In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Devon Halliday’s novel To Stay, To Stay, To Stay is filled with masterful storytelling and memorable characters and is one of the year’s strongest debuts.
David Haynes wrote of the book:
“In this enchanting tale of small-town love, artisanal bread, and sketchy real estate, Devon Halliday explores the webs that connect us and the mysterious forces that break those webs apart. Everything and everyone in this wonderful novel is rendered with precision, wit, and uncompromising humanity.”
In her own words, here is Devon Halliday’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel To Stay, To Stay, To Stay:
When I was young, I used to create mental music videos to accompany my favorite songs. As one song gave way to the next, the music video in my mind kept rolling, developing a vast plot that encompassed the lyrics of whatever songs were on shuffle that day. I loved the feeling of building a story through music, treating each new song as if it rose directly out of the mood of the last.
In the spirit of those long-ago music videos—alas, lost to history—I present an emotional road map of my novel, To Stay, To Stay, To Stay. If you listen to this playlist all the way through, the music video in your mind should recreate the plot of the novel with 99% accuracy… allowing, of course, for some differences in budget and casting.
icepick by Sadurn
We begin with a kind of rolling stasis. This song is about what it’s like to be in love—when it’s hard, but it’s still worth it, but it’s still hard. Doubts follow resolutions follow more doubts, like waves turning endlessly in the tide: “I get so frustrated about your communication / But I know you can’t help it, and I’m not really trying to change it.”
There’s so much in that not real. I’m not trying to change you—not really. Not all the time. Not when I remind myself not to. That’s where the characters of my novel begin: with good intentions and imperfect resolve.
Delphinium Blue by Cassandra Jenkins
As the novel settles in, we witness the characters at work in their respective jobs. Two tracks of thought run at all times: the autopilot track of labor, tasks, obligations, and the deeply submerged track of their real thoughts and worries.
“Chin up / Stay on task / Wash the windows / Count the cash,” the singer reminds herself in this song, but meanwhile: “I hear your voice when I’m closing … I picture the sun hitting you.” In jobs that don’t require our full attention, our minds are free to wander into old and forgotten longings.
Mama You’ve Been on My Mind by George Harrison
When the characters of my novel catch themselves dwelling in fantasy, they try to shake themselves back to reality… with uneven results. This sweet and wistful song captures that feeling of missing someone you normally try not to think about. In fact, the singer gives us a couple possible reasons that his mind might have wandered (“maybe it’s the weather or something like that”) before he even tells us what it’s wandered to.
There’s a push-pull between admission and denial in this song, as the singer tries to clarify what exactly he’s trying to do. “I am not asking for you to say words like yes and no,” he assures the woman he probably still loves. “I’m just breathing to myself, pretending not that I don’t know / Mama you’re just on my mind.”
The best that the singer can claim for himself here is self-awareness… which is quite different, of course, from resisting the temptation to dwell in the first place. As the characters of my novel learn the hard way, self-awareness doesn’t always do us much good.
I Can’t Stay by The Killers
At this point in your music video, you should have a character who is in a mostly loving relationship, but who is also fixated on someone else. That’s not a tenable situation. It’s time for this character to make a decision—or almost time. As the singer of this song puts it: “I can’t stay very far / I can’t stay much longer.”
Maybe that means: I can’t stay out, wandering the streets in indecision. I’ve got to head home.
Or maybe that means: I can’t stay in this home a moment longer.
The characters of my novel make different choices when they reach this impasse. Some of them decide to head back into the shelter of the status quo. Some of them decide to blow everything up and start over. Whichever they choose, the decision is summed up by the final line of this song: “Riding my decision home.”
Alone Again Or by Love
This whole time, while the star of your music video has been brooding and pacing the streets of their neighborhood, deciding whether to stay or to go, someone has been waiting back at home for them. This is the song of that person waiting. “I won’t forget all the times I’ve waited patiently for you / And you do just what you choose to do / And I will be alone again tonight my dear.”
It’s a tough break—and yet this song has always felt joyful to me. Check out that horn solo. The disintegration of the status quo means clean slate, square one, new opportunities. That could turn out to be a good thing. After all, as the singer puts it, “I could be in love with almost everyone / I think that people are the greatest fun.” The heartbreak is big, but the world around it is still bigger.
Saved by Devon Halliday
The star of your music video has finally made their decision. No more pacing! They’re committed to the new path. They’re done transforming. They might even make some kind of declaration, like: “Forever’s nice, but this is what we get / I’ll take it.”
But there are hairline cracks running through this new commitment. “Maybe I was saved,” the singer suggests, again and again, and that maybe never goes away. Instead, the song builds to a crescendo and then fades out, never resolving. There’s even an anguished scream embedded in the mix. The chorus repeats like a mantra, insisting that all that indecision and heartache is over.
It has to be, right? I mean, your character just made their big decision. They’re not about to unmake it.
Certainty by Big Thief
But what if they made the wrong big decision? Is it too late to change their minds?
Certainty is, it turns out, a “wild, weaving” thing. There’s indecision in every line of this song. “Why do I string you along?” the singer wonders—but she also has a vision of some future together, once all this has been resolved: “You lay beside me / Sleeping on a plane in the future.” If the singer is stringing someone along, she’s stringing herself along too.
Sometimes you can’t get the competing truths in your mind to reconcile. When that’s the case, maybe the best you can do is to admit it: “I love you / Still don’t know.”
It’s hard to act without certainty. But when will that certainty ever come? Maybe the thing to do is just to stick with the decision you already made—until something finally gives.
Bill of Goods by Loudon Wainwright III
As we close in on the end of the novel, the characters have settled into the aftermath of their big decisions—but that aftermath isn’t working, and the characters know it. This song captures that in-limbo period when it’s too late to fix anything, but too soon to leave: “Everything will be all right / Remember when you thought that? / I sold you that bill of goods / Remember when you bought that?”
There’s bitterness in the song, but there’s also the kind of close observation that can only come from love. It’s hard to know where one ends and the other begins: “We gave each other such a hard time / But it sure was fun / Or was it?”
If there’s a moral to the whole mess of this decision-making process, it’s too soon to tell. We’ve moved beyond reason, justification, the weighing out of the pros and cons. There’s only one thing left to try.
Wild Ambitions by Yellow Magic Orchestra
All our resolutions, all our careful habits, all the things our friends have told us, all the things we’ve told ourselves—they fall away in the face of what we truly want. This song feels to me like running back across the plains of all my mistakes, retracing all those steps I took in the wrong direction. “I’m on my way to where you are / I’m running through the wildlands.”
The characters made their big decision, yes. But it didn’t stick. Now they’re going to make the opposite big decision.
Have they got it right this time?
Come On Up to the House by Tom Waits
The truth is, there is no right decision. There are just the decisions we make, and the stories we tell to make sense of them.
The star of your music video has been through a lot in the last thirty-eight minutes. They fretted about a huge, life-changing decision. They made that decision. They tried their best to stick with it. And then they went right back and made the opposite decision, because they simply couldn’t stay the course once they realized what they actually wanted.
This is the journey that the characters of my novel go on—and on the last page of the novel, you can see the characters starting to fit their decisions into a new story, a story that they’ll tell from now on. We always say hindsight is 20/20, but I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s just persuasive.
The last song on this playlist is an invitation—to the star of your music video, to the characters of my novel, to you, to me, to everybody—to relinquish the illusion of agency. “There’s nothing in the world that you can do … You been whipped by the forces that are inside you … You’re high on top of your mountain of woe … You know you should surrender, but you can’t let go.”
Maybe you’re not really in control of your decisions, your desires, your fate. Maybe that’s for the best. “You’ve got to come on up to the house,” the singer calls you. Everyone else is up here waiting for you.h
Devon Halliday is a Pushcart Prize–winning writer. Her fiction appears in Ploughshares, One Story, and People Magazine, among other journals, and her criticism appears in Liberties and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She writes a popular Substack on craft, publishing, and the writing life.
Devon holds an MFA in Fiction from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, where she received a Rona Jaffe Foundation scholarship, and a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University. She grew up in southeastern Ohio, and teaches creative writing at Ohio University.
Her debut novel To Stay, To Stay, To Stay, published by McSweeney’s, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.