On Monday night, St. Vincent performed her new single "Teenage Talk" on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Now a web-exclusive video has surfaced of the singer before she hit the stage in which she reveals the story behind the creation of the song and what it all means to her.
"The song 'Teenage Talk' is a song that I actually wrote playing four-handed piano with a friend of mine," she said. "We were just kind of messing around on a piano in Austin and very clumsily playing chords, and I started singing the melody over the chords (sings). I was always very fond of it because it came about so spontaneously and with a whole lot of fun spirit behind it. So then I took it, and I think because I was in Austin, Texas, and I'm from Dallas, Texas, and I have a whole lot of love for Texas and roots and friends and family connections, it was reminding me of my best friends in my youth.
"So I decided to write a song about my particular group of girlfriends in high school. We were a foursome. We were the kids that had older brothers and sisters, so all we cared about was music and we had kind of the hot tip on what was good and what was like lame, and our entire objective for everything was to make each other laugh.
"It was incredibly formative. I feel super, super blessed, which is not a word I use, to have met them in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas, and to have forged such a strong bond.
"Basically, we were kind of outsiders, and we had to find our way through the malaise of suburban Texas childhood, and we really forged together.
"So I wrote the song in kind of memory of our fun times -- the time that my friend bought of what she thought was weed, but it was oregano, and the time that we rolled her mom's car down the driveway when we were 14 and snuck out and drove it around the block and felt so bad, and those early experiences with even drinking alcohol and having no idea what this foreign substance is and of course overdoing it and throwing up all over your autographed Bonnie Raitt t-shirt or hiding in the bushes from the cops.
"It was really an homage to that kind of growing up and it's something that I cherish a lot."
St. Vincent released her self-titled fourth studio album last year. It became her highest charting album to date, reaching No. 12 on the Billboard 200. She ended up taking home the Best Alternative Music Album award at this year's Grammys. It was praised as one of the best albums of 2014 by multiple outlets -- Music Times ranked it No. 1 on its end of the year list.
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