FEATURE:
Bring Me Your Loves
The Magnificent St. Vincent at Ten
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AN album that you…
PHOTO CREDIT: Winnie Au
should buy if you have not done so already, St. Vincent came out on 24th February, 2014. A wonderful eponymous album from the alias of Annie Clark, I am going to come to some interviews and reviews around a truly staggering album. One that I love very much. Featuring standout tracks such as Digital Witness and Birth in Reverse, it is one of the best albums of the 2010s. Her fourth studio album, I think that St. Vincent might be one of her best and most important. Released on 24th February, 2014 in the United Kingdom and a day later in the United States, it was produced by the legendary John Congleton. Highly critically acclaimed on its release, St. Vincent won a 2015 Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album - making St. Vincent only the second female solo artist to win the award since its inception in 1991 (when it was awarded to Sinéad O'Connor). I am going to start off with an interview from The Guardian. They spotlighted an artist who admitted that she is always on the intersection of accessible and lunatic. We got an insight into her remarkable 2014 eponymous album:
“She named herself St Vincent after a line in a Nick Cave song that referred to the famous Manhattan hospital, St Vincent's, where Dylan Thomas died in 1953. (At one point in our conversation, she segues into a highly entertaining anecdote about how, a couple of years ago, terrified of what she assumed was a rat running from room to room in her apartment, she picked up a volume of Thomas's poetry and threw it at the creature, killing it on impact, "even though I don't like any cruelty being done to living things".)
Clark's fourth album goes right through the emotional wringer: one song, Psychopath, is about a date she once had with someone who is now a friend; other titles include Regret, Severed Crossed Fingers, Bring Me Your Loves and Every Tear Disappears. In person, though, she is less agonised than ethereal and sprite-like (last week, the online teen magazine Rookie posted a charming video of her showing off her mean soccer skills). "I have a sneaking suspicion that everybody has dark thoughts, but maybe doesn't say them," she says.
As she polishes off a plate of eggs and spinach, Clark, who lives in the East Village, says that she has just arrived home from Christmas with her family in Texas. "In New York, I have to repress the urge to call men 'sir' and women 'ma'am'." (She smiles, then shivers. "I don't want to be 'ma'am' to anyone.")
At school, Clark admits people may have found her "a little odd", but that she was not "a figure of derision. I was always trying to get my sister to do fun, mischievous adventures, like to tip over the porta-potties (portable lavatories) at school or steal candy". She liked drawing and at five made her first guitar from cardboard and rubber bands. She made up songs and listened to classic rock and Led Zeppelin. Music "obsessed" her.
"When I was nine, Nirvana's Nevermind came out and that was a sea change across the world," Clark recalls, sipping her cafe au lait. "One day everyone was in polo shirts, the next in flannel. Suddenly my heroes were not C+C Music Factory, it was Kurt Cobain." She wonders, given how fragmented music distribution is now, and the proliferation of so much, so fast by the internet, whether something as culture-shifting as Nirvana could have the same profound and prolonged impact today.
Clark always wanted to be a solo artist. "My uncle told me when I was a teenager that if you want to be a person with confidence just pretend you are a person with confidence and eventually you will have confidence, so I did that. There's a fair amount of self-delusion involved. I never envisioned a Plan B. I'm almost immune to the idea of failure; it never occurred to me." She remains wary of working with others, though made an exception to collaborate last year with David Byrne on the much-praised album Love This Giant and subsequent tour.
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With so many complex layers of instrumentation in her songs, is she a perfectionist? "There's a difference between perfection and being detail-oriented. Perfection is everything on time, in tune, not a hair out of place. That's vanilla. Detail-oriented is different: some songs are puzzles sonically. The producer and I slightly recontextualise sounds. We manipulate guitar sounds to sound like [other] instruments.
"I try to live at the intersection of accessible and lunatic. As far out as David Byrne and I go, we counterbalance that with a memorable melody or something for people to latch on to. I try not to put songs into ill-fitting clothes." And does her labyrinthine style owe anything to a love of classical music? "Stravinsky is my all-time favourite, his shit bangs," she assents heartily. "Like heavy metal and hip-hop, it grooves really hard."
She insists that however fraught her songs sound they are in fact "quite literal." Rattlesnake, on the new album, is about a walk she took by herself on a friend's ranch in west Texas. "It was a beautiful day and no one was around, so I thought, 'I'm going to take all my clothes off to fully experience this'. I was having this communion with nature when I saw this rattlesnake. I took off running and when I got home had a shot of tequila."
Another song, Huey Newton, named after the co-founder of the Black Panther party, relates what happened after she took a sedative to relieve jetlag while on tour in Helsinki. "If you take one and go to sleep, you sleep for 12 hours. If you take one and don't fall asleep, you're high. It's bananas. You're in that high state between sleepfulness and wakefulness. I had this hallucination that Huey Newton was in the room with me. We didn't talk about the Black Panther party. We just kind of communicated. We understood each other. I was as high as a kite."
She says she has been listening to Beyoncé's latest album. "What I love about it is that she's the biggest star in the pop world, where there is a lot of focus on youth, especially for the hot new female-whatever. And here is Beyoncé singing about basically loving her husband, having a baby and being a fabulous woman. She didn't come pouting with a lollipop and pigtails and be something she's not. I think that's very helpful for people to see."
Clark thinks "being a feminist by action speaks louder than arguing about semantics. Being a strong woman in the world is a feminist act. It's impossible to be a woman and not see misogyny, but I don't walk through life feeling like a victim. I've been very lucky. The strongest thing a woman can do is be successful, powerful and excel at whatever they choose to excel at."
While her songs are drenched in the trials of love and relationships, Clark is single. "I live an absolutely unconventional life where I travel 10 months a year, so it's not always the easiest to hold a relationship together. I didn't ever imagine my wedding day. Someday I'd like to have kids, but I don't have that burning desire to."
Abruptly, eggs and spinach polished off, she removes the beanie to reveal a surprising large, tangled mass of grey hair, totally different to her usual brunette style. She says was inspired by old footage of David Bowie "who had tried to dye his hair blond but it had gone orange and was awesome", and also by a blonde contestant on the last series of TV show The Bachelor, in which a group of women compete for a man's romantic attention. One of the women had one arm "and was understandably horrified to learn that as part of their date she had to jump off the side of the building". It's comforting to know that Clark, cool as she is, can be caught in the headlights of trashy reality TV just like the rest of us”.
Prior to getting to some reviews of the astonishing St. Vincent, I want to include a Brooklyn interview from July 2014. Two years after her collaborative album with David Byrne, Love This Giant, and three years after her solo album, Strange Mercy, St. Vincent was a big step forward. Her most confident and compelling work to date:
“Clark began writing the songs that would comprise St. Vincent almost immediately after the tour for Love This Giant—her 2012 collaboration with David Byrne—ended. “I got a good night’s sleep and laid around on the couch, and then the next day I was writing again,” she says. “I didn’t have a big plan. I started just taking things out of my little idea-chest and without any judgment going, ‘Oh, what’s this? What’s this? Can these go together?’ and just writing pretty furiously.”
Clark doesn’t separate well from the work—it sustains her; it’s a source of nourishment—and she tells me that she spent her first few weeks back trying to ease into a more banal existence by “partying—just going crazy to feel anything.” The transition was challenging. “I was going a little crazy because I didn’t have the adrenaline and release of a show every night,” she says. “I’ve spent my whole adult life on the road, and in my mind I thought that someday I’d want to take a big break. But what I realized is that’s not who I am at all. I love working. I love being creative. I think I’ve just made peace with the idea that there’s not some other way I ought to be living.”
If Clark is an inscrutable presence, her songs, at least, offer a little more insight. “I think you can’t write about things you don’t know, or don’t [at least] know on some kind of intuitive, emotional level,” she says. For St. Vincent, Clark says she mined her most formative relationships for fodder— “I was looking around, looking at my friends and my family and myself, and being like, ‘What are we doing?’”—but her presence in these songs is still tough, self-assured, and nearly anonymous. If anything, Clark’s reluctance to perform a certain kind of intimacy—to sound vulnerable, to equate emotion with weakness—is a subtle condemnation of our expectations of her.
PHOTO CREDIT: Winnie Au
Still, there are glimpses of a very raw place. “I Prefer Your Love,” a stark, loping ballad in which Clark insists “All the good in me is because of you,” was written shortly after her mother recovered from some unnamed but grave illness. Even now, listening to Clark talk about it, I can hear the tiniest shift in her voice, a crack—then a hardening, a recomposition. “She’s doing great now, but she almost died, which was the scariest thing ever,” she says.
Clark was born in Tulsa but raised in Dallas—her parents split when she was young and her mom remarried; with all the attending step- and half-siblings, she grew up as one of nine children—and she still spends some of her downtime in Texas. “My mom is a really sweet person to bring out [on tour] because she thinks everything is great. I’ll come into a hotel room or a city and be like, ‘Ugh, I’ve been here seven times and it’s cool, but I’m gonna take a nap.’ And she’ll go and find the smallest thing that she just thinks is so interesting and fascinating,” she says. “You know, I’ll never forget being on the Byrne tour and bringing her along to Louisville. We were walking downtown, which is fine and cute, and she saw this green painted wall, and she was like, ‘That is the most beautiful color.’ And I was just like, ‘Oh my god, I wish I had your brain.’ I never would have noticed that in a million years.”
Her mother’s illness is present on St. Vincent, if never explicitly addressed. “I started writing this record right after the coast was clear, so in that way I was really checked in with myself and my senses of empathy and compassion,” Clark says. “I don’t mean it arrogantly, but the music part is very easy for me. I could write music all day, but having a song where it feels like a ghost is walking through the room…” She pauses. “I sang it in one take and just cried a lot and then it was done. I wasn’t in such dire straits, by any means, making this record. But I wanted to make sure everything had heart. Making music’s easy. I could come up with some crazy arrangement for you in five minutes, but that doesn’t make a song. A song is something else.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Winnie Au
We talk for a while about aspirational jams, all the songs and genres (gangsta rap, arena rock, commercial country) that are rarely relatable in a literal way but become anthems nonetheless. By the time we get to Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded”— “Is that a pedophile song?” Clark asks—we’re both snickering. “I’ve never felt like that,” she says. “I’ve never felt that whole rocky strut. I can’t even meet you halfway. I have no idea what you’re talking about. Or even the stuff that’s like, ‘We’ll be together forever!’ I’m like, ‘Really? You won’t! That’s not how life works. I hate to break it to you and I wish you all the best, but—you know what I mean?’”
Clark, for her part, isn’t one to indulge romantic fantasies, and she’s adopted a similarly hard line about her career. “If you’re lucky enough to find yourself in this position, you better play till your hands bleed and just give it all you have,” she says. Ultimately, work is the only thing she’s willing to submit to, and she’s made her peace with that. “It’s so liberating to be in a place where you don’t really give a fuck,” she says. “Where you can look back and say, ok, my instincts got me to here, so why in the world would I second-guess my instincts now?”.
I am going to start off with a short review from Rolling Stone.. They were full of praise for the songwriting brilliance of Annie Clark and the potency of St. Vincent. No doubt one of the very best albums of 2014, I would advise anyone who has not heard it to go and listen to it now. St. Vincent is one of the greatest artists of her generation:
“Annie Clark (a.k.a. St. Vincent) isn’t just a great songwriter. She’s a great song dissector, breaking down pop’s essential rhythmic, melodic and emotional components, retooling every impulse. No wonder her fourth album has a lushly distracted jam where she and a boy smash up and snort a hunk of the Berlin Wall (“Prince Johnny”) – finding new uses for old structures is kind of her thing.
St. Vincent is her tightest, tensest, best set of songs to date, with wry, twisty beats pushing her lovably ornery melodies toward grueling revelations. On the spring-grooved “Rattlesnake,” a clothes-free walk turns dangerous; the poetic, personal “Huey Newton,” named after the assassinated Black Panther, starts out shyly and explodes into mordant sludge rock; “Psychopath” is where her Kate Bush side and her David Byrne side (see their 2012 collaboration, Love This Giant) come together for a white-knuckled road anthem. Two live drummers – Homer Steinweiss of Brooklyn funk troupe the Dap-Kings and Midlake’s McKenzie Smith – help give the music a propulsive snap that plays perfectly off Clark’s chunky guitar noise. This album is haunted by isolation, dark hungers, regret and even death. But the playful way these songs contort makes pain feel like a party”.
Prior to coming to a feature from The Guardian – who named St. Vincent as the best album of 2014 -, I will bring in an extensive review from Pitchfork. It is amazing though not surprising reading all the positive words about St. Vincent. I am surprised that there has not been a tenth anniversary reissue of a hugely important and impressive work. It is one that everyone needs to hear:
“Annie Clark's bold and almost jarringly confident fourth record, St. Vincent, does not sound like it was recorded here on Earth. Its songs sprout with their own strange, squiggly lifeforms and are governed by unfamiliar laws of gravity. Check out the first one, "Rattlesnake", a song that's bare, Kraftwerky, and full of imagery that is somehow both Edenic and post-apocalyptic. Clark glances around: "Am I the only one in the only world?" She spots the title creature, gasps, and then comes this song's idea of a chorus, like melodic gagging, or distress expressed in an 8-bit video game: "AH-AH-AH-AH-AH-AH AHH AHH/ AH-AH-AH-AH-AH-AH AHH AHH." You often get the sense in a St. Vincent song that Clark has touched down on a desolate, previously unexplored planet without an air supply and is showing off the fact that—for the moment at least—she can still breathe.
Given the fangs she bares on St. Vincent, it seems like Clark could take that snake, easily. Over the course of four albums, many early-career guest spots, and a 2012 collaboration with David Byrne, Clark has been focusing her vision and sharpening her music's edges; were it not for Google image search, it would be easy to convince yourself that you merely dreamed those days when she wore butterfly wings with Sufjan Stevens and blithely flowing robes with the Polyphonic Spree. With each release, Clark sounds less like anybody but herself, and more forcefully embraces a darkness that was quietly stirring in even her earliest songs. "You don't mean that, say you're sorry," she chimed in a creepy, Bride of Chucky voice on her still-magnificent debut single, "Now, Now". But the smirking overlord that stares out from the cover of St. Vincent does not apologize, not for any of the unpleasantries she utters through gritted teeth, nor the much nastier things she blurts out her fingers.
St. Vincent continues Clark's run as one of the past decade's most distinct and innovative guitarists, though she's never one to showboat. Her harmonic-filled style bears the influence of jazz (she picked up a lot of her signature tricks from her uncle, the jazz guitarist Tuck Andress) and prog rock, two genres known to embrace sprawl. But Clark's freak-outs are tidy, modular and architecturally compact—like King Crimson rewritten by Le Corbusier. Even at its most spazzy, there's always something efficient about St. Vincent. The stark, spring-wound single "Birth in Reverse" doesn't waste a second on superfluous sounds, and the same goes for the corrosive crunch of "Regret", which sounds like a classic rock song pared down to its most essential elements. All the negative space in that last one makes Clark's riffs hit that much harder, especially when—in one of the most thrilling moments on the album—a solo strikes down out of nowhere like a cartoon lightning bolt.
Critics of St. Vincent call her pretentious. Fair enough—these are the sorts of songs that dare take themselves seriously and tack on easy suffixes like "in America" when they want to let you know they are Making a Statement. But there's an under-appreciated playfulness about Clark's music that balances this out. I can't think of much contemporary guitar-based music that has this much fun with texture—the rubbery whiplash percussion on "Prince Johnny", the stretched-taffy vocals on "Bring Me Your Loves", the gleefully synthetic-on-purpose sheen of "Digital Witness". At best, St. Vincent has a mischievous curiosity about texture (and explosions) that feels almost childlike. Recently my 8 year-old cousin asked me, with a wicked twinkle in his eye, if I'd ever microwaved a banana. I'm terrified to try, but I'm sure whatever happens—splattering, abrupt, radioactive—sounds exactly like an Annie Clark guitar solo.
"What's the point in even sleeping/ If I can't show, if you can't see me?" Clark asks on the single "Digital Witness", a rather on-the-nose critique of our hyper-transparent, Instagram-your-every-meal culture. It's tempting to label St. Vincent Clark's anti-internet album, but that wouldn't be quite right—it knows too well what a life mediated through screens feels and sounds like to be sending it up entirely. (In fact, digital life may have influenced her concise, anti-jam style: "I have some restless ears, and I now have a fractured attention span because I'm like living in the modern world," she said in a recent interview. "So I'm like, how do I make this sound interesting to myself?") "Huey Newton" is maybe one of the best songs ever written about falling down a late-night, vaguely depressive internet k-hole ("Pleasure dot loathing dot Huey dot Newton/ Oh, it was a lonely, lonely winter"); seemingly stream-of-conscious references to Black Panthers, Byzantine architecture, and the Heaven's Gate cult flicker by like puzzlingly connected Wikipedia pages. The common threads emerge if you look closely. From the self-coronated Prince Johnny to the "near-future cult leader" Clark has fashioned herself on the album cover, there's a fascination with power, faith, and mind-control running through these songs—learning how to sell yourself your own lines well enough to sell them back to other people, too.
"I was reading Miles Davis' biography," Clark says of her Beyoncé-like decision to self-title a record this late in her career, "and he says that the hardest thing for a musician to do is sound like yourself." In that sense, it's a perfect title. St. Vincent is the Platonic ideal of a St. Vincent record, executing with perfect poise everything we already know she can do. But this also is why it falls just short of being her best. That honor still goes to Strange Mercy, which had a capacity to surprise and defy expectations in a way that this record does not. Strange Mercy was easier to connect to emotionally ("If I ever meet the dirty police man who roughed you up," she cooed on the title track, a line that was as jarring for its tenderness as it was for its violence) and gave Clark a little more room to stretch her legs in the grooves. The pixelated shredding on "Huey Newton" and "Regret" are great, but nothing here feels as unhinged as the borealis chaos of at the end of "Northern Lights" or the razor-sharp coda of "Surgeon". The Bowie-esque metamorphosis suggested by the cover image doesn’t mean she’s reinvented her sound. Of course it's not the worst problem for an artist to have, but Clark's become so good at being St. Vincent that, on future releases, she risks boxing herself in. You hope the next album finds her coloring outside the lines she's so meticulously drawn for herself.
Still, it’s hard to ask too much more from an album that boasts melodies as lovely as "Prince Johnny" and "Severed Crossed Fingers". That last one is the best closing song on a St. Vincent album yet—a self-deprecating, slow-motion parade of a ballad that sounds like if Lorrie Moore had written the non-existent lyrics to “Here Come the Warm Jets”. (This song and “Birth in Reverse” both take their wry titles from Moore’s great short story collection Birds of America.) It’s a moment of vulnerability and bleak hope rounding out Clark’s hardest, tightest, and most confident record to date—a vaguely ominous promise of better days ahead. "We’ll be heroes on every bar stool," she vows, sounding so sure of herself that you’re liable to follow her to whatever planet she’s headed”.
At the end of 2014, The Guardian crowned St. Vincent as the best album of the year. With many of her fans wondering if there will be a follow-up to 2021’s Daddy’s Home, I would urge people to check out, perhaps, her finest work. An eponymous album that has no weak moments. St. Vincent is worthy of every impassioned review that it has received:
“There’s a sense in which Annie Clark’s career to date feels like a process of refinement, gradually paring down the clutter of fascinating ideas found on her early albums until she arrived at the music on St Vincent: self-titled, she claimed, after reading a quote from Miles Davis in which he said the hardest thing to sound like was yourself.
There’s a certain swagger about that explanation. Actually, there was a certain swagger about everything Annie Clark did in 2014: the album’s cover, on which she stared impassively while seated on what looked like a throne; the interviews in which, a discombobulated Guardian correspondent noted, she engaged in “flirtation as a kind of deliberate power-play”; her Twitter-trending choreographed appearance on Saturday Night Live; the clip on teen website Rookie where she demonstrated her “sweet soccer moves” while wearing a ridiculous pair of shoes. It would have been a bit annoying if she hadn’t had a point, but her confidence didn’t seem misplaced: on St Vincent, Annie Clark sounded suspiciously like an artist reaching the top of her game, capable of doing it all. She could write beautiful, crystalline melodies – the woozy swoon of I Prefer Your Love, Prince Johnny’s astonishing octave-leaping chorus, the warped power ballad Severed Crossed Fingers – then arrange them in a way that made them sound more astonishing still.
From Digital Witness’s claustrophobic electronic funk of to the stutter and buzz of Bring Me Your Loves, the sound of St Vincent owed nothing to rock cliches, and didn’t bother with the comfort blanket of familiarity: it never sounded like Clarke was trying to sound like someone else, which is a rare thing in rock music these days. She could play guitar in a way that made you gawp, shoehorning tricksy prog-rock runs, the angular influence of out-there jazz and splurges of noise into Rattlesnake and Birth in Reverse, but there was no showboating about her solos: not a moment of St Vincent felt self-indulgent or superfluous.
Similarly, it was smart enough to wear its intelligence lightly: however many intriguing sonic ideas it bore, however meticulous it all sounded, however many references to Seurat or Hagia Sophia the lyrics dropped, however many allusions to the short stories of Lorrie Moore the titles carried, St Vincent never sounded like a dry scientific experiment or a smartarse intellectual exercise. Clarke’s lyrics pack a genuine emotional punch. She’s brilliant on human beings’ increasingly complex and fraught relationship with social media (“pleasure dot loathing” as she puts it on Huey Newton), and capable of making a song as oblique as Prince Johnny – during which you’re never really sure if the protagonist is a man or a woman, a lover or an errant friend – remarkably moving.
If you saw Annie Clark perform the latter song live this year, or watched her performance of it on Letterman, you’ll have seen her end the performance with a bizarre, heavily stylised piece of choreography. She plays the kind of guitar solo that you suspect Robert Fripp would approve of, then stagily crumples to the floor, before very slowly rolling down a flight of stairs and ending up in an inverted crucifix position. It’s simultaneously ridiculous and hypnotising: it seems to have come from a completely different, more intriguing world to most rock music in 2014. You could say the same thing about the album the track’s taken from”.
On 24th February, we will mark ten years of an utterly wonderful album. St. Vincent reached twelve in the U.S. and twenty-one in the U.K. It has lost none of its brilliance and genius after a decade. Speaking to Uncut in 2015, St. Vincent discussed her eponymous album:
“This is a more primary colour record than I've done in the past. It's generally a bit brighter. It was less emotionally fraught than when I was writing Strange Mercy. There's an exuberance in Love This Giant, and maybe some of that carried on into this record. It's entertainment. It's fun… I did a lot of sketching for St Vincent in GarageBand before going into the studio. The process of actually recording it was less about discovery and putting the Frankenstein's monster together, and a bit more about execution. There were a lot of things that had already been decided long before I walked into the studio. It was a different experience than Strange Mercy or Actor. Recording took about six months all in, around May 2013. John and I usually work every day and take maybe one day off every ten or twelve days”.
On its tenth anniversary, I know there will be a lot of fresh attention on St. Vincent’s eponymous album. A masterful work from one of music’s true originals, I am glad I have had opportunity to revisit such a wonderful album. There are truly no other albums quite like…
THE phenomenal St. Vincent.