Annie Clark (St. Vincent)
Appearances
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
Yeah. I mean, children have... They might not have the lexicon to describe the emotions that they feel and the things they're intuiting, but they have all of the same emotions just in this tiny body. And I had... a lot of the anxiety emotion. I have a lot of fear. Um, and so hearing the kind of purge of that fear through Kurt Cobain and nevermind and, um, was liberating.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
It said to me, you're not alone. It said to me, um, we're all in this, like you have a tribe is what it said to me.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
Sorry. Absolutely. You just, you go, okay, okay, I'm not alone in this.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
I don't know. That's one that I don't know. I don't know where to put that experience. Because everyone wishes that Kurt was there doing that. And I wish that too. So I don't know where to put that experience. It feels very strange to be joyful about it.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
There's something in the structure of and building a really solid structure and foundation architecture of a show that to me feels safe. And what I mean by safe is that... Yeah, what is safe? What I mean by safe is that it means that I know that the show is always going to be at a certain level of quality because I've beta tested it, you know, extensively.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
And then so that I have this platform on top of that, just like baseline level of quality to experiment with exactly how emotional... it can be. And the thing about it is that performing night after night, it's a little bit like being an actor in that you need to be able to say your lines. You need to remember them. You need to stand in your light.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
You need to be, you know, have all the blocking down. Um, because at that point it's not about you and it's not about your experience in a So sometimes, sometimes I'm so in it and I'm reliving every moment of the heartbreak of the song and, and singing that. And then sometimes I am, um, totally disassociated, but I don't think you're outside your own body. It's hard to explain. It's,
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
You know, it's not, it's not unfortunately that like, you know, ghost floating above the bed looking down. It's not that, but, um, sometimes it is just this sort of, I, I went from this dot to that dot to that dot and we did the show.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
Well, a couple years ago, I was asked to be a part of an all-female horror anthology called The XX. And my ethos in life is to... do things that are scary. And luckily for me, most things are scary, so I do a lot of things. So I did this horror short, even though I don't like horror movies. Mine was more of a black comedy. It starred Melanie Alinsky, who was amazing. What was the plot? Oh, boy.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
I keep describing it as Weekend at Bernie's 2 meets Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It's like... It's like, oh, it's so stupid. A mother wakes up on the day that she is throwing her child a seventh birthday and she finds her husband dead of an overdose of some kind. And we don't know if it's suicide or an overdose.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
And she decides that hell or high water, she's going to throw her daughter, she's going to give her daughter a good birthday. no matter what. So she's sort of frazzled Elizabeth Taylor, hairstyled woman. And she hides the body and eventually hides the body in a
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
big bear suit and puts it at the front of the table as all the kids are you know coming in and they're about to blow blow out the candles at the cake and um he accidentally gets nudged by the nanny who's bringing in the cake and then his face falls into the cake and then the nanny takes the hood off and it reveals it's the dead dad and then the kids scream and it's over
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
Okay, so that was the entire plot of The Birthday Party. See it now, it's on Netflix. But the Oscar Wilde thing, yeah, I was approached by Lionsgate about being involved in an adaptation of Dorian Gray, but...
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
This is Toko Yasuda, who plays in my live band. I wanted her to pretend like she was an alien describing how to seduce someone, but in Japanese.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
um this time with a female protagonist and set in more or less modern times and i said yes i'm very interested in doing that but only if i can work with david burke who wrote l which is the french film um paul verhoeven and isabella pear it's the l is the best thing i've ever seen i am i'm totally obsessed with l and so i i contacted david scary as hell It's hilarious to me to be discussed after.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
Well, I'm going to play All You Need Is Love, the Beatles classic. I'm going to play New York. And I'm going to... I basically picked the saddest songs in my repertoire, of which there are many, but I picked the absolute most bleak for this party tonight. Glamorously sad songs. LAUGHTER
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
No, because I don't know how to play anyone else's songs.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
Because a couple of reasons. One, a totally self-serving one, which is that I love Japan and I want to be big in Japan so that I can go there all the time. I mean, I'm not above strategy.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
It's more or less kind of like a thesis. It's more or less, it contains all the characters that you meet on the album. It's... I thought of it like a graduate thesis or something.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
Um, I would say it's an exploration of power and the rosy sides of power, you know, and, and also the really the grim sides. I mean, the kinds of things that can have a total hold over you, be it, you know, drugs or sex or, um, Is it telling that those are the only two things I can think of? I know there's a third thing.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
It was a wild three years. Yeah, a lot of life happened in those three years, for sure.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
Yeah. I just, I hit a point where I just needed everything but the most vital things for creativity to just go away.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
Well, certainly off balance, yeah. Certainly off balance. I just needed to do sort of a radical reorganizing of my life in order to fulfill. This sounds really like a Tolkien thing or something, but in order to fulfill my destiny as a creative person, I needed to just clear a path.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
You know, otherwise just depression would take its jaws and just swallow me completely.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
I mean, well, one, I mean, talking about anxiety and depression, it seems like It doesn't seem like anything that's stigmatized to me anymore because all of my friends have dealt with it over their entire lives. So I've been a really anxious person since I was a kid.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
And more or less, I think that's helped me because I sought ways to cope with it creatively and felt safe in being able to make something.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
You know what? I don't want to overstate it because, um, because truly as it pertains to like drugs, I'm kind of a Pollyanna. I never really, like I, I still like, I've only seen cocaine like three times in my life, which is so stupid. Like you, you would think that it would just be, you know, be lying on people's naked bodies at parties, but that's just like not the vibe. So, um,
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
So I don't want to overstate it, but I was in a period of my life where I was working so much that I, and I didn't know how to get a hold of my life in any meaningful sort of centering kind of way. Um, and yeah, I was certainly relying on more pills than I should have been taking to deal with anxiety and depression. But I'm not anti-anti-depressant by any means or anything.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
Those kind of things have really helped me at certain times.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
Um, I will say there, there are definitely guitar moments on this album. It's not, it's not without guitar, but it's a funny, it's a funny thing. Um, the guitar, I've been playing it so long. I've been playing it for over 20 years. Um, which is weird cause I'm 25. So, um, no, I've been playing it for over 20 years. So it's so much a part of my person, you know? Um,
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
But there's a certain amount of guitar playing that is about pride that isn't about the song.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
Yeah. Yeah. Um, it just didn't, that's not the way that I want it. That's not the way that I want to hear guitar. And it's not the way that I want to present it in my music.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
Um, I want it to be like, like a perverse tornado or like, I want it to be, um, a lot of times really uncomfortable. I want it to be the one thing that comes in and disrupts the scene completely.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
Man. Do you ever feel like you have been coasting on the books you read in high school? Mm-hmm. because that's the time when you are just the most absorbent. In some ways, I feel like I've been coasting on the things I learned when I kind of first started playing guitar, when I was watching my uncle play.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
Oh, yeah. Tuck Andrus, he's one of the greats, one of the jazz finger style master. I mean, it's unbelievable. I forgot your question.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
Yeah, I think I'm not that interested in guitar being a means of poorly covered up pride.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
Some songs are hard labor. And I mean, every word, every note is just like deeply labored over until it finally gets to the right spot.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
Sometimes. Sometimes, yeah. Super hard. And then some songs feel like... They're floating around in the ether and they could have gone to your next door neighbor, but like you were the lucky recipient of them somehow. And New York was one of those songs that the melody and everything, it kind of came rather quickly.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
And it was one of those songs that I was, it felt like I just sort of pulled out of the ether more or less fully formed and was like, thank you. Thanks for that. Yeah.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
Black Like Me. I read that when I was 13.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
This was not assigned in school.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
Yes. And he does. And he's, um, brutalized and that something like that. Um, all of these things are empathy exercises. Um, and at its best, that's what, that's what art is. And I really, really, really firmly believe, and I wouldn't be doing what I do if I didn't, um,
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
that art, music, theater, film, I believe that those things change people's minds and make them more human and remind them of their humanity and thus the humanity of others.