My Baby Wants A Baby

St. Vincent (real name Annie Clark) has little confidence in herself as a prospective parent. All she wants to do is: Play guitar all day Make all my meals in microwaves Only get dressed up when I get paid Here, she lists the way she'd fail as a mother and partner. "If you're an artist, you're already married to your work," said Clark to The Independent. "And you don't want to make any decision that's going to make it so that you can't make things." She added that the song is an extreme "dirtbaggy" version of her life. "I'm definitely being self-deprecating but it's not that far off. If left to my own devices, I would barely survive in a conventional way. So the song's just exploring all of that. How much weight society puts on [the idea] that truly the best thing you could do is to make another one of you. But God, why are you so great?"

While working on the song, Clark got excited when she came up with a tune so catchy she couldn't get it out of her head. "For about 12 hours I thought, 'I've just written the best melody there ever was,'" the New York-based singer told the BBC. "I kept singing it and I was like, 'It's as if this song already existed, and it came to me like manna from heaven.'" Then Clark realized the tune in her head was Sheena Easton's 1980 hit single "Morning Train (Nine To Five)." Instead of ditching the song idea, Clark realized her lyrics about her failings as a domestic goddess were an ironic counterpoint to the melody of Easton's fantasy of suburban happiness. "So actually, it really worked for the song," she said. "I feel like it was kismet."

Florrie Palmer, the writer of "Morning Train (Nine To Five)," gets a co-writing credit for "My Baby Wants A Baby," along with St. Vincent.