- published: 19 Jan 2012
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"Daughters" is the third single from Heavier Things, the 2003 studio album from blues singer-songwriter, John Mayer. The critically acclaimed song won numerous awards, including the 2005 Grammy Award for Song of the Year at the 47th Grammy Awards.
Lyrically, "Daughters" is an admonition to fathers (and to a lesser extent mothers) to nurture their daughters in their childhood, because the relationship will affect their future relationships with men as adults. He uses his own troubled lover to illustrate his belief:
Mayer has at various times told different, and sometimes conflicting, stories as to the inspiration for the song, ranging from MTVs "Real World" (in a Sirius Morning Mash Up Show interview in May 2007) to an unnamed ex-girlfriend.
In 2010, on VH1's "Storytellers", Mayer stated that he wrote the song about an ex girlfriend who had trust issues because of her absent father, which lead to the decline and eventual split of their relationship.
Mayer had been resistant on releasing the song as a single, and was still skeptical despite the Grammy win, which he mentioned in his speech upon receiving the award. On several occasions, Mayer had pushed to release the songs "Come Back to Bed" and "Something's Missing" as singles, as they were more the kind of music he was leaning towards making.[citation needed] However, the label decided that "Daughters" would be more well-received by radio. In 2005, Mayer converted the song into an all-out blues song with his group John Mayer Trio on the live album, Try!, stripping away the acoustic elements the song had become known for, although not similar version to the "Electric Guitar Mix" of the song as included on the single's re-release.
A daughter is a female offspring; a girl, woman, or female animal in relation to her parents. The male equivalent is a son. Analogously the name is used on several areas to show relations between groups or elements.
The word daughter comes from the Old English dohtor, from Proto-Germanic *dochter, related to Dutch dochter and German Tochter, from Proto-Indo-European *dhugheter, shared by Sanskrit duhitar and Greek θυγάτηρ (thugatēr),Mycenaean Greek tu-ka-te, written in Linear B syllabic script. (Note: an asterisk before a word indicates that this is a reconstructed form, not an attested word.)
A daughter plant is an offspring grown out of a part of the plant, for example, from a cutting of a leaf.
The term can also refer to the subordinate in any relationship where the superior entity is referred to as mother, for example, a daughter ship. It may depend on time relations or on structure relations.
In music, a song is a composition for voice or voices, performed by singing. A song may be accompanied by musical instruments, or it may be unaccompanied, as in the case of a cappella songs. The lyrics (words) of songs are typically of a poetic, rhyming nature, though they may be religious verses or free prose.
A song may be for a solo singer, a duet, trio, or larger ensemble involving more voices. Songs with more than one voice to a part are considered choral works. Songs can be broadly divided into many different forms, depending on the criteria used. One division is between "art songs", "pop songs", and "folk songs". Other common methods of classification are by purpose (sacred vs secular), by style (dance, ballad, Lied, etc.), or by time of origin (Renaissance, Contemporary, etc.).
A song is a piece of music for accompanied or unaccompanied voice or voices or, "the act or art of singing," but the term is generally not used for large vocal forms including opera and oratorio. However, the term is, "often found in various figurative and transferred sense (e.g. for the lyrical second subject of a sonata...)." The noun "song" has the same etymological root as the verb "to sing" and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines the word to mean "that which is sung" or "a musical composition suggestive of song." The OED also defines the word to mean "a poem" or "the musical phrases uttered by some birds, whales, and insects, typically forming a recognizable and repeated sequence and used chiefly for territorial defence or for attracting mates."