FEATURE:
The Amazing Annie Clark
PHOTO CREDIT: Zackery Michael
Looking Ahead to the Release of St. Vincent’s Sixth Album, Daddy’s Home
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RATHER than do…
a Modern Heroines-style feature (which I have already included St. Vincent in), I wanted to shine a light on the magnificent Annie Clark (the women behind St. Vincent) and her exciting new album, Daddy’s Home. It arrives on 14th May. Many are predicting this will be her best album yet. Her sixth solo album is shaping up to be this fascinating and compelling work. Go and pre-order the album from Rough Trade:
“St. Vincent returns with an inspired album of her best work yet. Daddy's Home was produced by pop producer and long term collaborator Jack Antonoff. "The album was inspired by the classic records of the 70s. Stevie, Sly, Stones, Steely Dan, Chords, Groove. The days when sophisticated harmony and rhythm didn't sound heady - they just sounded, and felt good. Lots of guitar. But warm sounds, not distortion and chaos. Hopefully a turn nobody will see coming" - Annie Clark”.
I am going to bring in a few recent interviews where Clark discusses her new album and some of the themes/sounds that inspired it. As a songwriter and visionary, I sort of feel she is a modern-day David Bowie…in the sense she always innovates and creates this truly original music. Her style changes, and we have this chameleon-like artist who always fascinates. Whatever mode and guise she is in, she is always very much herself – in the sense that there is not another artist like St. Vincent.
I have been thinking about St. Vincent (I shall refer to her as the artist going forward) creating the album and what her life has been like over the past few months. That brings me neatly to an NME interview. In it, we learn what has been occupying the amazing St. Vincent, how she has progressed as an artist, and what we can expect from Daddy’s Home:
“It turns out that, over the past year, not even rock stars have been spared from the churn of incredibly wholesome pandemic hobbies. Forced away from the stage, Annie Clark, who makes and releases music as St. Vincent, has recently been unearthing some unlikely outlets for her creativity – with a newfound knack for home improvement that could give Changing Rooms a run for its money.
Now back in Los Angeles, with spectacular new album ‘Daddy’s Home’ on the way, Annie Clark is taking a well-earned break after remodelling her mum’s house to keep busy, and has been carefully cultivating a growing collection of power tools featuring “really legit drills and sanders and saws to do landscaping”. Tearing down interior walls and grouting tiles helped her to connect with her inner DIY daddy, she tells NME over the phone: “Once I turned those breakers off and started moving sconces around, I was like, I don’t need to call an electrician! I’m an expert after 15 minutes and a YouTube video.”
She adds, cheerfully: “If you need any plumbing done, or – God – a wall poorly painted, give me a call. I’m your girl.”
Since 2003, ‘this music thing’ has led 38-year-old Clark in a variety of directions – from playing in American choral rock band the Polyphonic Spree and singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens’ live bands early on to her 2012 collaborative album with David Byrne, ‘Love This Giant’, and her own storied solo career. Her previous record, 2017’s ‘MASSEDUCTION’, saw St. Vincent push her harsh, angular sonics to their glam-rock conclusion. This was a precise and severe-sounding web of tousling power dynamics; a leopard print-clad ass peeked out of its neon-hued cover.
Oozing with lust, desire and selfishness, it often returned to the unspoken gulf between what people say they want, and what people truly want at their core. A whirlwind of unidentified pharmaceuticals, ‘Pills’ depicted a narrator gobbling down prescriptions and rushing home “to give head to the money I made,” while ‘Los Ageless’ painted the city as a sleazy and seductive trap of a place. Like the burned-out, barbiturate-sipping housewife at the heart of Joan Didion’s 1970 novel Play It As It Lays, St. Vincent’s protagonist also tries to escape it by compulsively racing her car down the freeways in search of yet more self-destruction.
For ‘Daddy’s Home’, St. Vincent has transformed herself again – this time, into a ’70s singer-songwriter type crusading around New York City with a tumbler of bourbon permanently in hand, expensive perfume and cigarette smoke in her hair. “Imagery-wise, there’s this one side which is the really coquettish daddy’s girl, which is really just so pervy,” Clark says, “and the other side is wearing the suits and the more daddy vibe. I think it might be my funniest album title?” she muses aloud. “My funniest since ‘Marry Me’.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Zackery Michael
Another major inspiration was Candy Darling, an American actor and trans woman who later became a muse for The Velvet Underground, Lou Reed and Andy Warhol. As Clark puts it, she “lived within and presided over it all”, becoming a fixture in fashionable Manhattan. The closing song of St. Vincent’s record is named after Darling, who died in 1974 aged just 29, and imagines waving her off on the “latest uptown train” with armfuls of bodega roses.
“I just got pretty obsessed with her,” she continues. “I had a friend who was friends with her, and was at her bedside when she died, and I just started thinking about her. She was from Queens, which was not geographically far, but may as well have been a lifetime away from Manhattan. She invented herself there, and got to become herself in Manhattan,” Clark says. “I just kept picturing that we were all on the platform seeing her off and she was taking that last uptown train to heaven, slow motion waving with the tiniest bit of subway wind in her hair.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Zackery Michael
Often ‘Daddy’s Home’ returns to the image of a fallen angel or the myth of Icarus: tragic figures killed after flying too close to the sun. The title track, meanwhile, is autobiographical, recalling Clark signing makeshift autographs in the visitation room before her father left jail. “We’re all born innocent but some good saints get screwed,” she sings, “Hell where can you run when the outlaw’s inside you?”
And though ‘Daddy’s Home’ is more patently autobiographical than anything the musician has done before, it still stems from a fantastical world populated by down-and-out characters – and despite shedding light on some of the experiences that led here, Clark is opaque as ever when it comes to defining the meaning of her music. Though she’s said that this is partly an album about her self-discovery in the decade during which her father was incarcerated, she won’t elaborate on what exactly she’s learned – nifty DIY skills aside”.
The reason for bringing in a few interviews is that, in each, we learn something new. There will be more promotion before the album arrives but, with two singles from the album out already – Pay Your Way in Pain, The Melting of the Sun –, there is a lot of intrigue and excitement. I love the direction St. Vincent has taken on Daddy’s Home. There are elements of 1970s’ music sprinkled together with some arresting imagery and lyrics. This is covered in an interview St. Vincent conducted with The Forty-Five:
“On ‘Daddy’s Home’, Clark writes about a past derelict New York; a place Los Angeles would suffocate in. “The idea of New York, the art that came out of it, and my living there,” she says. “I’ve not given up my card. I don’t feel in any way ready to renounce my New York citizenship. I bought an apartment so I didn’t have to.” Her down-and-out New York is one a true masochist would love, and it’s sleazy in excess. Sleaze is usually the thing men flaunt at a woman’s expense. In 2021, the proverbial Daddy in the title is Clark. But there’s also a literal Daddy. He came home in the winter of 2019.
On the title track, Clark sings about “inmate 502”: her father. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison for his involvement in a $43m stock fraud scheme. He went away in May 2010. Clark reacted by writing her third breakthrough album ‘Strange Mercy’ in 2011; inspired not just by her father’s imprisonment but the effects it had on her life.“I mean it was rough stuff,” she says. “It was a fuck show. Absolutely terrible. Gut-wrenching. Like so many times in life, music saved me from all kinds of personal peril. I was angry. I was devastated. There’s a sort of dullness to incarceration where you don’t have any control. It’s like a thud at the basement of your being. So I wrote all about it,” she says.
PHOTO CREDIT: Zackery Michael
“I am protective of my family,” she says. “It didn’t feel safe to me. I disliked the fact that it was taken as malicious obfuscations. No.” Clark wanted to deal with the family drama in art but not in press. She managed to remain tight-lipped until she became the subject of a different intrusion. As St. Vincent’s star continued to rocket, Clark found herself in a relationship with British model Cara Delevingne from 2014 to 2016, and attracted celebrity tabloid attention. Details of her family’s past were exposed. The Daily Mail came knocking on her sister’s door in Texas, where Clark is from.
The entire record is familiar, giving the listener the satisfaction that they’ve heard the songs before but can’t quite place them. It’s a satisfying accompaniment to a pandemic that encouraged nostalgic listening. Clark was nostalgic too. She reverted to records she enjoyed with her father: Stevie Wonder’s catalogue from the 1970s (‘Songs In The Key Of Life’, ‘Innervisions’, ‘Talking Book’) and Steely Dan. “Not to be the dude at the record store but it’s specifically post-flower child idealism of the ’60s,” she explains. “It’s when it flipped into nihilism, which I much prefer. Pre disco, pre punk. That music is in me in a deep way. It’s in my ears.”
Clark is interested in the new generation. She’s recently tweeted about Arlo Parks and has become a big fan of Russian singer-songwriter Kate NV. “I’m obsessed with Russia,” she says. In a recent LA Times profile, she professed to a pandemic intellectual fixation on Stalin. “Yeah! I mean right now my computer is propped up on stuff. You are sitting on The Gulag Archipelago, The Best Short Stories Of Dostoyevsky andThe Plays Of Chekhov. I’m kinda in it.” The pop world interests Clark, too. She was credited with a co-write on Swift’s 2019 album ‘Lover’. At last year’s Grammys she performed a duet with Dua Lipa. It was one of the queerest performances the Grammys has ever aired”.
I am going to wrap it up soon. Before that, an interview from Esquire really caught my eye. With inspiration taken – in terms of the album title and a lot of the material – from her father’s time in prison, it is interesting to see how she views that experience. St. Vincent also talked about a recent songwriting and creativity masterclass, and the vibe of Daddy’s Home:
“We're curious about your dad and the American legal system.
I have had a lot of questions about that. For some reason it didn’t occur to me how much I would be answering questions about… my hilarious father!
How do you view his time in prison?
Just that life is long and people are complicated. And that, luckily, there’s a chance for redemption or reconciliation, even after a really crazy traumatic time. And also anybody that has any experience with the American justice system will know this... nobody comes out unscathed.
You recently presented an online MasterClass: "St. Vincent Teaches Creativity & Songwriting". One of the takeaways: “All you need are ears and ideas, and you can make anything happen”. Who’s had the best ideas in music?
Well, you’ve got to give credit to people who were genuinely creating a new style – like if you think of Charlie Parker, arguably he created a new style. This hard bop that was just absolutely impossible to play. It was, like, “Check me out – try to copy me!” So, that’s interesting. I think Brian Eno, for sure, has some great ideas about music – and obviously has made some of the best music. Joni Mitchell – completely singular. I mean: think about that. There are some people who are actually inimitable – like, you couldn’t possibly even try to imitate them.
PHOTO CREDIT: Erik Carter for Rolling Stone
The new album has a very “live” Seventies feel. I’d read that some of the tracks are first takes. Can that be right? It all sounds very complicated.
That’s not right. I should say [rock voice] "Yeah, that’s right, we just jammed…" But, you know, I’ll be honest. There are some vocal takes in there that are first takes. But it really is just the sound of people playing. We get good drum takes. And good bass takes. And I play a bunch of guitar and sitar-guitar. And it’s the sound of a moment in time, certainly. And way more about looseness and groove and feel and vibe than anything else [I’ve done before].
Amazing live albums, virtuoso playing, jamming – those were staples of Seventies music. Have we lost some of that?
I mean, I can wax poetic on that idea for a minute. In the Seventies you had this tremendous sophistication in popular music. Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan and funk and soul and jazz and rock…. and all of the things rolled into one. That was tremendously sophisticated. It just was. There was harmony, there were chord.
What else from that decade appealed to you for Daddy’s Home?
It reminds me of where we are now, I think. So, 1971-1976 in downtown New York, you’ve got the Summer of Love thing and flower children and all the hippy stuff and it’s, like, “Oh yeah, that didn’t work out that well. We’re still in Vietnam. There’s a crazy economic crisis, all kinds of social unrest”. People stood in the proverbial burned-out building. And it reminds me a lot of where we are today, in terms of social unrest, economic uncertainty. A groundswell wanting change... but where that’s headed is yet to be seen. We haven’t fully figured that out. We’re all picking up pieces of the rubble and going “Okay, what do we do with this one? Where do we go with that one?” Being a student of history, that was one of the reasons why I was drawn to that period in history.
Also: that’s the music I’ve listened to more than anything in my entire life. I mean, I was probably the youngest Steely Dan fan. It didn’t make me that popular at sleepovers. People were, like, “I want to listen to C+C Music Factory” and I was, like, “Yeah, but have you heard this solo on [Steely Dan’s] ‘Kid Charlemagne’”? That music is so in me. It’s so in my ears and I feel like I never really went there [making music before]. And I didn’t want to be a tourist about it. It’s just that particular style had a whole lot to teach me. So I wanted to just dig in and find out. Just play with it”.
I am excited about the upcoming release of Daddy’s Home. St. Vincent is, to me, one of the most compelling and inspirational modern artists. She is a phenomenal songwriter, musician and creative that is influencing so many people. Whilst she will release a lot more music, Daddy’s Home is going to be a huge release! I wonder whether there will be a short film or documentary around the release of the album because, in terms of its themes and inspirations, there is a lot of personal weight and family in it. Brace yourself for a phenomenal album from…
A modern-day genius.