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On a latest Tuesday night time in a dressing room of the Brooklyn Paramount Theater, Annie Clark, the 41-year-old musician who information as St. Vincent, thumbed by way of a shelf of secondhand information and sipped a glass of pink champagne. Clark, invited to D.J. the venue’s grand reopening party, was the room’s first inhabitant since a significant renovation restored the previous film palace; a pristine, new-car scent lingered.
Holding courtroom amongst just a few members of her group and her 23-year-old sister, Clark was an attentive host on this antiseptic house, prepared with a witty comment (the fastidiously curated LPs had been in all probability “somebody’s deceased grandma’s report assortment”) or a topped-off beverage. She wore a cream-colored silk shirt, black kitten-heeled footwear and a gauzy black bow tied artfully round her neck.
Even in a second of relative repose, Clark possessed a feline hyper-awareness of her environment. Dave Grohl, who performs drums on two tracks off St. Vincent’s blistering new album “All Born Screaming,” later informed me in a cellphone interview, “When you’re speaking to her and also you’re wanting in these eyes, you’ll be able to solely marvel what reels are whirring in her mind, each second.” He added, amused, “I’ve by no means seen her together with her eyelids half closed.”
Clark is a gifted and nimble guitarist with a dexterously spiky taking part in fashion that contrasts with the moony smoothness of her voice. She can be recognized for absolutely the dedication of her dwell performances. “What she does is so transformative,” mentioned the musician Cate Le Bon, Clark’s shut buddy of over a decade, in a video interview. “When I see her play, it freaks me out generally. I may be even serving to her prepare for a present, and it’s like I do know nothing of the girl who’s onstage.”
Seven albums and 17 years into an acclaimed solo profession, Clark has eked out a singular house in music, sometimes intersecting with the mainstream however for essentially the most half staying uncompromisingly countercultural. She has collaborated with each David Byrne and Dua Lipa; the riot grrrl pioneers Sleater-Kinney and the post-post-riot-grrrl pop star Olivia Rodrigo. She was one in every of 4 feminine musicians requested to entrance Nirvana for an evening in 2014 when the band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “She’s clearly outrageously gifted,” Grohl mentioned. “For her to play a Nirvana track was, possibly, so much easier than her personal music.”
I first met up with Clark in March, once we drank iced coffee beneath the shady pergola exterior her manager’s Hollywood workplace. She carried a black Loewe purse and wore a white T-shirt bearing the title of the Swedish punk band Viagra Boys. Clark has, previously, embodied numerous characters and donned costumes — a gray-haired cult chief on the quilt of her 2014 self-titled album; a louche ’70s glamour lady on her 2021 launch “Daddy’s Home” — however nowadays she’s kind of dressing as herself.
“I’ve definitely performed with persona, as a result of I’m queer,” Clark mentioned from behind giant sun shades. “That’s how I play and make sense of my life. All of that simply appears completely pure to me, to play with persona and id and to place it within the work.”
But adopting an over-the-top persona, she mentioned, is just not one thing she finds notably compelling proper now. “I’m extra serious about that which is uncooked and important,” she mentioned. “You’re alive otherwise you’re dead. And if you happen to’re alive, you’d higher dwell it, as a result of it’s quick.”
In some sense, Clark is coming off the best business success of her profession, and one that’s decidedly extra sunshiny than the work she’s recognized for: During a session with the ever present producer Jack Antonoff, who collaborated on her two earlier albums, Clark helped write “Cruel Summer,” the sugar-rush pop track that Taylor Swift launched on her 2019 album “Lover.”
“It was one thing Jack and I labored on and made its method to Taylor and made it again, as these issues go,” Clark mentioned. Though it was not initially launched as a single, Swift’s formidable fan base has, previously yr, willed it into changing into the unofficial anthem of her Eras Tour and a No. 1 hit 4 years after its preliminary launch. Clark attended a present in Los Angeles final yr and located it surreal to witness 90,000 folks singing alongside. “I’ve by no means seen something prefer it, a lot much less been part of something prefer it,” she mentioned.
And but, she has little interest in replicating that method in her personal music. In truth, “All Born Screaming,” due April 26, incorporates among the heaviest, darkest and weirdest St. Vincent music so far. “That’s what I need from music proper now, personally,” Clark mentioned, secure within the shade of the California solar. “I would love a pummeling. I need one thing to really feel harmful.”
CLARK HAS A popularity for being guarded with journalists, partly as a result of she doesn’t like speaking about her private life. Unsurprisingly, she didn’t need to specify why themes of grief and loss permeate her new album, as a result of she doesn’t assume it might make a lot distinction to the listener. In one in every of our later conversations, she mentioned that she believed a performer’s responsibility is solely “to shock and console” advert infinitum. Explaining oneself is superfluous to that job description.
“Generally everyone seems to be misunderstood, and also you understand it’s not your job to make folks perceive you,” Le Bon mentioned. “It’s your job to work and align your self with your individual integrity. I feel that’s even tougher to harness if you’re an artist as massive as Annie. But she does.”
“She’s virtually definitely wildly misunderstood by folks,” she added, “however there’s a perverse pleasure in that.”
Le Bon, who’s from Wales, met Clark when she was opening for a St. Vincent tour in 2011. She mentioned that in the first place she discovered it tough to get to know Clark: “She was very mysterious, doing yoga numerous the time,” Le Bon mentioned. Eventually, nevertheless, Le Bon discovered a manner right into a “actually rewarding” friendship. “She’s so trustworthy with out agenda, and that’s a uncommon factor on the earth we each exist in,” Le Bon mentioned. “She asks the robust questions, she offers you the actual solutions.”
Clark was born in Tulsa, Okla., and raised principally within the Dallas suburbs. She picked up the guitar at 12 and confirmed a precocious expertise; in her early teenagers, she sat in together with her music teacher’s band and selected a track with a excessive stage of problem, Jimi Hendrix’s “The Wind Cries Mary.” Her aunt and uncle play because the jazz duo Tuck and Patti, they usually introduced her on tour one summer season as a roadie to indicate her the realities of touring life. She liked it. “Some of my fondest reminiscences of touring are from these actually early days,” she mentioned.
Le Bon mentioned she sees a stark demarcation between the considerably extreme and imperious musical determine “St. Vincent,” and, as she put it, “Annie Clark from Dallas.” Annie Clark from Dallas slowly emerged, in our conversations, as a humorous, genial and frivolously self-deprecating one who enjoys trendy comedy (she quoted “30 Rock” from reminiscence and referenced each “Veep” and “Waiting for Guffman”), is shut together with her many siblings, and on at the very least one event has drunk an excessive amount of pink champagne at a party celebrating the reopening of an previous Brooklyn theater to make it to Pilates the following morning.
But I witnessed one thing swap over in her once we met one afternoon at Electric Lady Studios within the West Village, the place Clark labored on components of her final a number of albums. “This is the room the place I recorded the vocals for ‘Violent Times,’ ‘Broken Man’ and ‘Sweetest Fruit,’” she mentioned, referring to songs on the brand new album. She jumped up from a sofa to reveal how she’d sung into a specific microphone. Then she obtained distracted by the studio’s wall of consoles and patch bays.
“Where is that this 67 patched in the mean time?” she requested herself with sudden ease, like an expat shifting into her native tongue. “Oh yeah, by way of the 10-73. But the place’s the 11-76?”
“All Born Screaming” started with a sonic puzzle: “How do I render the sound inside my head?” After “hours and hours and hours mainly making postindustrial dance music in my studio on my own,” Clark mentioned she realized that the sound in her head was one thing she wouldn’t have the ability to clarify to anybody else. So, though she has been a really concerned co-producer on every of her different albums, she determined “All Born Screaming” was one thing she must produce herself.
She approached the duty with attribute zeal. She requested her buddy and collaborator Cian Riordan to provide her engineering classes, and he discovered her an impressively apt pupil. “She would present up, there can be coffee, she’d have a notepad prepared,” Riordan mentioned in a cellphone interview. “She’s extraordinarily targeted. There was a lot intention with all the things.”
She mastered compression, mic shootouts, sign circulation. To his dismay, Riordan finally discovered Clark beginning down a path that he had seen journey up many musicians within the digital age: analog synthesizers.
“Any time somebody brings modular synths into the studio, that’s often my cue to be like, ‘I’m going to go someplace else, as a result of that is going to be an enormous waste of time,’” Riordan mentioned. “But together with her, it was actually unimaginable to observe. She would purchase all these esoteric issues that I didn’t even find out about, and I’d come again they usually had been all synced up and he or she’d be making music on them. It was enjoyable to see her take it to date.”
Clark mentioned these synths allowed her to construct a brand new sonic world. “You’re really harnessing electrical energy,” she defined. Her enthusiasm was palpable; her speech kicked up its tempo. “It’s going by way of distinctive circuitry, and you might be on the helm, so that you’re like a god of lightning.”
CLARK HAS LONG been somebody who will get a thrill out of testing her limits and rising to challenges, however across the time of her brightly barbed 2017 album “Masseduction” she was starting to hit a wall. “It can be like, ‘Sure you’ll be able to go from Memphis to Beijing to Champaign, Ill., in a weekend,” she mentioned. “Sure you’ll be able to. See if you happen to can pull this off.” But all of a sudden, after years of “going, going, going,” she famous, “my physique simply sort of shut down. My abdomen — all the things about my abdomen harm.” She stopped ingesting and went into what she calls “nun mode,” throwing herself headfirst into studio work.
It wasn’t till the pandemic, although, that she was actually pressured to decelerate and keep put. She obtained superb at D.I.Y. initiatives and put in numerous lighting fixtures. She additionally completed constructing her house studio and labored on a report that had been gestating for some time. During the pandemic, “Some artists went very inside and quiet, understandably,” she mentioned. “Then, you recognize,” she laughed. “Some folks placed on wigs.”
She was referring to “Daddy’s Home,” the closely stylized ’70s-inspired album she made in response to her father’s launch from jail, after he served eight years for conspiracy, fraud and cash laundering. “Daddy’s Home” gained a Grammy for greatest different album and featured some imaginative experiments, nevertheless it was a polarizing launch that generated some criticism on-line.
Clark is conscious of this and thinks the album was partly a casualty of unhealthy timing. “The story kind of grew to become, not that I made a report a couple of tough familial time, however that, like, ‘OK, good, we have now somebody guilty for the prison-industrial complicated,’” she mentioned. “It’s like, oh wait — that’s not fairly what I used to be going for. But these had been the occasions. Everyone’s lives upturned and everybody was more and more on-line and there was numerous fervor normally.”
For “All Born Screaming,” Clark went again to fundamentals and drew inspiration from “that kind of rock that’s the first music that felt prefer it was mine, and never music from one other technology.” She was speaking about Nine Inch Nails, Tori Amos and, sure, even that band she helped induct into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. While engaged on the bracing head banger “Flea,” she realized she wanted some enormously forceful percussion. The solely particular person she may think about taking part in on it was Grohl. So she wrote to him saying as a lot, and some days later he was in her house studio, laying down drum tracks for that and the again half of “Broken Man.”
“He’s an important drummer as a result of he’s an important songwriter, proper?” Clark mentioned. “He provides a lot energy and electrical energy and vibrance, however he’s all the time supporting the track. He takes a track from a 9 to, like, 100.”
“All Born Screaming” is sequenced like a journey from darkness into mild; its brooding first monitor is titled, appropriately, “Hell Is Near.” The title-track finale finally ends up someplace extra comfortably earthbound, however whereas she was making the track, it was torturing Clark, who simply “couldn’t crack the texture of it.” She referred to as Le Bon and performed her what she had. Le Bon informed her, “Give me a beer, a bass and two hours.”
It labored. The track is bouncy and delightfully off-kilter, unusual in St. Vincent’s inimitable, particular manner. Clark mentioned the track sprung from the belief that, as she put it, “Joy and struggling are equal, needed components of the entire thing. And the one purpose to dwell is for love and the folks we love and that’s sort of it.”
“It’s not simple,” she added. “But it’s easy.”
