In a recent interview with Kerrang! magazine, St. Vincent called John Mayer‘s song ‘Daughters’ the “worst song ever written”.
When asked to name the ten songs that “changed her life,” the Grammy Award-winning artist (born Annie Clark) listed Michael Jackson’s ‘Bad,’ Sonic Youth’s ‘Bull in the Heather,’ and The Pointer Sisters’s ‘Automatic’ as several of the tracks that influenced her passion for music. Elsewhere in the conversation, Clark named Into ‘My Arms’ by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds as a “perfect” love song, adding:
“I’m drawn to various periods of Nick Cave. I wrote to him because his new song Frogs was just gutting me, it moves me so deeply. But just that line (from Into My Arms), ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God / But I know, darling, that you do,’ I think was from a period of time he was with PJ Harvey, and it just moves me.”
Notwithstanding the above, when it came to discussing Mayer’s 2003 hit ‘Daughters’ which won Song of the Year at the 2005 Grammy Awards, the American-born singer/songwriter said:
“It’s just so hideously sexist but it pretends to be a love song, but it’s really, really retrograde and really sexist.” “And I hate it… It’s so deeply misogynistic, which would be fine if you owned that, but it pretends like it’s sweet.”
St. Vincent’s concern has to do with such Mayer lyrics as “So fathers be good to your daughters / Daughters will love like you do / Girls become lovers who turn into mothers / So mothers be good to your daughters too,” which advise fathers to “be good to your daughters” so women will have better relationships with men in the future.
John Mayer has yet to respond to Clark’s criticism.
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Author: Al Denté
Photo: Stephen Eckert