A Musical Chameleon Goes Retro

St. Vincent takes inspiration from the 1970s for her latest record Daddy’s Home

St. Vincent’s Walk on the Wild Side

Like David Bowie Before her, annie Clark, the innovative singer-songwriter-guitarist who goes by the stage name of St. Vincent (the moniker, she says, comes from a line in a Nick Cave song), has come up with alter egos tied to each of her albums. For 2011’s Strange Mercy, she told Billboard, she was a “housewife on pills;” for 2017’s Masseduction, she was a “dominatrix at a mental institution.” On her latest Daddy’s Home (due May 14), she’s gone back to the early 1970s as an Andy Warhol-esque character living in gritty and bohemian New York City, the kind of downtown scenester Lou Reed celebrated in “Walk on the Wild Side.”

This era has always fascinated the Tulsa-born Clark, 38. “It was this period of time in downtown New York where culturally things were really tumultuous: life was bad, but music was great,” she tells Newsweek. “It kind of reminds me of where we are now: ‘Okay, we’re kind of sifting through the rubble, we’re singing from the burned-out building.’ We’re in this period of transition where we’re reassessing and tearing down old institutions of power.”

The music on Daddy’s Home is an homage to the old vinyl records that Clark’s father introduced her to when she was a kid, recalling such acts as Parliament-funkadelic, the Pointer Sisters, Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan, Pink Floyd and Bowie during his Young Americans period. “This kind of music has been in my ears forever,” Clark says. “I wanted to approach some of the sophistication of it. As a musician, I probably wasn’t ready to learn some of the lessons that this kind of music taught me until this moment. But I was just instinctively drawn to it.”

The new record still has the familiar aspects of St. Vincent’s previous works: surrealistic soundscapes and edgy lyrics in addition to her guitar