Yahoo News St Vincent: ‘I was in a high-speed paparazzi chase with Cara Delevingne. It was jaw-dropping’
With Annie Clark, you never quite know what you are going to get. While following her own singular path, the 41-year-old American musician, better known as St Vincent, has collaborated with everyone from David Byrne to Olivia Rodrigo, been a member of the sprawling ensemble the Polyphonic Spree, produced the riot grrrl pioneers Sleater-Kinney, duetted with Dua Lipa at the Grammys, fronted Nirvana for their induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and been named the 26th-greatest guitarist of all time by Rolling Stone magazine.
Off-stage, she has had high-profile relationships with the supermodel Cara Delevingne and the film star Kristen Stewart. Oh and, somehow, she also found time to co-write Taylor Swift’s most popular song, 2019’s Cruel Summer, which has been streamed more than two billion times.
“I did my part,” she says discreetly. “But you’d have to ask Taylor Swift about that.” Still, she was surprised when it became such a hit, rising to the top of the charts four years after its release. “That was so wild. But, honestly, I think all my songs are pop bangers, so that shows my compass; I have no idea.”
Clark is sitting stiffly in the centre of a huge sofa in a plush London hotel room, sporting a strong new look. Her makeup is strikingly pale, with vivid black eyebrows; her outfit, a clash of black (leather coat, miniskirt, kitten-heel boots) and bright red (polo neck, jazz socks). Her hair – which has been, at various times, spiky, soft, curly, straight, long, short, brunette, silver and blonde – is also dyed black, and pulled into a bun with a centre parting. When I ask her to describe what this bold aesthetic represents, she laughs: “Tightly buttoned up, but just a little bit off. I keep it easy-breezy in the studio, but I am doing my best to look chic for you today.”
It’s a special occasion: Friday will see the release of St Vincent’s seventh solo album, All Born Screaming, the cover image of which depicts her with her arms apparently on fire. It was inspired by a visit to the Prado Museum, in Madrid, with her friend and collaborator, the conceptual artist Alex Da Corte, where they saw Francisco Goya’s “Black Paintings”, a series of dark masterpieces created in the years before the Spanish master’s death in 1828. “It immediately struck us – Aha! That’s the sound of the album.” She was also much taken by the Hieronymus Bosch triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. “I’ve loved that since I was, like, six, and I’d go into my great-aunt Dee’s bathroom, where she had a print. It captured my imagination forever.”
Heaven and hell are both subjects of All Born Screaming, a record that throbs with great slabs of distorting synths, pulsating basslines and clanking drum machines, but never at the expense of Clark’s delicate pop melodies. Songs including the ethereal opening number, Hell Is Near, the coruscating Broken Man (which Clark describes as “the sound of the inside of my head”), and the brassy Bond-style torch theme Violent Times handle lyrically dark scenarios with glimmers of light. “Forgive me for being highfalutin for a second,” says Clark, with a wry smile, “but if the artist is the psychic mirror to the world, there’s a lot of heaven and a lot of hell all around us right now. The record sounds violent because it is a violent world.
“I hit a point in life where there’s only a few things really worth talking about,” she continues. “And they’re the things of the basement of your soul – the rawness and not the ephemera – so I tried to go deeper as an artist and writer, to strip away anything that felt false and just get to it.”
Clark was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and raised in Dallas, Texas. Her parents divorced when she was very young. Years later, her father, a stockbroker, was sentenced to 12 years in jail for financial crimes; his release, in 2019, set the emotional tone for her last album, Daddy’s Home (2021). By contrast, All Born Screaming is more urgent, apocalyptic even. “Life is hard, no matter who you are, or where you come from,” says Clark. “Loss, hurt and death are clarifying forces, because they make you aware of what does and doesn’t matter. Love matters; oh, man, love’s all we got! It’s trite because it’s true.”
Clark’s stepfather “was into computers” and helped build a PC-based recording studio in her teenage bedroom. As a result, she says, “Instead of going to whatever party at whatever dirtbag’s house to smoke weed, I was in my room writing songs.” She attended the prestigious Berklee College of Music, in Boston, where she led a noise rock band called Skull F---ers, and later toured as a guitarist in Sufjan Stevens’s band. A self-confessed “gear head”, she self-produced her latest album, building tracks through “long hours of jamming live electronic music, trying to harness the chaos, like lightning in a bottle”.
The Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl – who, she says, is “everything you hope he’s going to be” – contributed some drum tracks to the album, and she lights up talking about other famous names she has encountered in her career. “I was playing at the Beacon Theatre, in New York, and in comes Paul Simon, probably 20 minutes before showtime,” she recalls. “We start talking and it’s the most beautiful, profound thing, he’s giving advice, telling stories, I’m rapt. But I’m also like, ‘It’s showtime, I still have to put my tights on, finish my hair and do vocal warm-ups…’ I hate being late to a show, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell Paul Simon to stop spitting pearls of wisdom at me!”
A dinner with Paul McCartney was, she says, the “best time of my life! Some people, they’ve been famous for a long time and assume everyone wants to hear what the f--- they have to say, and that can be taxing. But Paul McCartney, I’d listen to him all day, any day of the week. He makes people happy everywhere he goes.”
During her relationship with Delevingne, in 2014-16, Clark had her own brush with the kind of mainstream celebrity from which she’d always steered clear. “I would find myself in a high-speed chase around the streets of London with paparazzi. I did not ever see that on my life bingo card. It was kind of jaw-dropping, just confounding to me, that level of fame: you have to dress up just to go get a coffee!
“I found it really interesting, but the thing about my particular level of success that I really value is that when I walk in a room, no one’s double-taking and whispering and going, ‘Oh, my god!’ I can exist as a person without being watched. So I get to actually live in the world in a way that serves me as an artist, because I can observe situations, I can sit at the bar alone and strike up a conversation with somebody, and they don’t know who I am.
“The trouble with fame,” she concludes, as if sharing a confession, “is it’s really kind of boring. That’s the secret of fame. Imagine if that got out!”
All Born Screaming by St Vincent (Total Pleasure Records) is released on Friday April 26
