VOL. 2 GAME SOUNDTRACK AMBIENT SCORE BY AWARD WINNING COMPOSER, DREN MCDONALD, WITH GUESTS SOPHIA JAMES AND AMELIE ANNA, RELEASED ON APPEARING RECORDS

Stay: Forever Home is a small, personal cozy game by indie game studio, Windup Minds. In the game, the player is rewarded by the evolution of their relationship with Ember, their magical pet. Some of those rewards come from little moments with Ember, relaxing in the Otherlands watching a waterfall, or engaging with floating orbs of light as they pass by. Volume 2 of the soundtrack reflects on the quieter moments of this game, resulting in an ambient, dream-like listening experience. As in “Volume 1: Chaos”, composer Dren McDonald worked with two of his favorite vocalists for the new volume of this soundtrack, Sophia James and Amelie Anna.

One of those vocalists is musical artist Sophia James. This fall Sophia enjoyed a crazy bit of TikTok fame by creating the “Group 7” trend on the platform in a frustrated attempt to create awareness of her latest single, “So Unfair”. Sophia was also a top ten finalist in Season 18 of American Idol, she recently collaborated on new songs with the creators of Phineas and Ferb (Disney) on the latest season, and her song, “Somebody New” has over 24 million streams on Spotify. Vocalist Amelie Anna, is featured in the score for the recently released Kojima game, Death Stranding 2 (Sony) as well as a recent Destiny 2 (Bungie) DLC chapter, and both Amelie and Sophia contributed vocals to McDonald’s upcoming album, VoxPterous.

​“Many of these pieces were formed from the improvisations that both Sophia and Amelie performed in the studio with minimal harmonic structure. It’s a credit to their talent and musicianship that many of these recordings became the basis for a few of the tracks. For instance, in “The Otherlands Floating Music Spores” I wanted to create emitters in the game map that would let the player know that they were entering a magical area, so we tried a lot of unusual vocal sounds, a combination of short ‘bips and boops’ and longer tones. Later in production I flipped the long tones to play backwards and arranged them to work melodically with the oddball short vocal sounds…offering a sound that is clearly a human voice but somehow magical or dreamlike.” says McDonald.

“A significant part of the game is to simply hang out with Ember, your pet companion, and chill, either in mixed reality or in virtual reality. This volume of the soundtrack (“Vol 2: Cozy”) represents those quiet moments in the game, and the soundtrack plays as an ambient album.”

Vol. 2 Cozy is the second soundtrack installment for Stay, and contains the chill/ambient music from the game, as Vol. 1 Chaos, (released July 2025) contained the upbeat music from the game. Both albums are mixed in both Dolby Atmos (AppleMusic/Tidal) and in stereo. Produced, Mixed and Engineered by Dren McDonald, additional recording engineering by Chad Wackerman (The Drum Room). Track listing as follows:

1. Otherlands Nightfall (feat. Sophia James & Amelie Anna)

2. A Home In Between (feat. Amelie Anna)

3. Night Time Explorations (feat. Sophia Jame)

4. Back Home Sleepytime

5. The Otherland’s Floating Music Spores (feat. Amelie Anna)

6. Under The Mossling Bridge (feat. Sophia James)

7. Ember’s Memory Pieces (feat. Sophia James)

8. A Floating Portal In My Room (feat. Sophia James)

9. Starfall To Nightfall (feat. Sophia James & Amelie Anna)