TRACK REVIEW: St. Vincent - Pay Your Way in Pain

TRACK REVIEW:

St. Vincent

PHOTO CREDIT: Catalin Kulczar/Redux/Eyevine

Pay Your Way in Pain

9.6/10

The track, Pay Your Way in Pain, is available from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUTu65AXrJw

GENRE:

Art Rock

ORIGIN:

Oklahoma, U.S.A.

RELEASE DATE:

4th March, 2021

The album, Daddy’s Home, is available to pre-order via:

https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/st-vincent/daddy-s-home/lp-plus

RELEASE DATE:

14th May, 2021

LABEL:

Loma Vista

PRODUCERS:

Annie Clark (St. Vincent) and Jack Antonoff

TRACKLIST:

Pay Your Way in Pain

Down and Out Downtown

Daddy’s Home

Live in the Dream

The Melting of the Sun

The Laughing Man

Down

Somebody Like Me

My Baby Wants a Baby

… At the Holiday Party

Candy Darling

__________

IT in exciting…

PHOTO CREDIT: SCANDEBERGS

that St. Vincent released new music this week. I am a big fan of her work, so it is great to get a chance to spend some time discussing her. I am going to cover a few different themes and points before coming to her new single, Pay Your Way in Pain. Taken from her forthcoming album, Daddy’s Home, it is a terrific song – we would expect nothing less from Annie Clark! I think that people associate St. Vincent with her excellent songwriting and singing. As a guitarist she is hugely interesting and inspiring. I found an article that detailed the kit she uses. I know that she is inspiring so many upcoming songwriters and, more than that, compelling girls and young women to pick up the guitar. St. Vincent also teaches a creativity and songwriting masterclass, where you can watch video lessons and learn about the ups and downs of songwriting/creativity, guitar skills and a whole lot more. She is a complete artist who is keen to give something back. I want to start by linking St. Vincent to one of her music idols. Kate Bush is someone who I associate with being Art Rock. I have never seen her as a conventional Pop artist. Some artists feel being labelled as Art Rock is either pretentious or not a good thing. St. Vincent brings soul and passion to her music, but there is an experimentation and artiness that is deeply compelling and original. In an interview with the Irish Times from 2015 (she released her eponymous album in 2014), she addressed the somewhat negative connotations of being arty or Art Rock:

“Annie Clark makes joyous, angular, soulful pop music which is unashamedly arty.

“Why should I be ashamed of artiness?” she says, sounding rightly perplexed by my philistinism.

Clark is the genre-crossing genius and guitar-god behind the music of St Vincent. She released her eponymous fourth album last year (her fifth if you include the brass-filled Love This Giant which she created with polymath Talking Head David Byrne) and her head is filled with ideas. She’s driving her car and talking to me over the phone at the same time, pausing at length whenever she has to turn a corner or wants to have a bit of a think.

She started playing guitar at the age of 12, she says. “The first song I tried to learn, I think, was Jethro Tull’s Aqualung.”

“That’s hard,” I say.

“I know!” she says”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Emma McIntyre/Getty Images

I want to discuss Annie Clark/St. Vincent and the musical side a bit later Before then, it is useful learning some background. I think that every artist has a different past and story; learning about it allows us to appreciate and understand their music in a deeper way, I think. In a Vogue interview from 2017, we get a little history regarding one of the finest musicians of the modern age:

“Raised in Dallas as one of eight siblings and half siblings, Clark says that the commotion of a big family allowed her the freedom to fall down artistic rabbit holes. After dropping out of Boston’s Berklee College of Music, she found herself in another huge family: the Polyphonic Spree, a sprawling, orchestral rock experiment that sometimes incorporated dozens of members, all dressed in matching floor-length robes. By 2007, Clark had moved to New York and released her first album as St. Vincent, Marry Me. The blend of her angelic voice, occasionally sinister lyrics, and complex songwriting created an uncanny sound that quickly cemented her in the vanguard of critically beloved indie rock. Her hybrid of musical virtuosity and high-minded aesthetic reinventions went on to earn her a Grammy, comparisons to David Bowie, and equal footing with such collaborators as David Byrne”.

I feel the artist who create the most arresting and fascinating are the ones who had exposure to a whole range of different sounds at a young age. That may sound flawed logic or wrong, but there does seem to be a correlation between these amazingly creative and curious artists and music entering their consciousness from a young age. As we learn from the Irish Times interview, St. Vincent (I will refer to as such from now on, rather than Annie Clark) definitely grew up in an interesting family:

“She always had access to music. Her aunt and uncle performed as a duo, Tuck & Patti, and young Clark carried their equipment and did her first gigs opening for them. She recalls her parents “thinking/hoping that I would be an architect” but she says that “they got it pretty early on that music was my thing”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Patrick Demarchelier

So it was a cultured household? “Yes and no,” she says. “My folks were not well off but they were well educated and they had a certain curiosity for culture that definitely exceeded their means. They were big readers. [My father] was big into James Joyce and would go on the lecture circuits to talk about James Joyce.”

Clark first came to notice playing in the Polyphonic Spree, but she was already working on her first record, 2007’s Marry Me. “Sufjan Stevens heard it and asked me to play in his band and open for him and while I was opening for him in Europe, I got signed,” she says.

“I started off quite shy,” she says. “[I was] wary of ‘performance’. I think I was hung up on some idea of authenticity, of being just purely about the music and not about the persona and not about anything else. So I hadn’t embraced the more performance aspect of things”.

I want to stick on this theme for a little while longer. I am not sure whether one exists, but I would like to see a documentary of St. Vincent where she discusses her favourite artists and songs that have changed her life. I am also curious to know the guitarists who moved her because, as I say, she is a phenomenal player! There is a little bit of repetition regarding what has just been covered but, in an interview with The Line of Best Fit from 2017 (her fifth studio album, Masseduction, was released in October that year), we get a glimpse into the musical tastes and early musical experiences of St. Vincent:

“From Hendrix to Zeppelin, Jethro Tull to Nirvana at their heyday and the local record store nerd who gave her PJ Harvey and Nick Cave, Clark quickly learned to respect her “inner weirdo.”

She got her first experience of life on the road with her uncle Tuck Andress and his wife Patti Cathcart, better known as jazz guitar and vocal duo Tuck & Patti. Their ubiquitous tour hand, teenage Annie was responsible for everything from flowers in the dressing room to the voltage on stage. Maintaining that she’s never worked harder, the real value came from the deeply spiritual connection her uncle had with music. An exemplary finger-picking guitarist, his talent, he insisted, came from an undoing of ego rather than a propulsion of one. She remembers watching the way their fans would listen, really listen.

Perhaps a shred of this sentiment caused her to drop out of Berklee College of Music in her third year. She realised she was being taught “every potential style of music,” she says, rather than how to develop one of her own. Aged 20 she faked it as a booking agent and moved to New York to tour the East Coast. Three months later she was broke and back at home with her parents in Texas”.

To move on, and I wanted to fill a gap that runs between her eponymous album of 2014 and 2017’s Masseduction. Going back to the interview from The Line of Best Fit, and we discover how the St. Vincent album affected its creator with so many new opportunities – the Oklahoma-born musician definitely underwent a huge rise and change:

“In the three years since the success of St. Vincent her profile and passions have expanded to fit. She’s inducted Nirvana into the Rock N Roll hall of fame, hosted a Beats 1 radio show, made her directorial debut with a horror short, acted as official ambassador for Record Store Day and become one of few artists invited to design a signature Ernie Ball Music Man guitar. Beck, Dave Grohl, Josh Homme and Taylor Swift all have a St. Vincent six string somewhere in their collections.

Prowess proven, how did she tackle the enormous challenge of superseding her own infallible benchmark fifth time around?

“I more or less prepared myself to make another record by doing completely different things,” she says, referencing her recent extra-curricular activities. “But I knew early on that I wanted to make a record about power and seduction, in all kinds of forms. Political, personal, sexual”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Nedda Afsari

This sort of takes me to St. Vincent’s previous album, Masseduction. I wonder how her sixth solo album, Daddy’s Home (she released a collaborative album with David Byrne, Love This Giant, in 2012), is going to compare to Masseduction. I have covered an interview where St. Vincent addressed a, perhaps, negative viewpoint of being arty. I think what Masseduction did was to raise St. Vincent’s profile without her compromising. It is a tremendous album where she mixed Pop and Rock, though was very much herself. In a GQ for 2019, we find ot more about the impact of Masseduction and a slightly repurposed version of it, MassEducation, of 2018:

“Masseduction made the case that Clark could be as much a pop star as someone like Sia or Nicki Minaj—a performer whose idiosyncrasies didn't have to be tamped down for mainstream success but could actually be amplified. The artist Bruce Nauman once said he made work that was like “going up the stairs in the dark and either having an extra stair that you didn't expect or not having one that you thought was going to be there.” The idea applies to Masseduction: Into the familiar form of a pop song Clark introduces surprising missteps, unexpected additions and subtractions. The album reached No. 10 on the Billboard 200. The David Bowie comparisons got louder.

This past fall, she released MassEducation (not quite the same title; note the addition of the letter a), which turned a dozen of the tracks into stripped-down piano songs. Although technically off duty after being on tour for nearly all of 2018, Clark has been performing the reduced songs here and there in small venues with her collaborator, the composer and pianist Thomas Bartlett. Whereas the Masseduction tour involved a lot of latex, neon, choreographed sex-robot dance moves, and LED screens, these recent shows have been comparatively austere. When she performed in Brooklyn, the stage was empty, aside from a piano and a side table. There were blue lights, a little piped-in fog for atmosphere, and that was it. It looked like an early-'90s magazine ad for premium liquor: art-directed, yes, but not to the degree that it Pinterested itself”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Nedda Afsari

To return to Masseduction (the album was stylised in capital letters), and there was a lot of speculation as to inspiration behind the lyrics. St. Vincent, as an artist/persona, is very different to Annie Clark. I think the thing that bonds both is the need to retain some privacy and mystery. A lot of journalists wanted to explore St. Vincent’s personal life when Masseduction arrived. In a detailed 2018 interview with NME, we are told how one song especially, New York, provoked a lot of intrigue and curiosity:

“Also put under the microscope, but not by Clark herself, was her personal life. Many a column inch was dedicated to analysing the lyrics of the vulnerable break-up ballad ‘New York’, for example – thanks to interest from tabloids and celeb glossies in her her relationship and split from actor and supermodel Cara Delevigne. Many poured over the likelihood of Delevigne being the aforementioned “only motherfucker in the city that can handle me,” during her dalliance at a “home run with some blue bloods”. Clark has remained reticent to spell anything out, however. As high concept as her work may be, ‘MASSEDUCTION’ is her most confessional, raw and devastating to date.

“It’s not my job to tell you what the truth is, unfortunately, but a lot of the time artists are the worst people to explain what they’re doing,” says Clark. “You’re following an intuition and just trying to make something that feel right in your core. When you’re so busy making these things you don’t really have time to stop and go, ‘What is this?’”

She continues: “My heart is in these songs completely. My whole life is in these songs. It’s not literal because then it wouldn’t be art necessarily. I also feel that once the song is written it’s not about me anymore. It’s not for me. It’s flattering that people would want to know about what inspired them from my life, but really the point of music is that it’s really supposed to be about the music at that point”.

I just want to spend a brief moment bringing things back to the guitar. It may sound a bit nerdy, but I think different guitars can lend the music with a different personality. I feel a lot of people just assume an electric guitar has a particular sound and there is not a lot of diversity and contours between different models and designs. In the interview from The Line of Best Fit, St. Vincent talked about one particular guitar that was all over Masseduction:

“Of the guitar that we do hear, how much of that can be attributed to her new Ernie Ball signature?

“I didn’t use any other guitar on this record!” she responds, gleefully. “And not for any other reason than I love it. I have all these vintage guitars. Obviously I love guitars. I have a lot of guitars! But this was just the most perfect, flexible, go to instrument. I did a lot of glam tuning with the slide!”

Is this the first time she’s only used one guitar across a whole album?

“It really is. I mean, on the last record I think I used like, Thurston Moore’s Jazzmaster – his signature from Fender. My old Harmony Bobkat. And my Music Man Albert Lee for a lot of the whammy bar stuff”.

There are a few more things I need to tick off of the list before getting down to review Pay Your Way in Pain. I want to return to the 2019 interview from GQ, as the angle was to show how St. Vincent was never boring. I feel how an artist spends their time away from tours and off stage can be as important as anything. I was eager to learn more about this side of things; how St. Vincent spends time off of tour – or ways in which she can recharge and create this different headspace:

“Another thing Clark does when off tour is absorb all the input that she misses when she's locked into performance mode. On a Monday afternoon, she met artist Lisa Yuskavage at an exhibition of her paintings at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea. Yuskavage was part of a mini-boom of figurative painting in the '90s, turning out portraits of Penthouse centerfolds and giant-jugged babes with Rembrandt-esque skill. It made sense that Clark wanted to meet her: Both women make art about the inner lives of female figures, both are sorcerers of technique, both are theatrical but introspective, both have incendiary style. The gallery was a white cube, skylit, with paintings around the perimeter. Yuskavage and Clark wandered through at a pace exclusive to walking tours of cultural spaces, which is to say a few steps every 10 to 15 seconds with pauses between for the proper amount of motionless appreciation.

The paintings were small, all about the size of a human head, and featured a lot of nipples, tufted pudenda, tan lines, majestic asses, and protruding tongues. “I like the idea of possessing something by painting it,” Yuskavage said. “That's the way I understand the world. Like a dog licking something.”

Clark looked at the works with the expression people make when they're meditating. She was wearing elfin boots, black pants, and a shirt with a print that I can only describe as “funky”—“funky” being an adjective that looks good on very few people, St. Vincent being one of them—and sipped from a cup of espresso furnished by a gallery minion. After she finished the drink, there was a moment when she looked blankly at the saucer, unsure what to do with it, and then stuck it in the breast pocket of her funky shirt for the rest of the tour”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Zackery Michael

Maybe this is tangential but, just before bringing things up-to-date and learning a bit of background regarding Daddy’s Home, I want to bring in a Variety article that details an interesting new Audible project, St. Vincent: Words + Music:

“As larger-than-life rock stars go, St. Vincent may be a slightly slippery character, but Annie Clark, the woman who records under that name, isn’t so much so. At least that’s the impression you’ll take away from the new audio project that has just been released as one of the pilot projects for Audible’s new Words + Music series. If there’s an alluring mystique to the persona that Clark presents in her visually arresting shows or deep-dive-worthy albums, she seems almost surprisingly easygoing about deconstructing it all and discussing the personal meaning behind some of her fans’ most cherished songs in the new audiobook.

For as long as Clark is speaking, “St. Vincent: Words + Music” (available here) feels like an especially revealing episode of “Fresh Air,” minus the Terry Gross. (The singer was in fact interviewed for the project, by veteran rock journalist Bill Flanagan, but his probing voice does not appear.) She discusses how she decided on her stage name, childhood panic attacks, having jazz singers Tuck & Patti as her aunt and uncle, her desire to escape Texas, apprenticing with both Sufjan Stevens and the Polyphonic Spree, finding salvation in work with David Byrne, and how her father’s imprisonment and mother’s health scare affected her music. The candor carries through to the themes on her most recent album, 2017’s “Masseduction,” and how she engages with social media in the present (spoiler: reluctantly). If there’s anything she’s not eager to be as an artist, it’s “my own sweaty used car salesman”.

VARIETY: This falls kind of somewhere between an interview and an audiobook memoir, along with the fresh versions of songs. Did the idea of doing this for Audible appeal to you from the start?

ST. VINCENT: It did. For one, it sounded like a really fun challenge to take old songs and reinvent them. And it happened at a really auspicious time because it got raised at the beginning of this corona pandemic, so it meant that I had something really fun to do by myself, alone in my studio. And I mean, really most of the way that I ingest information now is through podcasts and audiobooks, so this is really a very natural, familiar way for me to get involved.

PHOTO CREDIT: Jeff Hahne

There’s something interesting that you said in the Audible piece: “I am always talking to an audience like they’re f—ing geniuses. I think people are so smart — they’re smart with their brains, with their heart, with their gut. There is I think sometimes what can be perceived as sort of coldness or aloofness is actually my feeling that everybody’s equal…” You say that in the context of explaining why you don’t feel the need to constantly engage your audience with small talk or vegan recipes. But probably a majority of the artists feel the opposite way nowadays, that they need to put themselves out there online as much as possible to prove that they, too, are everyday people.

Shouldn’t the work that you make kind of prove that? You can’t make work about life if you’re not living some kind of normal life that isn’t surrounded by a cadre of yes-men. Like. when has that worked well… Because if there are really talented people surrounded by people who just tell them yes all the time, that’s not good for art. It’s not good for somebody’s soul, but it’s also not good for art. So yeah, I think that it occurred to me… Like, I’m a person who will tell you something really intimate or vulnerable in a way that’s not particularly vulnerable. There are other people who will seem like they are revealing all things, and it seems very emotional, but it’s not particularly vulnerable. So I’m kind of more on the first side of that. And that’s just who I am. Probably the second thing is the more popular way to be. [Laughs.]

In the Audible book, you talk about a lot of things we wouldn’t necessarily have expected you to talk about, as they have come up in the songs. And it’s interesting because these are things that maybe have been a little harder to discern than they would be from someone who’s writing in a really obviously, purely confessional vein.

The other thing about it is that, as a fan myself, I will listen to stuff and it means so much to me if it’s inextractable from my life, from a period of time or from a major seismic event in my life. And maybe this is just me being selfish., but I don’t really want to know what the artist was thinking. I kind of don’t care! And I mean that with all respect. I’m like, oh, I’m too selfish — I love this for me, and what it means to me. And for a long time, I think I didn’t want to talk too much about what the songs were personally about for me, because it felt like it was a little selfish to push all that into the way that somebody was interpreting or enjoying the song. It felt like micro-managing their experience. You kind of have to trust that if you say something that resonates with you, then it’s going to resonate with other people. But the records that I touch upon in the Audible piece, I feel far enough away from personally — and they’d existed in the world long enough — to where I feel kind of okay divulging certain things and hoping that it doesn’t interfere with anybody’s experience of just listening to it. Because it’s like not about me. You make the work so it can not be about you, so it can just be for other people. I know that might sound kind of Pollyanna, but it’s true. That’s the best way I know how to communicate… You know, that and talk therapy. [Laughs]”.

Let’s drag things to the here and now and the much-anticipated album from St. Vincent. Daddy’s Home is out on 14th May. The lead single gives a glimpse into what we might expect in terms of sound and direction. The title might confuse a few people regarding its derivation and personal significance. For those who do not know about some family history and St. Vincent’s father, a very recent interview from The Guardian provides some more details:

“As her publicist counted column inches, Clark perceived the coverage differently. In 2010, her father was sentenced to 12 years in jail for his role in a $43m (£27m) stock-manipulation scheme. Inside, prisoners passed on clippings about his daughter’s flourishing career. “I always pictured it like I was throwing a little paper airplane over the gates,” says Clark, tracing the arc from her to him with her finger as she speaks over a video call from her studio in Los Angeles.

This is what lay behind the suffocated scream of Strange Mercy and its obsession with bondage. Clark never discussed her father’s imprisonment until the tabloids dug it up in 2016, during her 18-month relationship with Delevingne. A decade ago, she was terrified about protecting her family in Dallas and Tulsa – especially those of her eight siblings who were still children. “I wasn’t in any kind of place where I wanted that narrative to overshadow the music,” she says. “I didn’t have any perspective on it. It was just this horrible, festering wound.”

PHOTO CREDIT: SCANDEBERGS

Clark has always dismissed the term “confessional” as diminishing artistry. But she says she didn’t need to dress up Daddy’s Home, a song about taking her father home from prison in 2019 and also the name of her disgustingly great sixth album. The title is trademark St Vincent – ambiguous and unsettlingly kinky – but there is a sea change in sound and spirit: the old adrenaline rushes are replaced by louche soul and world-weary tenderness, straddling Sly and the Family Stone’s degraded 1971 epic There’s a Riot Goin’ On, the sweet spots of Stevie Wonder and Steely Dan and the queer revelry of the 1974 Labelle concert at the Metropolitan Opera in New York that scandalised polite society.

Clark recalls visiting her father in an “edgy” medium-security institution before he was moved to a depressing camp that reminded her of primary school. During visitation, families could pose for photos in front of various backdrops. “Like, look, an inmate is at the beach. They just happen to be in an orange jumpsuit, but with their wife and baby. The one that I remember most vividly was a picture where the inmates – who are obviously disproportionately black and brown in America – could stand on a plantation veranda.” Her eyes pop. “That pretty much sums up this place.”

Humour and perspective gradually leavened a situation that had been “immovable and full of sorrow”. Clark had to laugh when prison guards sent her to Walmart to buy looser clothes (“Mind you, I wasn’t going dressed to the nines!”), or when other visitors asked her to autograph crumpled receipts. She has a nuanced take on her father’s conviction. “One takeaway could be: don’t go against the government, or don’t be the last person holding the bag. There’s a lot of layers to it”.

PHOTO CREDIT: LeAnn Mueller for Rolling Stone

Pay Your Way in Pain begins with jaunty and skipping piano that has a sort of Beatles quality (maybe it could have been on their eponymous album of 1968). One thinks that the song is going in one direction but, with a brief vocal in the intro (“Ow)/Oh-oh-oh”), the song shifts. The chorus finds St. Vincent singing “You got to pay your way in pain/You got to pray your way in shame (Yeah, ow)”. We get layered vocals and a tempered, fairly measured delivery. I do like the vocals, as there is this eerie backing/choral effect. St. Vincent sounds incredible in the chorus, where we get this affecting and intriguing delivery that makes you curious from the off. There is a grooviness and sexiness to the pace and sound of the first verse. Everything St. Vincent puts out is pretty cool, though I was especially struck by her sound and delivery on the verse. The backing vocals punctuate the lines, and I like how there is this constant interjection and echo that heightens the lyrics and gives Pay Your Way in Pain drama, emotion, power and a slight darkness. The opening verse gets one thinking: “I went to the store, I was feelin' kinda hungry/But I didn't have the money and the shelves were all empty/So I went to the bank to ch-ch-ch-check my checking/The man looked at my face, said, "We don't have a record"/Oh no, you thought we had forgotten?/The show is only gettin' started/The road is feelin' like a pothole/Sit down, stand up, head down, hands up, and…”. The idea of the shelves being empty and the bank account being bare makes me think of the pandemic and how things are hard – maybe the heroine is struggling in these times. I also thought they could be metaphors for different emotions; perhaps something else. I have listened to the song a lot and, whilst I visualise that verse each time I hear the track, my interpretation changes.

PHOTO CREDIT: Phillip Montgomery

Leaving the last line hanging, we then move into the chorus – “Pay your way in pain/You got to pray your way in shame (Uh-huh)” – that has this addictive punch and sense of breathing in and breathing out. The video is kind of trippy and blurry where St. Vincent is in a green jacket and a blonde wig. It is very ‘70s in its style, and I think really love how the videos fits with the song and gives it this class and incredible look (Bill Benz directed the video; Avigail Collins was responsible for styling). The bridge comes in and, as we move the story forward, the vocal changes. There is St. Vincent asking questions and a backing/response vocal being quite high-pitched and rapid: “Do you not remember me? (What do you want? What do you want?)/Do you know what I want? (What do you want? What do you want?)/You know what I want (What do you want? What do you want?)/Keep the rest, baby, ah, ah/I wanna be loved/Pay, pain/Pray, shame”. On the word ‘loved’, St. Vincent’s voice holds and reaches this emotional and emphatic crescendo. It is a wonderful moment that then dives into this brief chorus return. I love how the song changes pace and direction as we move through. It creates this nuance so that the listener keeps coming back. Whereas the opening verse was St. Vincent/the heroine going to the store and coming away empty-handed, the second verse creates more alienation and drama: “So I went to the park just to watch the little children/The mothers saw my heels and they said I wasn't welcome/So I, I went back home, I was feelin' kinda queasy/But all the locks were changed, my baby wouldn't see me/Oh no, you've put your finger on it/The stove is only gettin' hotter/The sun, it's gotta, gotta melt it/Stand up, sit down, hands up, break down”. I wonder whether there will be a short film about Daddy’s Home because, whilst the video for Pay Your Way in Pain is great, it would be interested to see the verses acted out and the scenes being visualised! It seems like Daddy’s Home has this conceptual arc…so I wonder whether St. Vincent is going to do some visuals/shorts around the tracks. There is some awesome woozy guitar before the final verse. I really like the composition throughout. We have some squelchy and spacey synths with a nice beat and these echoed/ghostly vocals – in fact, the range of vocal sounds is one of the highlights of Pay Your Way in Pain. Just as before, there is a dramatic vocal hold at a crucial moment (“I wanna be loved”). The song seems to be St. Vincent being castigated and looking for acceptance and love. The fact her voice rises and howls when she mentions wanting to be loved is certainly moving - and it seems to be the mission statement of the song. A tremendous first single from Daddy’s Home, Pay Your Way in Pain is a wonderfully rich, fascinating and stunning song – just what you’d expect from a pioneer and true original like St. Vincent!

I am going to close this review up very soon. There are a couple of other things I want to look at before doing so. I am not sure what themes are going to be covered through Daddy’s Home, but there is one song that was highlighted by The Guardian in the interview I sourced from earlier. It seems that My Baby Wants a Baby provides one of the funniest and most arresting moments om the album:

“The funniest song on Daddy’s Home outlines Clark’s commitment to her cause: My Baby Wants a Baby starts with Clark seemingly playing a pouty 60s rocker (her “baybee” is very Jagger), annoyed because his girl wants to pin him down. Then her own fears break through: she predicts her prospective failures as a parent, when all she wants is to “play guitar all day / Make all my meals in microwaves / Only get dressed up when I get paid” – conscious, too, of how art made by women is judged by their mothering capacities, or lack thereof. “I couldn’t leave like my daddy,” she sings.

The song is “the most base, dirtbaggy version of my life”, she says. She can’t cook. After answering the door for a delivery, she returns with a utilitarian vat of salad that you suspect is always on hand to minimise time away from the studio. “If left to my own devices, I would just make a lot of music and barely survive.” She does not live with her girlfriend – “I’m a real Frida Kahlo/Diego Rivera kinda person: you have to have your own space to be able to work” – but she says they have had the kids chat. Clark demurs on the details, then does her best Texas accent. “Daddy’s home,” she shrugs, at once camp and sharp”.

I will finish by quoting from an article from Rolling Stone. We sort of learn that Daddy’s Home is St. Vincent coming full circle. There is this connection between 2011’s Strange Mercy (her third studio album) and Daddy’s Home:

“If her 2011 breakthrough, Strange Mercy, reflected the “pain and ambivalence” of her father’s arrest, as she writes in a comic that accompanies the new album, then Daddy’s Home is about coming full circle. Zooming in to chat about the record, Clark has ditched the super-streamlined aesthetic that accompanied the sleek pop of 2017’s Masseduction, instead opting for a head scarf and Seventies-style tinted glasses.

“I think that with my last record, I had gone as far as I could in a certain way with fly-out-of-the-speakers-and-grab-you-by-the-throat kinds of sounds,” she says. Daddy’s Home feels more human and lived-in, with echoes of Bowie, Sly Stone, and other Seventies artists. That era, she says, was “post-flower-child idealism, but it’s pre-disco. It’s this period of time that I feel like is analogous to where we are now. We’re in the grimy, sleazy, trying-to-figure-out-where-we-go-from-here period.”

The record careens from Prince-esque stompers like album opener “Pay Your Way in Pain” to the title track, which brims with bluesy jazz — especially with the addition of backup singers Lynne Fiddmont and Kenya Hathaway (daughter of late R&B legend Donny Hathaway), who croon on the chorus. “I’ve never done a record where I wasn’t singing my own backups,” Clark says. “I feel like there’s a specific meaning behind that, if you were the only one doubling your own voice or harmonizing. This record is way looser, way more about just performance”.

I am looking forward to Daddy’s Home, as St. Vincent’s work is always so wonderful and memorable. Pay Your Way in Pain is an incredible introduction. Many people will be wondering which song will be released next as a single. Having barely dropped a step (or created a weak moment in her career), the inimitable St. Vincent keeps evolving and moving forward. An Instagram video St. Vincent put out with the album announcement saw her in a Candy Darling (she was an American actress, best known as a Warhol Superstar and transgender icon) wig. She was creating this Andy Warhol/1970s vibe. I wonder whether St. Vincent will play this alter ego through the album or she is going to embody Candy Darling through the songs. Daddy’s Home’s final track is called Candy Darling, so it does seem that there might be an arc/concept. Judging on what we have learned and heard on Pay Your Way in Pain, it appears that Daddy’s Home is shaping up to be…