St. Vincent has called John Mayer’s Daughters the “worst song ever written”.
In a recent interview for Kerrang! magazine, the Grammy Award-winning artist – real name Annie Clark – was asked to name the 10 songs that “changed her life”.
Clark listed Michael Jackson’s Bad, Sonic Youth’s Bull in the Heather, and The Pointer Sisters’s Automatic as some of the tracks that have influenced her passion for music.
However, she didn’t mince her words when it came to discussing Mayer’s 2003 hit Daughters.
“It’s just so hideously sexist but it pretends to be a love song, but it’s really, really retrograde and really sexist,” she argued. “And I hate it… It’s so deeply misogynistic, which would be fine if you owned that, but it pretends like it’s sweet.”
Mayer’s song contains lyrics which advise fathers to “be good to your daughters” so women will have better relationships with men in the future.
“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,” he sings.
The singer-songwriter has not yet responded to Clark’s criticism. Daughters was well-received upon release and won Song of the Year at the 2005 Grammy Awards.
Elsewhere in the conversation, Clark named Into My Arms by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds as a “perfect” love song.
“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,” the 41-year-old commented.
