples. Over the course of four minutes, we see those couples pine for one another, reunite, argue, reconcile and make out, with all five pairs cycling their way through the familiar steps of a relationship. To make things more believable — and, presumably, to break away from the typecasting of today’s run-of-the-mill country videos, whose protagonists tend to be young, white and straight — those couples reflect the full range of American society. There’s an older couple. A gay couple. A black couple. A white couple. The Osbornes pop up throughout the video, too, performing the song in an empty warehouse just south of Nashville. [Watch the full clip above.]
“That song gives [the crowd] everything that we are,” vocalist T.J. Osborne explained during the March 2015 interview. “It starts off and the verses are really emotional and fragile. You don’t want to be alone, you’re making the phone call [to an on-again, off-again lover], taking the trip to the house and then you’re tearing t-shirts off and it’s this electric thing. But then, boom, you’re by yourself again: ‘I’m lying here wishing you could stay a little longer.'”
Originally released in 2014 as part of the band’s self-titled EP, “Stay a Little Longer” was rerecorded and reissued this spring, with producer Jay Joyce capturing the full firepower of the Osbornes’ live show. A full album is on the horizon, too, pointing Brothers Osborne further down the dirt road less traveled by.