Candy Darling

Album: Daddy's Home (2021)
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Songfacts®:

  • "Candy Darling" is named after the 1970s American actor and trans woman of the same name. A muse for The Velvet Underground, Lou Reed and Andy Warhol, she became a fixture in fashionable Manhattan. Darling died in 1974, aged just 29, and St. Vincent imagines bidding her farewell as she embarks on her journey to her eternal home.

    And your wig, blonde, rolls home
    Waving from the latest uptown train
    I never wanna leave


    "I just got pretty obsessed with her," St. Vincent told NME. "I had a friend who was friends with her, and was at her bedside when she died, and I just started thinking about her."

    Clark added: "I just kept picturing that we were all on the platform seeing her off and she was taking that last uptown train to heaven, slow motion waving with the tiniest bit of subway wind in her hair."
  • "Candy Darling" is the closing track on Daddy's Home and was the last song St. Vincent wrote for the record. "I just kind of became obsessed with her version of grace," she told the BBC, adding it took her just 20 minutes to pen the tune.
  • St. Vincent has touched on the Big Apple queer scene before on tracks like 2014's "Prince Johnny." The musical palette, glamor queens and down-and-outs of early 1970s New York seep throughout Daddy's Home.
  • Lou Reed first introduced us to Candy Darling on his 1972 hit "Walk On The Wild Side" along with Holly, Little Joe, Sugar Plum Fairy, and Jackie. They were all part of the infamous Andy Warhol Factory.

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