Annie Clark makes joyous, angular, soulful pop music which is unashamedly arty.
“Why should I be ashamed of artiness?” she says, sounding rightly perplexed by my philistinism.
Clark is the genre-crossing genius and guitar-god behind the music of St Vincent. She released her eponymous fourth album last year (her fifth if you include the brass-filled Love This Giant which she created with polymath Talking Head David Byrne) and her head is filled with ideas. She's driving her car and talking to me over the phone at the same time, pausing at length whenever she has to turn a corner or wants to have a bit of a think.
She started playing guitar at the age of 12, she says. "The first song I tried to learn, I think, was Jethro Tull's Aqualung."
“That’s hard,” I say.
“I know!” she says.
She always had access to music. Her aunt and uncle performed as a duo, Tuck & Patti, and young Clark carried their equipment and did her first gigs opening for them. She recalls her parents “thinking/hoping that I would be an architect” but she says that “they got it pretty early on that music was my thing”.
So it was a cultured household? “Yes and no,” she says. “My folks were not well off but they were well educated and they had a certain curiosity for culture that definitely exceeded their means. They were big readers. [My father] was big into James Joyce and would go on the lecture circuits to talk about James Joyce.”
He also taught her how to box, she says. “There was a stiff-upper-lip and toughness on my dad’s side, a good Irish Catholic family who never talk about anything,” she says. “I would always hear things like, ‘Toughen up. You’ll be fine. You shouldn’t cry unless you’re bleeding’ and stuff like that.”
This attitude stayed with her. “I’m kind of an athlete. If I get off stage and don’t feel like I’ve left everything on it, I feel like I’ve failed.”
Clark first came to notice playing in the Polyphonic Spree, but she was already working on her first record, 2007's Marry Me. "Sufjan Stevens heard it and asked me to play in his band and open for him and while I was opening for him in Europe, I got signed," she says.
“I started off quite shy,” she says. “[I was] wary of ‘performance’. I think I was hung up on some idea of authenticity, of being just purely about the music and not about the persona and not about anything else. So I hadn’t embraced the more performance aspect of things.”
People hear with their eyes
That has changed a lot. She currently collaborates with choreographer Annie-B Parson (who also works with the likes of Mikhail Baryshnikov) on her meticulously arranged live performances.
“I just wanted to make a show that I thought was really entertaining in the classical school entertainer sense, in a kind of James Brown sense,” she says, “but all of that had to be translated through my own body . . . The music will always be the most important thing but it’s more interesting to me to think through all of the visual aspects of it. I think a lot of times people hear with their eyes.”
However you hear it, her own music sounds like nobody else’s. She composes using a computer and does a lot of demoing and arranging before she ever goes into the studio. She likes leaving “little clues” in her music, she says, but she isn’t sure if people spot them.
"I mean there's something I just remembered about the record," she says. "The ascending pad of strings that come in on Regret underneath the second chorus [that's] actually the inverse of a line in a song on Strange Mercy." She sings the line. "Doo, doo, doo, doo . . . I don't know if anyone's picked up on that." She laughs. "Maybe that's not interesting at all."
She writes a lot of her guitar lines without a guitar, she says.
“I find that sometimes my ears are my biggest asset – and my ears are the things that will always keep my body reaching and they will always reach for things that I’m not quite able to play.
“It wouldn’t be instinctual. We rely on muscle memory a lot as guitar players, so anything we can do to get out of our rote muscle memory is a good thing. If it’s detuning your guitar so that you do the same thing but get different results, that’s good.
“Most of the riffs, I heard them as melodies or I loaded them into a computer and then learned how to play them on guitar.”
What would Miles do?
She recalls reading Miles Davis’s autobiography. “He said the hardest thing for any player to do is to sound like yourself and I just felt like whatever it is to sound like yourself I had done it most distinctly on this record.”
How would she describe the latest record? “At this point I know I should have a tagline: ‘A party record you can play at the funeral etc, etc’,” she sighs. “It’s been out for a year and I’ve been on the road for over a year but the fact is, I don’t know [how to describe it].”
What was it like working with David Byrne? “Working with David I liken to following David on a bicycle, which I did a number of times in various cities,” she says.
“You’re on the sidewalk one minute and the next minute the sidewalk ends and you’re on a highway racing with trucks and trying not to get run over and going, ‘Where the hell are we going?’ and then all of a sudden you’re at the most beautiful beach you’ve ever seen or an art gallery in a remote part of the south.
“There’s often that moment of trepidation, but then you end up with an amazing vista.” She laughs.
“So it was great. I don’t know that his mind ever turns off. I think the most exciting thing about him is that he never looks back. I’ve never met anybody with less nostalgia. It’s always about the next thing, the new project . . . he’s designed chairs and written books; he can knock up a bicycle. It’s very inspiring.”
Is she personally nostalgic? “No,” she says. “I’ve thought a lot about nostalgia and in some ways I find it quite cynical because it presupposes that the past is better than the future or the present, and I don’t believe that to be true.
Cynical
“And a lot of waves of nostalgia in music I find cynical. It’s strange. I like garage rock. But I’m not entirely sure that I want to hear an updated version of garage rock. But I understand its usefulness for kids who haven’t heard that genre before. ‘Oh, wow this is new to me!’ Every generation needs their new updated version.”
She tries not to take things too seriously. There’s quite a strong strain of humour running through her music. She acknowledges it as “a layer of absurdity”.
At some point during almost every show, she says, she looks around and thinks: “Wow, it’s a miracle that we’re all here engaging in this thing together. Isn’t it strange? Isn’t it absurd and life-affirming what brings us together?”
St Vincent plays the Iveagh Gardens in Dublin on July 10th and Galway International Arts Festival on July 14
