St. Vincent is the musical vehicle of Annie Clark, a Dallas-raised, Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist. A veteran of Texan cult-chic Danielson Famille wannabes the Polyphonic spree and the live-band of neo-legendary banjo-pluckin' beefcake Sufjan Stevens, Clark branched out, solo in 2006. In 2007, she released her first-ever album as St. Vincent, Marry Me, which introduced the world to Clark's particular, peculiar brand of songwriting; a mixture of indie rock, pop balladry, showtunes, jazz, modern composition, and the kind of dense, hyper-reality afforded by computer recording. Two years later, she follows it up with Actor, an album exploring the artifice of performance and the (self-)delusions of artistic grandeur. If her music sounds dramatic and forceful, in person Clark is neither; instead, she's self-deprecating, genuinely polite, and nice in an old-fashioned manner. Here, she speaks right after Actor's release.
Interview: 8 May 2009
So, you're hitting the road soon. Before you go out on tour, is there a sense of excitement and anticipation, or a sense of nervous dread?
“Ha! Nervous dread! [laughs] No, not at all. I'm excited. I'm looking forward to it. I like being on the road, I like being a vagabond, I like living in a suspended reality where you don’t see the news, and you don’t know anything outside of your lovely band-mates and the inside of venues. I love escapism, and I think being on the road is a very intense form of escapism.”
Is the creative act, for you, an act of escapism?
“I think I’m trying to create a world that I wish existed as a form of subverting the world as it does exist. With this record in particular, I wanted to make something that felt as much visual as it did audible. I know that may sound like an esoteric way to describe it.”
How does one actually go about authoring 'visual' music?
“I was envisioning that the music was a film-score, and the words were the story, were the pictures. I had a mantra for making the record which was just: ‘make this human, make this human.’ So, instead of romanticized words, I tried to make the words human, and just focus on the details within a scene, as opposed to making a grand proclamation about grand, romantic ideas."
So, what is this narrative?
“Well, they’re more like little meta moments; story-within-the-story things. There’s an emotional truth to all of the songs, but I fictionalized the time and place and event. A song like ‘Laughing with a Mouth of Blood’ is the story of a young person going to Los Angeles, living in a motel, sending letters back home that say ‘everything is going well, I’m doing great out here’ but the reality is that they’re just watching televangelists on TV, and finding themselves in more and more desperate situations. I think desperation is a big part of the record. And of the life of any actor. To me, there’s nothing more admirable, but also more bad, this archetype of artistic endeavour, than an actor’s work. That image, to me, is like a metaphor for the whole artistic mindset.”
Do you feel like an actor when on stage?
“To some degree. But I feel as if I can always connect to the emotional truth of a song, even if that in itself is kind of like an actor’s performance.”
How does your ‘mantra’ relate to these ideas? And was adopting it a reaction against the first record, at all?
“Marry Me is the romanticized musing of someone who hadn’t experienced much of life; I wrote it between the ages of 17 and 22, which is a very specific time in life, and recounts very specific life experiences. This one is more grown up, less idealistic. I wanted to compose with more of a sense of the, if I can dare say, ‘highbrow’ qualities that I love in classical music and jazz, and infuse it with pop-songs that’re easy to sing along to.”
Are there less unguarded moments this time; almost less of ‘yourself’ in a way?
“I think there’s more of myself, actually. I think there’s more emotional truth on the record than the first one. Or maybe I just feel that now because I’m so very far away from Marry Me.”
Can people who listen to your music get a sense of who you are as human-being?
“I have no idea. Actually, I kind of think no. I think the humor and the emotionalism of it; the sardonic nature, the black comedy, the things that I’ve experienced, those are all parts of me that are on there. But, no. My label person just sent this strange story from The Times in London, where the interviewer described me as a vixen with malice in my eyes, wearing kitten heels. I don’t know who he spoke to, because that isn’t me! I told a couple of my friends about it, they thought it was hilarious.”
Do you want me to run with that? To forget the fact that you said 'oh, shoot!' earlier on, and publicly portray you as some cold-eyed, icy vixen?
"Oh, yes! Please do! Let's see if we can keep it going. It's a nice myth to run with. I think it could work for me. It could get me dates!"
Next: "I started Twittering, and I wrote a couple of things that were almost personal, and I started feeling really weird about it. It seemed self-aggrandizing and creepy..."
