I wanted to tell my story, it had been told without my consent
ST VINCENT’S NEW ALBUM WAS INSPIRED BY HER FATHER’S RELEASE FROM PRISON. ALEX GREEN FINDS OUT WHY SHE’S GETTING PERSONAL
ANNIE CLARK has made a career out of inventing characters. On 2011’s Strange Mercy, she was a tranquillised suburban housewife, while 2017’s Masseduction saw her transform into a deranged leather-clad rock heroine.
On Daddy’s Home, her sixth and newest album as St Vincent, she visits early 1970s New York, channelling the grit of the city through funk, proto-punk guitars and jagged rhythms.
Simultaneously, the record addresses her most personal topic yet – her father’s recent release from prison following a decadelong stint for his part in a multimillion dollar stock scheme.
“I never really wanted to talk about it in any specific way,” she explains. “To protect my family and also because I never wanted it to overshadow, or put too much of my own autobiography, into the music.
“Because really the music is for the fans. After it is made, it is not really about me at all. It is about their experience with it. It’s not about me and the happenstance of my own life.”
So why has she recorded an album about it? “I was at a place where I was able to write about it with humour and compassion, without losing heart.
“I wanted to be able to tell my story because it had been told without my consent anyway.”
At the age of 38, Texas-raised Annie is retaking control of her narrative.
In 2016, when she was in a relationship with supermodel and paparazzi magnet Cara Delevingne, her father’s story was dug up by the press and reported far and wide.
Up until that point, she had largely avoided that level of public scrutiny, moving through the music industry as a left-field, rather than pure pop, artist.
Daddy’s Home takes her challenging personal tale
It is intended to be funny and pervy and just absurd...
and treats it with irreverence, drawing out the incongruity of the situation.
In trademark style, Annie has also added a dash of camp to proceedings. Seventies New York and her father’s imprisonment match, she laughs, because “they are both quite sleazy stories.”
“The title Daddy’s Home means a lot of things, but also, it is intended to be funny and pervy and just absurd.”
Annie makes a dramatic, sarcastic “eugh” sound as she reflects on her choice of album title. But the Daddy in question is not just her genetic father, she says. “There is a transformation. It certainly starts in terms of telling a story that is more autobiographical.
“But then over the course of the thing transforming, actually I am Daddy now.
“The title really encapsulates everything.” Annie may have created a character for the album, but she has still poured herself into it.
“It’s definitely inside me,” she replies, searching for the right example. “It’s like a mixing board.
“If you have a personality and parts of you are this and parts of you are that, it’s just a question of turning up your more masculine side or turning down ego or turning up humour.
“I think of it as, everybody has faders on their personality traits.”
Daddy’s Home sees Annie adopt a blonde Debbie Harry bob and razor-sharp disco suits.
Her constant shape-shifting has prompted inevitable comparisons to David Bowie, so much so, that it is almost obligatory that any review notes the two artists’ shared love of reinvention.
“Everything I do needs to continue to tell the story of the album and expand upon the story,” she explains.
As an artist who believes in gender and sexual fluidity, growing up in Dallas, Texas during the Nineties was, unsurprisingly, a challenge for Annie.
“I had to leave to figure out where my people were,” she recalls. And now that I am settled in myself, in a certain way, now I am happy to go back and there are great things about where I am from, and I spend a lot of time there.”
On choosing her new album’s name