Sifting the post-Trump rubble with St Vincent
Annie Clark talks to Danny McElhinney about the events that shaped her latest album
Annie Clark in her guise as St Vincent has released some of the most compelling music of the last decade and a half or so. She has also achieved commercial success while compromising very little of her artistic vision. The 38-year-old Oklahoma-born, Texas-raised performer is hardly shy and retiring, but she certainly would prefer to let her art speak for her. As she told me after a sell-out show in Dublin’s Olympia Theatre in 2017, ‘If you want to know about my life, the good and the bad, listen to this record.’ That record was Masseduction, a Grammywinning album that often delved into her relationship with supermodel and actor Cara Delevingne, with whom she split the previous year but who jetted into Ireland that day and watched the Olympia gig from the front row while her former lover, clad in red thigh-high boots and bustier gave a stunning solo performance.
The relationship with Delevingne prompted increased interest in Clark’s private life and reporters discovered that her father was halfway through a 12-year jail term for defrauding investors of more than $40million dollars while involved in a scheme designed to purchase stocks. Her father’s 2019 release from prison gives rise to the title of St. Vincent’s seventh album Daddy’s Home. Although she didn’t speak previously about his crime or his incarceration, she addresses it in the album’s title track singing, ‘I signed autographs in the visitation room/ Waiting for you the last time, inmate 502/ Yeah, you did some time/ Well, I did some time too.’
‘Well… it’s my story. Ten plus years have passed and I’m daddy now,’ she says of the relationship with her father, who is now in his early 70s and a phrase she will repeat later.
‘Incarceration is not a new story in America. Anybody who has dealt with the US prison system has been traumatised by it. People who are black and brown are disproportionately incarcerated. My father’s incarceration is just simply a fact of my life that had been exposed in the press in a way that I had no control over and which I didn’t like. I said, “you don’t get to tell my story, I get to tell my story”. It is not the totality of the record but the duality of transitioning from being a child to being daddy is worth talking about.’
She splits her time between Texas and LA, from where she takes my call, and New York, a recurring setting for so many of her songs.
‘New York city is the only city to which I have a deep romantic connection,’ she says.
‘That is where my imagination goes. I wrote a record of stories of people being down and out or just trying to do their best to get by. I’ve been every single character in it at some point or another. You have to live it, if not exactly literally then emotionally, to be able to write about it.’
That romantic connection to the city is also evident in the track New
York from the Masseduction album where she sings ‘New York isn’t New York without you, love.’ That led to many speculating that this was a reference to Delevingne or perhaps Kristen Stewart with whom she also had a brief relationship after her relationship with Delevingne ended.
However, she divulged later that she was thinking of the death in 2016 of one of her musical heroes, New York resident David Bowie. Bowie was a friend of Lou Reed and in the early Seventies was feted by Reed’s mentor Andy Warhol and his Factory cohorts. St Vincent pays tribute to one of those, Candy Darling, on the track of that name on her current album. The funk of Sly & the Family Stone to Pink Floyd and singer-songwriters such as Joni Mitchell inform its sound. ‘My album is focussed on a nerdily specific time from 1971 to 1976 in New York as far as the references go,’ she says.
‘It is after the idealism of the flower children. It’s pre-disco and pre-punk musically. We are tearing some institutions down and rightly so but we haven’t exactly decided what we’re going to do with the rubble. But if history teaches us anything it’s that we always somehow figure out a way forward. I can tell you that this album offers no moral certainty or judgment. It’s about a lot of people doing their best to survive. That’s it.’
After the divisive presidency of former Manhattan resident Donald Trump, she feels we are living in a period that is analogous to the early 1970s, a period of transition and uncertainty. As an Oklahoman, raised in Texas and who travelled widely in the southern states in her teenage years while a roadie for her aunt and uncle’s band, she is also familiar with the prevailing attitudes in both red and blue states.
‘We’re living in fearful times and understandably so, but one of the reactions humankind has to being fearful is to look for certainty,’ she says.
‘But you can’t have these pillars and slot everybody into a narrative. That’s why I think I’m more pragmatic than an idealist. I believe in dealing with what is, rather than what we want it to be. Being really interested in history, I am constantly trying to figure out where we are right now and if it is analogous to another time. If it is, then let me look back to see what was happening in that time to help me understand what is happening now because we’ve seen this before.
‘You had a situation in America where a lot of people were down on their luck and scared. Their fears were kindling. It just took a charismatic person to come in and say, “I see you and your fears are validated.” It’s just that they fell for the wrong person. They fell for a conman.’
The people who invested money with her father may use exactly the same words about him. In the track
My Baby Wants A Baby she refers
I CAN TELL YOU, THIS ALBUM OFFERS NO MORAL CERTAINTY OR JUDGEMENT
THEY FELL FOR THE WRONG PERSON – THEY FELL FOR A CONMAN
I HAVE TO SAY IT’S A JOY NOT TO BE IN LATEX ANYMORE
to the man who was divorced from her mother when she was three singing ‘I couldn’t leave like my daddy’.
We talk of how pleased she was to have lent the song such a catchy melody until she realised she had subconsciously borrowed it.
‘I’ve been kicking that song around for a while and I was so proud of myself. I thought “wow, that is a great melody, I’ve really outdone myself”,’ she says.
‘But it is so familiar, what is that? Then I realised, of course it’s a good melody, it’s Morning Train (aka Nine To Five) by Sheena Easton. I’m referencing it so much that (the song’s writer) Florrie Moore is credited as a co-writer on My Baby Wants A Baby.
We then move on to her own attitude to parenthood and whether it’s in the future for her.
‘Being a mother was something that never entered my mind. But a lot of things never entered my mind because I’ve been solely focussed on being an artist for years and years. But I started to think about it because I’m coming to an age where I would have to think about it. That certain age is like a rubicon. When you pass it, you can’t unpass it.’
She has always paid great attention to the look she presents that accompanies her record. Last time it was all constricting latex, raven black hair and transfixing gazes. This time it’s warms smiles, blonde wigs, loose flares and angora.
‘I have to say it is a joy not to be in latex anymore,’ she laughs.
‘Everything about my demeanour and look can tell the story of the album because I’m the daddy now. When I think of the aesthetic of this album it is glamour that hasn’t slept for three days.’
As the consummate artist, I wondered how soon the travails of her life and the fallout of relationships, with her father among others become fuel for her work.
‘Oh God! If you are a writer, everything is copy,’ she laughs. ‘Not to the extent that I want terrible things to happen. But there is a fine line!’ n St Vincent – Daddy’s Home is out now on Loma Vista Records.