Annie Clark - aka St Vincent - does not like John Mayer. Or rather, she doesn’t like his song Daughters. Not one little bit, it seems.
In fact, in an interview with Kerrang! in which she picks the ‘the 10 songs that changed my life', Clark proposes Mayer’s song as ‘the worst song ever written’.
“It’s just so hideously sexist but it pretends to be a love song, but it’s really, really retrograde and really sexist,” she says. “And I hate it… It’s so deeply misogynistic, which would be fine if you owned that, but it pretends like it’s sweet.”
Though not a hit in the UK, Daughters won the 2004 Grammy for the Song Of The Year. In it, Mayer warns fathers to be good to their daughters because "daughters will love like you do". In other words, try not to pass problems down the generations.
Perhaps, though, Clark was referring to the middle eight where Mayer does lapse into what you might term old-fashioned platitudes: "Boys will be strong/and boys soldier on/But boys would be gone without warmth from a woman’s good good heart". And: "On behalf of every man/Looking out for every girl/You are the God and the weight of her world."
Clark’s other choices are far less contentious. Her ‘Song that got me into rock music’ is Hendrix’s Crosstown Traffic, her ‘Song that inspired me to become a musician’ is Fire In The Hole by Steely Dan, and her ‘Song that reminds me of my first love’ is Nick Cave’s Into My Arms.
Interestingly, for her ‘Song I want played at my funeral’ ,she picks Sleepwalk by Santo And Johnny. Don’t know that one? Yes, you do:
“I just love that song! It's so beautiful and there’s no words, so people can feel whatever they’re feeling without words telling them too much,” she gushed before taking a sideswipe at a rather more, er, cliched choice: “What gets me is when people pick a song like My Way. All those people who love you are gathered here and you’re just going to take one last opportunity to stick it to them. It’s so crazy to me.”
St Vincent released her seventh album All Born Screaming in April. She’s about to embark on a North American tour that takes her through to mid September. In October she returns to Europe for a string of dates, including shows in Manchester and Dublin.
