Songfacts®:

• "John Grant" is sung by... well, American singer-songwriter John Grant. Linda Thompson told Uncut magazine they met through Grant's friendship with her son Teddy Thompson.
  
  "I went to a John Grant show expecting he was going to sing, but John being John, he wasn't singing, he was lecturing," she explained. "So halfway through, I stood up and said 'I'm Teddy's mummy' - because he and Teddy are very good friends. We just hit it off."
  
  When Grant relocated to London to work on an album, he moved to a residence just five minutes away from Thompson's home. The two often met at Dell's, a local restaurant, for casual get-togethers.
• The song meanders through moments from Grant's life - missing his mother's passing, moving to Iceland for a fresh start, and trying to feel he belongs somewhere. Grant also sings about his friendship with Linda, including sipping tea at Bertaux, a London café famous for its cakes.
  
  We had tea at Bertaux
  We like cake and it shows
  A moment on the lips
  
  Linda Thompson said, "After I went to that show I wrote him a love letter, and I probably said, 'Would you put it to music?' Not thinking he could. I mean, it was a mad collection of words, but John just did it."
  
  Teddy Thompson then flew to Reykjavik to help record the song while Linda stayed home, because, as she put it, "Reykjavik? Too far and too cold."
• Linda Thompson recorded "John Grant" for Proxy Music, an album of her songs performed by other artists - a necessity since her own singing has been cut short by spasmodic dysphonia.
  
  "I wrote them with myself in mind, but then I had to cast the net," she lamented. "I can't sing anymore. Which is a shame for me – not for anyone else, but for me!"
  
  The album title is a play on words, referencing both Roxy Music and the concept of the album, where other artists perform Linda Thompson's songs by proxy due to her vocal condition.
• Along with lending his voice to his eponymous track, John Grant played the piano, a Roland Juno-60 synth, and a Kong kit (a type of percussion kit). He also provided harmony vocals on another Proxy Music track, "Those Damn Roches."
• As for Linda, she leaned heavily on Teddy to help her pull the album together. "He's such a fine producer," she told Uncut. "Brilliant ears, understated taste."
  
  These days, she admitted, she's "deaf as a bleeding post" and apparently leaning a bit schmaltzy in her tastes, so Teddy's there to keep her on course.
  
  "I miss a lot of the top end and the bottom end and often things seem very far out of tune to me," Linda added, "but if it's one voice and one guitar, which is what I prefer anyway, I can hear that."
• The Proxy Music cover is a direct parody of the cover for Roxy Music's self-titled debut album from 1972. Linda Thompson is photographed mimicking the glamorous 1940s/'50s style shoot of model Kari-Ann Molle that was featured on the Roxy Music cover, replicating her outfit, hair, and makeup.