ST. VINCENT
What has Annie Clark been doing since last we heard from her? Only rethinking her entire approach. News of an LP and a movie where she turns into a monster.
“IMISS LIVE SHOWS so much,” says Annie Clark, the force behind St. Vincent. “I miss the sweat. I miss the people. I miss the danger. I miss the communion. I miss everything about it.”
Yet as the year ends, Clark – who has partly spent her downtime learning tennis and reading about Stalin – has a new live outlet. “I’ve taken to writing musicals for my family,” she says, laughing. “There was a tradition where we would go and see A Christmas Carol and it was always hilariously bad but just wonderful. I half-remembered some of the songs, then I’ve rewritten them to be family specific. Then I’m insisting that everyone dress up in full costume. I’m making one of my nephews be Tiny Tim.”
Fortunately, however, she’s also completed a project for a wider audience: the follow-up to
2017’s Masseduction, planned for late spring/summer. “It’s locked and loaded,” says Clark. “And I’m American so I will only use gun metaphors.” Her sixth album, she explains, marks “a tectonic shift. I felt I had gone as far as I could possibly go with angularity. I was interested in going back to the music I’ve listened to more than any other – Stevie Wonder records from the early ’70s, Sly And The Family Stone. I studied at the feet of those masters.”
Masseduction’s hot pink and leopardskin melted into “the colour palette of the world of Taxi Driver” or “Gena Rowlands in a Cassavetes film. I just wanted to capture the colours, the film stock, and tell these stories of being down and out, down on your luck.” She thinks she was “subconsciously drawn” to the mood of post-’60s turbulence because “I imagine that’s where the world will be in 2021, this immense amount of transition and, probably, a real resourcefulness and scrappiness.”
Clark suggests her live shows will change, too. “My last tour was a whole bunch of production and high-concept video and razzle-dazzle and I can’t go any further with that. I’m going to come down and just play. I don’t think high-gloss sheen is going to be that resonant with people because it will feel very much ‘let them eat cake’”.
Yet another side of St. Vincent will appear with the wider summer release of The Nowhere Inn. “It’s a scripted meta-documentary starring me and my best friend Carrie Brownstein,” explains Clark, who co-wrote the Performance-inspired script with the Sleater-Kinney/ Portlandia star. The Clark as imagined in the world of the film is “too boring a subject to make documentary on, so Carrie insists I do something to spice it up. I take that too far and that thing happens when people’s alter ego and actual self combine, until you’re not sure which is which and I become a monster.”
The “bonkers meta-comedy horror narrative” springs from Clark’s desire to avoid the “artist-sanctioned” concert film, the carefully curated “peek behind the mask”. “I don’t want to make propaganda,” says Clark, “I want to make art.”
“I’m American so I will only use gun metaphors.” ST. VINCENT