Songfacts®:

• On this piano-driven album track, Amos realizes she's been emotionally unavailable in her romantic relationships and is about to lose her boyfriend as a result. At the time, she was dating her Under The Pink co-producer Eric Rosse. While their musical partnership was flourishing, resulting in a UK #1 album, their romantic partnership was falling apart. She connects her intimacy issues to being raped at 21 - which inspired her song "Me And A Gun"- and tries to recapture what was lost. "In 'Baker Baker'... it says I'm the one who was endlessly unavailable, to Eric, even when having sex," she told Hot Press in 1994. "And now the only way I'm getting out of all this is with him. The only way back now having taken so much hatred from one man is to accept so much love from another. But it's a long, slow process."
• This echoes the English nursery rhyme "Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man." Instead of asking the baker to bake her a cake, Amos wants him (or her) to make her whole again. "What ingredients do you need to become whole again when something is broken inside?" the singer asked in the liner notes to the 2015 deluxe edition of the album. "You don't feel as if you're whole grain. You feel more like Wonder Bread - which isn't very wondrous at all. The childlike framework of the song is referencing the wholeness that began to be lost back in childhood. The baker is whoever you want it to be - some people very much believe in a male authority God, but a doctor or a baker can be male or female. It depends on who you feel has the power to heal. In this case, it is the baker who the song believes holds the keys needed for healing to be complete."
• Amos told The Baltimore Sun in 1994 how she was taking accountability in the song and how other women should follow suit. "'Baker Baker' is kind of tragic in a way, because - I've had to look at how I treated men, and on this record," she explained. "I think with 'Baker Baker,' to deal with a man that truly loved me, but that I wasn't emotionally available for. You know how women always say men aren't emotionally available. Well, a lot of women aren't emotionally available. It's like, if you're vulnerable, we say, 'Look, we need you to be sensitive.' So you become sensitive, and yet we go, 'You've got no f--kin' backbone,' and we kick you in the face and run off with a ski trainer."
• Amos' relationship with Rosse was irreparable. She wrote her third album, Boys For Pele, in the wake of their breakup.