Songfacts®:

• This vulnerable ballad from Lucy Dacus' Home Video (2021) album finds the singer begging her suicidal friend to keep going by any means necessary, even when life seems too hard. "Quit your job, cut your hair, get a dog, change your name, change your mind," she rattles off suggestions. "Call me if you need a friend or never talk to me again" - just "please stay."
  
  "If you've ever been a friend to someone who doesn't think they should continue living and you are trying with everything at your disposal to tell them otherwise, everything feels like fair game," Dacus explained to Pitchfork in 2021. "Do anything with your life, ruin it, but don't end it, just stay another day - that kind of thing. I've had a lot of friends throughout my life that have contemplated or committed suicide, and I've been involved to varying degrees, as someone they can talk to or be physically around. The sense of clarity in situations like that is so profound, like the only thing that matters is that you're here."
• As a lifelong journal-keeper, Dacus has always used writing as a tool to deal with her feelings, but songwriting is a different animal. An emotional journal entry can be tucked away and forgotten, but a heartwrenching ballad like "Please Stay" might have to be sung night after night. In a 2025 Junkee interview, Dacus explained how she approaches songs with painful subjects.
  
  "It's important to write it for myself, but at that point where I would have to play it every show, I just count out songs that I know would make me feel bad every night. And I have songs that make me feel bad, like 'Thumbs' and 'Please Stay,'" she said. "They get to me in my chest when I sing them, because I just remember where they came from. But there's even other stuff that just has crossed a line that I won't sing."
• If this had been written earlier in Dacus' career, it likely wouldn't have a piano-driven melody. Dacus previously shied away from the instrument because there was already a piano player in the family.
  
  "My mom's a pianist so I had veered away from using piano because it had such a heavy connotation for me," she explained in a 2021 Esquire interview. "But since this was going back to childhood anyways."