Bailey Gaylin Moore’s Thank You for Staying with Me is a brilliant collection deeply settled in its sense of place (Missouri) and filled with poignant and fascinating stories of feminism, family, and vulnerability.
Matthew Gavin Frank wrote of the book:
“In Thank You for Staying with Me Bailey Gaylin Moore restlessly and ingeniously proves that a dedicated engagement of home becomes—as we age and evolve—in turns an act of redefinition and refusal, of dismantling and reconsecration. Such acts, in this brilliant essay collection, carry with them a narrative vulnerability that is as electric as it is raw, as it is exhilaratingly curious, filtering intense formative experience through inquiries into psycholinguistics, the behavior of the cosmos, legislative policymaking, philosophy, symbology, entropy, and more. Such ruminations gather an uncommon gravity as they twine to become one of the more earth-shattering comments on family that I’ve ever read. These essays—and their urgent drive to make sense of the human experience in both macro and micro ways—stand not only as testaments to but also as demonstrations of love.”
In her own words, here is Bailey Gaylin Moore‘s Book Notes music playlist for her essay collection Thank You for Staying with Me:
At its core, Thank You for Staying with Me is a meditation on my complex relationship with my home in the Ozarks—a region deeply rooted in religious and political fundamentalism. Growing up in the heart of the Bible Belt, my world was shaped by the rigid doctrines of the Southern Baptist church, which I began to question and eventually move away from in my late teens. Leaving that environment opened up spaces for discovery, offering me glimpses of vibrant, layered worlds that had once been obscured by the insularity of my upbringing.
One of those worlds was music. Music, at its core, is a language of emotion—a means of expressing what words alone often cannot. Through melody, rhythm, and lyricism, it reflects the intricacies of human experience, offering both solace and connection. For me, engaging with music has often been like holding up a mirror to my own identity, helping me see and understand parts of myself that were otherwise inaccessible.
Music became a way to reimagine my relationship with Missouri, softening the resentment and disillusionment I once felt toward my hometown. This transformation was particularly profound when I began listening to artists from Springfield, whose music carried echoes of the landscape, culture, and contradictions I’d known my whole life. This playlist is shaped by that experience. It’s influenced by Springfield’s local artists, the music my mom played on repeat when I was growing up, and the songs that defined my coming-of-age in the mid-aughts. Together, these tracks form a kind of sonic map—a soundtrack to the tension, beauty, and complexity of the Ozarks and the ways music helped me navigate my own evolving sense of home and identity.
Cat Stevens – Hard Headed Woman
Home to me begins with my mother, which is also how the first essay starts. Teaser and the Firecat or Tea for the Tillerman were her staple albums, especially on road trips to her home state of Michigan. We loved to sing “Sad Lisa” and “Father and Son” again and again, but “Hard Headed Woman” felt too on the nose for us to linger on for more than a single play. Perhaps it’s because the title reminded us of who we were, though she skipped over herself when laughing about how I had always been a strong-willed daughter. Thank You for Staying with Me starts with this reminder in the opening essay, “How to Be a Daughter,” recounting the time a neighbor bought my mother a book for headstrong children after I tried to run away from home. In the song, Cat Stevens is searching for a hard headed woman, “who will make me do my best.” There’s a comfort in this kind of woman, an assurance that he’ll be accepted for who he is while also ensuring he still strives for his highest self. Elvis, who shared a song with the same title, used the image of a hard headed woman to account for the downfall of sweet boys, drawing from biblical examples, like Adam vs. Eve and Sampson vs. Delilah. “A thorn in the side of man.” When my mom talked about me as a strong-willed child, it felt more Elvis than Cat Stevens—she was in a constant state of exasperation, whether from chasing after me or preparing herself for another unfaltering wave of needless defiance. For a long time, I felt the same way about her, creating a discordance where we kept crashing into each other, head first and headstrong. There was a moment five years ago where we stopped and saw each other fully, perhaps saw ourselves in the other, and we became friends. We found the kind of hard headed woman Steven’s was searching for, and we finally accepted her without question.
mewithoutYou – Bullet to the Binary
The only performance I liked at Cornerstone, the Christian hardcore music festival featuring bands from a label aptly named “Tooth & Nail.” I was sixteen, working for my three-day pass as a volunteer who restocked toilet paper in the “Johnny-on-the-Spot” porta potties. Most of the shows blurred together as one black t-shirt-ed mosh pit. The stage for mewithoutYou was dramatic, too quiet for the context of a music festival, but everyone was watching the microphone with dried flowers, waiting for Aaron Weiss to arrive. The lyrics pleaded for everything I wanted to say to my mother: “Look in our eyes, Look in our eyes. Let us be, let us be,” spoken-word-yelling-in-the-microphone in English then French then English again (“And you will feel me…Je n’ai pas d’espoir/I have no hope…Those aren’t your tears but I’m there falling down your cheek.”). Or, what I wished my mother could see: “She put on happiness like a loose dress over pain I’ll never know,” “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.” A Vonnegut mantra to fill the teenage void.
Broken Social Scene – Anthems of a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl
The slow building of an ambient crescendo, a voice masked with a flanging effect, repeating “Used to be one of the rotten ones, and I liked you for that.” Minimalism via banjo and violins. My go-to away message in 2005, the year I turned seventeen and got pregnant: Park that car. Drop that phone. Sleep on the floor. Dream about me. The climax was my favorite part—the words repeating over and over and over until they faded into the instrumentals, creating a sense of dissociation through its distortion.
This song is supposed to be about a woman looking back at her former self, a ghost who was chaotic but free, unable to reconcile who she was with who she turned out to be. When I was seventeen, I listened to this song again and again, already mourning the loss of my youth before I even had the chance to turn into someone I couldn’t recognize.
Modest Mouse – Dark Center of the Universe
This song was stuck in my head during a brief stint in the children’s psychiatric hospital. Perhaps it was because the CD player was incorrectly installed in my shitty ‘93 Ford Taurus, creating my own musical Groundhog’s Day with Modest Mouse’s album, The Moon and Antarctica. Maybe it was because I couldn’t stop thinking about what it means to be the dark center of the universe after my mom caught me sneaking through my window, drunk at seven in the morning—how I felt like the dark center of something when she looked at me disappointed and defeated and said, “I just don’t know what to do with you anymore.” To which I’d channel Isaac Brock, who was deeply entwined with my being at that point, and say, “I might disintegrate into thin air if you’d like.” It felt like the only response that would offer both of us peace. But after meeting with an impassive psychiatrist who told me my pregnancy test came back positive, I never had the chance to think about an imagined conversation beyond a quick daydream.
Mitch and Mickey – A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow
My mother drove me to Branson when she was worried, or at least she did the day after I came home from the psychiatric hospital. We already didn’t know how to talk to each other, and the silence was amplified by each anti-abortion billboard we passed as we headed south. I wondered if she thought about how Branson, a hillbilly tourist town, symbolized a previous life, one where my brother and I were still kids asking if we could ride one more roller coaster at Silver Dollar City. She let out a held breath when I finally made a small request for music. The only thing I wanted was to listen to the soundtrack to A Mighty Wind. My obsession with Christopher Guest films morphed into a deep desire to be serenaded by familiar voices during a time of wild unknowns. At first, I tolerated songs by The New Mainstreet Singers and The Folksmen, but when I heard the voices of Mitch and Mickey, it’s all I wanted to listen to. I needed Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy to be my parents for a moment, to listen to them sing “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow” on repeat and pretend my own veil of dreams hadn’t been lifted, that there were more fairytales to be told. I imagined the duo in the back of the car, Mitch looking out the window at the Ozark Mountains while singing soft, effortless harmonies with Mickey as she strummed her autoharp. My favorite part of the song had always been her solo, but this time it made me anxious, and I couldn’t help but look over at my mother when the lyrics poured through the speakers and into the space between us: “My sweet, my dear, my darling. You’re so far away from me.”
Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin – Modern Mystery
This song was on a loop in my early twenties. Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin was an indie darling from my hometown, and like this song, they made everything feel possible, even if you were from Springfield, Missouri. Before SSLYBS signed with Polyvinyl Records, my friends and I would try to sneak into their bar shows despite us being teenagers. One time Abby and I walked by them on the street, waiting to start their show at The Outland. We tried to look older when we told them how much their music meant to us, how we wished we could go to their show but we didn’t have any money. We feigned poverty to hide the real issue of being underage, but they were so nice they put us on the guest list without being creeps about it—only talking to us one more time to say they hoped we enjoyed the show. We celebrated their wins with them, geeking from afar when we heard “Oregon Girl” playing on The O.C. or losing our shit when they performed “Back in the Saddle” on Seth Meyers, belting, “We’re going to bomb the Battlefield Mall. We’re gonna take you down!” along with Phil Dickey. I loved all their music, but “Modern Mystery” carried with me the first time I heard it at The Outland. Even though it was one of their older songs, they didn’t make room for it on their debut album, and it would take another three years until I heard it again when Pershing was released in 2008. It’s the kind of song that still feels like you could experience it for the first time, whether it’s from an hypnotic hook or an unparalleled bass line or an undeniable vocal chemistry. I play it any time I come back to Springfield, entering city limits while blaring: “It’s a pointless small place. On a map in outer space,” and I think to myself, “Maybe it’s not so bad to be home.”
Abby Webster – River Rats
One of my favorite writers happens to be one of my favorite musicians. Abby shows up throughout the collection, sometimes joking about the guy who made puke angels as he called out my name and sometimes studying for an astronomy test on galaxy identification. The combination of undiagnosed Inattentive ADHD, shared musical taste, and geographic boredom made us fast best friends, which carried throughout high school and undergrad, where we both majored in philosophy. It was the kind of friendship where both people were often struggling with similar hardships, whether it stemmed from falling in love with emotionally-stunted men we were too beautiful for, simultaneously mourning heartbreak, or being inspired by a new project. A sense of psychic fellowship even shows up after years of not seeing each other, like in this song off her 2024 album, Livin’ by the Water. A few months ago, I asked if she wanted to write a song to go alongside my essay, “Galaxy Identification,” which details one of our late night study sessions at Waffle House where she asks what kind of Galaxy I am. The piece ends with us not knowing despite spending five pages thinking about it. Instead, I come to the conclusion we are our own kind of galaxy. The final scene is us, unhinged from studying types of stars all night, pointing at a blinking red light on the drive home:
Aside from the flashing red light, we’re alone on the street—the quiet so thick we may as well be alone in the universe.
Look, I say, pointing toward the stoplight. A dying giant red star.
It’s winking at us from the sky, she says.
We drive past the blinking red light—past Betelgeuse, past Mira—galaxies all our own.
I’d all but forgotten about the request when I first listened to Livin’ by the Water, only to hear “River Rats” and feel the unmistakable parallels between her song and my essay. Lines like, “We used to dream, always / We dreamt all day and night / That we would find a way to be / A way to be alright” echoed the existential questions we asked ourselves during those study sessions. The song captures the restless yearning of past lives, our desire to escape and to understand ourselves, while the essay reflects the same desire through the lens of cosmic metaphors.
Additionally, the lyrics, “And we used to run, we hid / Never did know how to be with ourselves / But we were staring at the sun / When we finally did,” serve as another mirror to imagery of the blinking red light in the essay. Both pieces point to our shared search for identity, meaning, and connection in a world that often felt too large and unknowable. In a way, Abby’s song feels like the answer to the question posed in my essay—not an answer in words, but in emotion, in the music that carries the weight of what we were always trying to say. Together, they form a dialogue across time and medium, reflecting the enduring bond between us and the galaxies we’ve become.
Tom Waits – Hold On
“Beck and I sing Tom Waits ballads in the car. We sing low and raspy. He always asks, ‘What is Tom waiting on, anyway?’”
Willie Nelson – You Were Always on My Mind
An important note: Unlike my grandmother, I do not think Willie Nelson is ugly.
I learned more about my paternal grandmother, Maa, after she died. I didn’t know how to ask questions before she got sick. After I said my goodbyes in Colorado, I came home and couldn’t stop listening to Willie Nelson sing “You Were Always on My Mind.” My mom caught me listening to it shortly after Maa died. She stood in the doorway, her body half in, half out, and said, “Oh, this song. Your grandmother loved this song. She loved listening to Willie sing it, but couldn’t stand to watch him perform it live. Said he was too ugly to look at.” I can’t remember whether she laughed or cried. She loved Maa deeply, even after my dad left. She always said his parents were the best thing about him. After that, I didn’t know how to listen to “You Were Always on My Mind,” especially on a loop. Five years later, I heard it again at the beginning of the pandemic. I was at a stoplight next to a bro. I knew he was a bro because I live in a college town with an unfortunately rich Greek life—that and the fraternity decal on the back of his beat-up Ford Fusion was a dead giveaway. His speakers were on full volume, which would normally annoy the shit out of me, but the dude was playing Willie Nelson. Not only was he blaring “You Were Always on My Mind,” but he was belting along with it. When I looked over, he caught my gaze, and I saw he had been crying. I think Maa’s laughter would fill the room if I told her how, every time I think of her, I think about Willie Nelson’s ugliness and a weeping bro at a stoplight.
Neil Diamond – Sweet Caroline
“I was still at the writers’ retreat when the rain had blown into the covered porch, a small group sat in a circle underneath, drinking Chris’s cranberry wine and talking about that afternoon’s panel. I couldn’t pay attention to the conversation, not because I wasn’t there, but because Neil Diamond’s ‘Sweet Caroline’ was playing in my head, only the chorus was replaced with ‘Cranberry Wine.’ When I mentioned this, a synchronized moment followed: everyone started to sway and sing together. In Styrofoam cups, the sweet red swished along to the beat as we all pounded duh, duh, duh.”
Jeff Buckley – Hallelujah
“When you find yourself in the car listening to Jeff Buckley’s ‘Hallelujah,’ you think back to the previous year. It was an especially cold October, and a pair of mice had found refuge in your hundred-year-old home. You were playing rummy with your boyfriend, sipping on a forty of Olde English as the two mice snuck between half-empty cereal boxes. When you lost a game, you looked up to find one of them staring at you, whiskers twitching, daring you to try and catch him. Or her. You’re convinced it’s a romantic duo, the way they squabbled back and forth, and with your luck, the house would contain a thriving rodent family by early November.
Despite the impending mouse doom, you found yourself smiling as the chords of ‘Hallelujah’ crept up through the speaker. Forty seconds into the song is your favorite moment—when Buckley was so moved by the pairing of chords that he moaned along with his guitar, as if moved that his Telecaster could make such a noise.
You looked away from the mouse. You said, ‘That moan. I love how Jeff can still be surprised by music.’
‘Yeah,’ your boyfriend said back, unfazed, looking down at a fresh hand of cards. Maybe it was then that you understood the first verse of the song. The song as a whole, actually. Perhaps this was why you were unsurprised by your last conversation, when you asked if he was even sorry about the affair, and he said not at all. The house remained empty besides you, your son who you had half the week, and a nuclear family of mice neither you or your boyfriend had ever bothered to catch.”
Ben Folds – Still Fighting It
A repeating prayer for my son, borrowed from Ben Folds:
Everybody knows
It hurts to grow up
And everybody does
It’s so weird to be back here
Let me tell you what
The years go on and
We’re still fighting it, we’re still fighting it
And you’re so much like me
I’m sorry
Dragon Inn 3 – Teleport
Another Missouri sweetheart from the list, featuring former members from Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin. I was still in Springfield when Dragon Inn 3 formed. I didn’t have to listen to their music to know they were amazing. The name alone was a deep cut, a play off a Chinese restaurant named Dragon Inn 2. I guess Abby and I weren’t the only ones who joked about what happened to Dragon Inn 1. The band has done well for itself since relocating to Kansas City, including signing with American Laundromat Records and collaborating with Pedro the Lion, American Football, and Nick Wilkerson on “Yer Brother,” a single produced by Polyvinyl Records. Though I’ve been a longtime fan of Pedro the Lion and American Football, it was clear within a handful of seconds that Philip Dickey led the creative voice for the song, a vibe that took me back to the early days of Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin.
“Teleport,” carries hints of SSLYSB but combined with the 80’s synth pop aesthetic that Dragon Inn 3 is known for, especially in their sophomore album, Trade Secrets. While I love their entire discography, “Teleport” appealed to this section of Thank You for Staying with Me. In an interview, Dickey explains, “The lyrics were inspired by my toddler. He was always asking for these rare and expensive Thomas the Tank Engine collectibles and I got in the bad habit of saying, Sure- when I get a lot of money. But really I’m already haunted by the idea that he’ll grow up and move away someday and all I’ll wish for is a way to teleport back to his childhood.”
In the penultimate essay, “Brave New World,” Beck turned eighteen, and I signed a contract for a book that I started writing before he was born. While I balanced celebrating and an impending existential spiral, Beck drove to his favorite tree to do homework—reading Brave New World while late autumn leaves fell around him. Both pieces navigate the parental internal conflict that happens when confronted by the inevitability of time, often forcing us to mourn the current moment before it’s even over. Like Dickey, I was haunted by the future, of this moment ending before I could appreciate what was happening in front of me. The rest of the day we played Goldeneye and I was able to slow down and hold onto the moment, unaware that in seven months, my son would be moving for college. I guess this is to say, maybe it’s okay to let yourself be moderately haunted by the future—it can make you more mindful of the time you have left.
ABBA – Slipping Through My Fingers
Home starts with my mother, and it ends with her leaving Missouri. I helped her move to Oregon, a process that involved her yelling at her seventy-pound retriever mix to get off the center console every ten minutes while also commending him for being a very good rider shortly after. You would think we’d listen to music to drown out his hot breath between us, but we talked from Missouri to Idaho without a peep of Cat Stevens or Ben Folds or fucking Yanni. When the sun went down, she got nervous and asked me to put in the soundtrack to Mama Mia, a guilty pleasure movie we watched often enough I knew all her commentary. Her favorite was to make fun of Pierce Brosnan’s singing, usually accompanied by an imitation. The moment she loved but couldn’t bring herself to watch was the scene where Sophie is getting ready for her wedding while Donna watches her, singing “Slipping through My Fingers.” I know my mother cries less than ten seconds into the song, and it intensifies when Donna runs her fingers through her daughter’s hair. My mother doesn’t have to tell me she’s thinking of how she used to pick me up to sit on the edge of her vanity in my childhood home, how she made a small ponytail at the top of my head and called it a fountain. When she hears the intro to “Slipping through My Fingers,” start to play on the drive, she immediately turns it to the next song, “Nope, can’t do it. I won’t ever stop crying if we listen to that song.” But she’s already tearing up, and she hasn’t even heard the chorus to know it’ll gut her: “Slipping through my fingers all the time / I try to capture every minute. The feeling in it, / slipping through my fingers all the time. / Do I really see what’s in her mind? / Each time I think I’m close to knowing she keeps on growing, / slipping through my fingers all the time.”
I’ll write about the drive to Oregon but can’t bring myself to talk about this moment without crying, so I leave it out because I won’t know how to stop the tears even when she’s no longer next to me, now thousands of miles away. And when we said goodbye, we’re quietly holding onto the same lyric: “I watch her go with a surge of that well-known sadness / and I have to sit down for a while.”I’ll see her again for my own wedding in six months. For both of our sakes, she doesn’t watch me get ready. What I don’t tell her: It’s my biggest regret from that day, even if it had been spent ruining our makeup, unable to hide the redness in our cheeks—the flush of feeling too much. What I wouldn’t give to have a montage of her watching me re-applying mascara or running her fingers through my hair. Perhaps an image mirroring Sophie in Donna’s lap as she paints her toes, stopping for a second just to look at her. Instead, I’ll cling onto an imagined final snapshot of a mother leaning her head against her daughter’s cheeks, overcome by an urgent need to freeze the picture.
Bailey Gaylin Moore is an Ozarks-based writer who lives with her husband and son in the heart of Missouri, where she is amassing a plant collection for her cat to shamelessly destroy. She serves as the editor in chief for the online nonfiction series Past Ten, which asks contributors to consider where and who they were ten years ago. Her work has appeared in AGNI Magazine, Pleiades, Wigleaf, Willow Springs, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and other journals. Thank You for Staying with Me is her debut essay collection.