St. Vincent - MOJO interview

It started at the movies. “When I was five or six, I remember seeing La Bamba, and Ritchie Valens had that red Strat,” says Annie Clark. “And then I remember going to Target in the suburbs of Tulsa and seeing a red toy guitar and asking my mom for it. We didn’t have a lot of money, so I don’t think she bought it for me at first ask. So I went home and tried to make my own guitar, with cardboard and crayons and rubber bands.”

A few years later, Forrest Gump came along, with a Vietnam-era scene soundtracked by Jimi Hendrix. Once again, Clark was snared. “I was over at a friend’s house and her dad had an old Strat that was clearly his prize possession, and none of his kids cared,” she says. “But he saw that I was interested in it, so he taught me how to play All Along The Watchtower and I went home and asked my parents for a guitar. From the age of 12, I didn’t look back.”

Twenty years later, and Clark’s blazingly original guitar playing is the calling-card of one of our most unusual pop stars, and the cornerstone of her reputation for doing things differently. In 2013, the trait was underlined when she received an American Ingenuity Award from the Smithsonian Institution, alongside revolutionary materials scientist John Rogers and NASA engineer Adam Steltzner. In 2015, non-brainiacs are taking notice, too. Earlier this year, she won the Grammy for Best Alternative Album, holding off Jack White and Arcade Fire.



“Maybe it’s a vague neo-futurism in my music,” she says, pondering her burgeoning popularity. “Ultimately, it’s just about trying to make alien pop music – music that is memorable, but also has a twist.”



St. Vincent songs usually have more than “a twist”; they can resemble a wobbly roller coaster or a street racer built from spare parts, with different sections pulling at each other, propulsive but never predictable. At the center, sonically and structurally, is Clark’s unconventional fretwork.

“Annie’s virtuosity isn’t gratuitous,” says The National’s Bryce Dessner, who played with Clark in Sufjan Stevens’ touring band. “It’s like a character in her songs, a foil to the pureness of her voice. She’s a lovely, modest person, but what comes out with her guitar is a kind of devilish [not sure if that’s right - UCB] mischievousness, these aggressive sounds with a razor-sharp edge.”

“I feel kind of irreverent about the function of guitar in a song,” explains Clark. “I’ve never been that interested in just chords that strum. I’d rather it be a beast or a monster or a ballerina, and have things feel kinda bubbling and lava lamp-style rather than static. It’s nice to just look at things as noisemakers.”



Meeting for MOJO’s interview in Gibson’s midtown Manhattan showroom, Clark traipses past versions of the instrument that has made her name (and quietly expresses her disapproval of the colour of the guitar next to her chair). Minus the sci-fi robes and silver frightwig [not sure - UCB] of last year’s shows, dressed instead in a neat black dress with a prominent, draping collar, she seems more delicate without a guitar between her and the world, and pauses to thing before answering questions with a quick, charming wit.

Playing the showroom’s piano quite serviceably is Clark’s girlfriend, the British supermodel Cara Delevingne, dressed down and sporting a hat. Later, she will burst in on us, mid-interview, to ransack Clark’s bag for a credit card she thought she handed off the night before. “Just trying to annoy you as much as possible,” says Delevingne boisterously. “That’s my fucking job.”

After our interview, the two hope to take advantage of a rare day home in New York to revisit the new West Village location of the Whitney Museum of American Art, whose mega-glamorous opening party Clark recently DJ’d. Then it’s off to the Caribbean for what Clark calls the first actual vacation of her adult life, then a stop-off in Cannes before touring resumes, with a busty festival season climaxing at the UK’s Green Man Festival in late August.

Growing up in Dallas, Texas, in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, Clark didn’t seem destine for such rarefied territory. She participated in theatre, played soccer, “I was always passable enough to not get bullied, but I didn’t quite fit in,” she says. Even her early guitar explorations began conventionally, learning the chords to Puff The Magic Dragon from her mother and studying with a teacher who would have her bring in rock songs she wanted to learn (one of the first was Jethro Tull’s prop epic, Aqualung). But she started venturing down new roads: “I would end up mid-song trying to write my own thing, getting lost in a riff or an idea and trying to follow that thread to wherever it landed.”

Clark found kindred spirits, “the slacker younger sisters of older siblings who were also into music.” They drove around blasting Type O Negative and Lords Of Acid, or lounged by the pool listening to Pink Floyd. At 15, she built a recording studio in her bedroom (with help from her stepdad). “Working songs out on the computer, instantly I wasn’t limited to one instrument at a time,” she says. “I was thinking in terms of layers and texture and colour.”

She was also becoming a fully-fledged music nerd. “Music was my currency and my shield, my weapon,” she says. “I was totally obsessed with music. The amount of minutiae, like baseball card knowledge, stats, facts, and figures that I know about music is just silly. But that’s what you do. You get the record or the CD and you see who played on it and who produced it, where it was made and when, and you start to weave your own through-lines, slowly get the bigger picture.”

Unlike most aspiring musicians, however, Clark had an actual, tangible connection to a successful artist: her uncle, Tuck Andress, and his wife, Patti Cathcart, are better known as the guitar-vocal jazz duo Tuck & Patti. When Clark was a teenager, they took her on the road and put her to work. “They showed me all the nooks and crannies of the touring life, and not necessarily the glamorous stuff,” she says. “Talking to promoters, walking around with a clicker to make sure that the final number of tickets sold matched the bodies, making sure that there were towels and flowers and dinner at the right time. I used to take all the gear to my room after every flight, test all the connections, take the voltage meter and make sure the power was right.”

Sometimes things got messy, like the time they were afraid they were being kidnapped in Russia. A theatre in Chechnya had been teargassed, and so Red Square was shut down. “It was the last gig of a long tour and we played at this club in Moscow that was like the place where the rich Mafia dudes take their girlfriends or their prostitutes,” she says. “After the gig, everybody is exhausted, we’re trying to get back to the hotel and the promoter says, ‘Just flag down anyone and hop in their car, it’s fine, it’s how we do things here.’ So we get in the car with some random dude, in his ‘80s brown Suburban, and we got stopped by the police at the checkpoint right under Red Square. None of us had our passports on us. We looked at the driver and he seemed worried, and I thought we might never be seen or heard from again.”

Rather than scare Clark away from a life in music, these encounters only solidified her ambitions. “I thought it was totally awesome – ‘I want to see the world and meet people and play music every night.’ It seemed like the most exciting way to live.”

She was set to attend the University of Texas, like her siblings, when Tuck and Patti made an impassioned case to her parents that she should switch to Boston’s Berklee School of Music. Accepted with a scholarship, she headed north with visions of where this intensive training might lead.

“I got to Berklee thinking that maybe I would be a jazz musician,” she says, “but I realized that I love listening to jazz, but I don’t have anything to add to the conversation.” Clark played in a number of different groups, including a noisecore band(“if your ears weren’t bleeding by the end of the gig, you hadn’t played a good show”) and went to a lot of basement punk rock shows. She found that these visceral sounds were connecting with her more than the high-wire musicianship favoured at Berklee. “At a music school like that, there’s a tendency to put athleticism and technicality over feel and emotion, and that’s the great travesty of music schools,” she says. “I’m well aware of the stigma and I have seen and experienced the pitfalls personally. You can teach the quantifiable stuff, but you can’t put on a Can record for the kids who think ‘the more notes the better’ and explain why it’s brilliant.”

Clark dropped out and moved t New York, starting work on a solo record until she ran out of money. She moved back in with her parents in Dallas, feeling “super depressed, like I’d been chewed up and spit out by New York.” Through a friend, she heard that the Texas-based choral-pop army The Polyphonic Spree was looking for touring musicians, and she auditioned.



“I was really nervous, but I got through the songs pretty well,” she says, “and after that, Tim [DeLaughter] the lead singer and writer and everything, asked me if I had a passport ad said, ‘You’re going to Europe.’ Next thing I knew, I was on-stage in a robe playing Pukkelpop and Lowlands and all the big summer European festivals.”



When that tour was done, she moved on to Sufjan Stevens’ group. “Even then, she was the best guitarist among us,” says Bryce Desner. “She always had a sense of independence, a sense of calm in the storm and a wisdom beyond her years.”

Clark looks back fondly on these days as a working, travelling guitarist. “I got to see the interpersonal workings of bands. I got to feel what it feels like to put on a show, get comfortable on stage performing,” she says. “It was the same thing as going out as a tour manager – it was an apprenticeship.”

With these experiences behind her, in 2006 she returned in earnest to the songs she had started in New York, songs which became the album Marry Me. Clark put out the record under the moniker she had adopted for her solo work – St. Vincent, taken from an old family name and a Nick Cave song in which he invoked St. Vincent’s hospital in Manhattan, where Dylan Thomas breathed his last. The album, an extensive tour that followed, and the 2009 follow-up, Actor, were all well received, even if her ambitions sometimes outpaced her execution.

By the time of Strange Mercy n 2011, Clark’s profile was rising. She debuted the album with a performance at the Romano-Egyptian Temple Of Dendur in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. She started turning up on magazine covers, and she even cracked Billboard’s Top 20. Bu the album, written mostly during a period of self-imposed isolation in Seattle, documented a painful phase.

“Strange Mercy was a record that I wrote when I was just shattered, heartbroken,” she says. “I’d lost a lot of people and it was just a horrible time in life, and I was writing my way out of misery. The fire was still at my heels.”

Even before the album was finished, though, she had started another project, developing ideas with ex-Talking Head David Byrne. It turned out that he’d been monitoring her progress for a while.

“I heard her first record,” says Byrne, “and I loved it, so I checked her out and she was using a lot of loop pedals and basically being a one-person band, which was appropriate for that project. The next record and tour were more chamber-pop – more arranged and texturally varied. She was experiment, trying different things.”

After meeting at a benefit show, they reconnected at a live collaboration pairing Bjork and Dirty Projectors. What started as a notion to do a similar, one-off event eventually grew into a full-fledged album, with arrangements featuring a brass band. The Love This Giant record, finally released in 2012, was followed by an extensive international tour.

“David’s process is so fascinating, because a lot of the time it feels like throwing spaghetti against the wall, but then parts drip down and whatever you have left is always really interesting,” says Clark. “I remember following him on a bicycle in Atlanta, going to an outsider art gallery and realizing, Uh oh, the sidewalk ended, what do we do? Uh oh, the shoulder on the highway ended – oh, God, we’re just pedaling down the highway! He has no sense of fear, but every twist and turn was rewarded.”

Byrne notes that, even on an album that took shape over the course of several years and mostly involved working separately, digitally transferring lyrics and melodies back and forth, their chemistry was undeniable. “I’ll bet you can’t tell who wrote what,” he challenges MOJO.

He also points out that Clark’s stage persona changed significantly in the course of their tour. “She was little wary of movement and especially the idea of choreography at first,” says Byrne, “though she always did her arresting, peculiar, and slightly creepy doll dance. But she warmed up to it pretty quickly – and look at her current show! She’s totally jumped in the deep end!”

“People were dancing at our shows,” says Clark, “and I wanted to see if I could make people dance at mine. I wanted to dance as well – it’s kind of a stifled, angular thing, but still…”

But Clark’s idea of mach schau isn’t for everyone. When she appeared on the 2014 season finale of Saturday Night Live, her distinctive, mechanized frug seemed to baffle many social media users. “St. Vincent is possibly the weirdest… band… thing… I’ve seen perform on SNL,” went one tweet. Another was more succinct: “St. Vincent scares me.”

Armed with new creative tools and new confidence coming off of the Byrne tour, Clark went into her next sessions with greater patience and focus. “I spent a long time demoing these songs,” she says. “So unlike on records past, where the studio has been way more of a discovery playpen, it was more about execution, because the songs were already really quite fleshed out. I think that lends itself to the cohesion of the work as a whole.”

Led by the warped but irresistible pop of the singles Birth in Reverse and Digital Witness, 2014’s St. Vincent album marked Clark’s arrival in music’s elite, topping countless year-end Best Of lists. “She’s stuck to her guns in terms of making ambitious music,” says Bryce Dessner. “Every record has been more brave than the last, and you usually see the opposite, even among so-called indie musicians.”

Clark has taken inspiration from a range of media (Mary Me was named for a running gag on Arrested Development; many of the songs on Actor were based on Disney movies), and the lyrics on St. Vincent – tackling death, sexuality, technology – borrow from various literary sources.

“You can’t create in a vacuum,” she says. “I steal from the New Yorker all the time. In Birth In Reverse, there are a couple of [late New York Times media reporter] David Carr references, from his book The Night Of The Gun. There’s a Joan Didion quote in Prince Johnny, about tracing the globe with your index finger. Severed Crossed Fingers is a Lorrie Moore reference, from a short story about a woman who reads a story in the newspaper – they’re sifting through a plane crash and find somebody’s severed hand, but the fingers are still crossed, and I thought that was such a great, hilarious, bleak metaphor for life.”

A few weeks after the record’s release, Clark was part of a memorable rock history event when the surviving members of Nirvana asked her to be one of the four women (with Joan Jett, Kim Gordon and Lorde) to front the band when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; she growled her way through and intense Lithium, and later joined Grohl and Novoselic in a surprise late-night jam in a tiny Brooklyn club.

“I still can’t believe that happened,” she says. “I thought it was a really inspired idea to highlight what a feminist Kurt was. I have a little plaque on my wall that says: ‘Thanks for being part of our herstory’ – Kurt would have loved it.”

Despite her space-alien presentation and bookish tendencies, St. Vincent insists the foundation of her music is not craft, but soul. “Songs just have to have a heart,” she says. “If they have a heart, they tell you where to go sonically, because they have some kind of narrative or emotional or psychic roadmap.”

Clark raises her head and with it her tone rises as she speaks more emphatically than she has all afternoon… “You get to the end of the record, take your worst song and try to make it your best song,” she asserts. “Finish it, even if you think it’s the runt or you don’t know where it’s going or don’t think it has legs. You have t believe in every song.”