Daisy

Coming Up Daisy is a fictional movie within the movie Burn After Reading, but it has nothing to do with this song. In a Songfacts interview with Kate Davis, she explained that when her father was dying of brain cancer, her sister asked him what she should name her child. He suggested some lovely, flowery names, like Daisy. When she asked him what Kate should name her child (should she ever have one), he replied, "Volcano." "These floral names that were easy to digest gave me this idea for creating this expectation of what my dad wanted for his kids," Davis said. "'Daisy' represented all of the things we needed to achieve to help promote his legacy. So it ended up being a word to describe the experience once you've lost someone. It's good and bad, it's hard and easy. It's total self-destruction, it's total empowerment. It's the experience of loss in a word, which I know is very abstract and strange, but it also represents the potential I have for my future, whether it is that I have a child, or if I can have a career I think he'd be proud of. It's just all of those things in one word."

Daisies represent the circle of life - when you die you are metaphorically "pushing up daisies," meaning your body provides nutrients for the soil. "It all made sense to me," Davis said. "My parents, when we were growing up, grew little starter seeds in our basement. I have this really deep memory of going down to the basement and seeing all these tiny seedlings under one of those lights that is supposed to be like the sun. I related to that - I felt like I was one of those little seedlings, being very protected and nourished and isolated in the basement."

This is one the tracks from Davis' first album, Trophy, which came out five years after she made a viral splash performing "All About That Bass" in a jazz style with an upright bass. Davis learned jazz at the Manhattan School of Music, but rejected the form in favor of more contemporary music that allowed her more personal expression. Listening to "Daisy," there's little trace of the Davis that became famous for her jazz spoof.