Huey Newton

Album: St. Vincent (2014)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song is named after the co-founder of the Black Panthers. Huey Newton appeared to St. Vincent's Annie Clark in a dream after she took a sedative to relieve jet lag while on tour in Helsinki. "If you take one and go to sleep, you sleep for 12 hours," she told The Observer. "If you take one and don't fall asleep, you're high. It's bananas. You're in that high state between sleepfulness and wakefulness. I had this hallucination that Huey Newton was in the room with me. We didn't talk about the Black Panther party. We just kind of communicated. We understood each other. I was as high as a kite."
  • The lyrics are a series of free association bleak images designed to feel like a Google wormhole. Clark told Uncut magazine: "I wrote the words for in a very furious frenzy, it was just free association. I was trying to be meta with it, and every line is tied to the next in a way that I don't even understand. I did a lot of that. It has the feel of an extended Google search, and is set in the near future, after a long winter."
  • The song later refers to The Heaven's Gate cult. Heaven's Gate is one of Clark's obsessions, which she told NME. "I am fascinated by and love, if you can say that you love a cult where they were waiting for the comet to come and committed suicide, all wearing Nikes."

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