Daddy's Home

Album: Daddy's Home (2021)
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Songfacts®:

  • In 2010, St. Vincent's stockbroker father was sentenced to 12 years in jail for his role in a $43m (£27m) stock-manipulation scheme. During this song, she recounts visiting her imprisoned dad.

    I signed autographs in the visitation room
    Waiting for you the last time, inmate 502


    St. Vincent confirmed to The New Cue that she did indeed sign autographs for prison guards on till receipts. "I would sign crumpled-up Target receipts somebody had left in the visitation room," she said. "And, of course, it's incredibly sad, but it's also incredibly absurd so the whole family has found a way to laugh about it."
  • St. Vincent indicates there was an emotional cost to seeing her father incarcerated.

    Yeah, you did some time
    Well, I did some time too


    The singer told the BBC her dad's release in 2019 "was a real, palpable sense of relief. You don't realize how permanently constricted your chest is. How there's a ceiling on any kind of joy. For a lot of years."
  • St. Vincent stayed fairly tight-lipped about her father's imprisonment, only making a few cryptic references in her music. On 2011's "Strange Mercy," for instance, she sings:

    Our father in exile
    For God only knows how many years
    But when you see him, wait
    Through double pain


    "Daddy's Home" was the first song she wrote for the record and is also its title track. Her father's influence is felt elsewhere on the album as St. Vincent incorporates the sounds of some of the 1970s music he introduced her to as a child. She told Apple Music's Zane Lowe they include "all the Stevie Wonder stuff from basically '71 to '76." She added: "He's got a lot of great periods, but there's a really special Stevie Wonder period in there with Talking Book and Innervisions, and then all the Steely Dan s--t from the early '70s."
  • St. Vincent wrote and produced the song with Jack Antonoff, her main collaborator on the album.
  • Bill Benz directed the video, which shows St. Vincent riding on the back of a truck down a street, singing and playing guitar. Benz also shot the singer's clips for "Pay Your Way In Pain" and "Down" as well as her joint movie with Carrie Brownstein, The Nowhere Inn.
  • St. Vincent told the UK newspaper The Sun this song was a starting point for the album. "It's telling stories about humanity without judgment," she said of the record. "And that's where I am right now in my life. It's about growing and my own transformation into being the daddy. There's enough judgment going around and I'm interested in looking at things with logic and empathy."
  • Daddy's Home won the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album at the 2022 ceremony. Jack Antonoff also won for Producer Of The Year.

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