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."
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