Songfacts®:

• St. Vincent's Annie Clark told Uncut magazine she got the idea for this song from a phrase in a short story by a novelist she loves, Lorrie Moore. She added: "It was such a perfect image of some hope you have that ends up, for one reason or another, in a pile of rubble on the floor."
  
  Lorrie Moore is an American fiction writer known mainly for her humorous and poignant short stories, which have long had a cult following. Her tale of a young child falling sick, People Like That Are the Only People Here, won the 1998 O. Henry Award, which is given to short stories of exceptional merit.
• Annie Clark elaborated on the song to Mojo magazine: "Severed Crossed Fingers is a Lorrie Moore reference, from a short story about a woman who reads a story in the newspaper – they're sifting through a plane crash and find somebody's severed hand, but the fingers are still crossed, and I thought that was such a great, hilarious, bleak metaphor for life."