St. Vincent is a lover of music history, as she showed on her 1970’s-inspired 2021 album Daddy’s Home. She’s not a fan of all of it, though, especially not one of John Mayer’s early hits.
In a recent interview with Kerrang, the publication had St. Vincent pick a handful of song superlatives, including “the worst song ever written.” Her choice there was Mayer’s “Daughters,” from the 2003 album Heavier Things. She explained, “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.”
This isn’t her first time speaking unfavorably about Mayer. In a 2017 Vogue interview, she said she wasn’t concerned if listeners tried to match her song lyrics with her past relationships, adding, “Songs are Rorschach tests anyway. They say more about you than the person who made them. All my songs are about John Mayer.”
Then, in a 2021 interview with Vinyl Me, Please, St. Vincent said, “It’s kind of a joke in the music industry that sound people, when they’re walking into a new venue, will put on a Steely Dan record to test the system, because they’re just known for being, like, sonically perfect. One time, a sound guy who I was working with put on John Mayer’s Gravity, and I fired that sound guy.”