FEATURE:
Revisiting…
St. Vincent – Daddy’s Home
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AN album that turned one…
quite recently, I wanted to include St. Vincent’s (Annie Clark) Daddy’s Home in this Revisiting… Her incredible sixth studio album was co-produced with Jack Antonoff. Although it got some positive reviews, some did not give it as positive a take as they should. There was love around for St. Vincent’s amazing album, although it is not as shared and discussed now as it should be. I am going to come to a couple of reviews for Daddy’s Home soon. There are also a couple of good interviews with St. Vincent – one from this month; the other from 2021. I am going to start with The Forty-Five’s chat with her (they refer to her by her real name). I have selected a few passages that caught my eye:
“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.
Back then, she was aloof about meaning. In an interview we did that year, she called from a hotel rooftop in Phoenix and was fried from analytical questions. She excused her lack of desire to talk about ‘Strange Mercy’ as a means of protecting fans who could interpret it at will. Really she was protecting an audience closer to home. It’s clear now that the title track is about her father’s imprisonment (“Our father in exile/ For God only knows how many years”). Clark’s parents divorced when she was a child, and they have eight children in their mixed family, some of whom were very young when ‘Strange Mercy’ came out. She explains this discretion now as her method of sheltering them.
“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.
“Luckily I’m super tight with my family and the Daily Mail didn’t find anybody who was gonna sell me out,” she says. “They were looking for it. Clark girls are a fucking impenetrable force. We will cut a bitch.”
Luckily I’m super tight with my family and the Daily Mail didn’t find anybody who was gonna sell me out. Clark girls are a fucking impenetrable force. We will cut a bitch.
Four years later, Clark gets to own the narrative herself in the medium that’s most apt: music. “The story has evolved. I’ve evolved. People have grown up. I would rather be the one to tell my story,” she says, ruminating on the misfortune that this was robbed from her: a story that writes itself. “My father’s release from prison is a great starting point, right?” Between tours and whenever she could manage, Clark would go and visit him in prison and would be signing autographs in the visitation room for the inmates, who all followed her success with every album release, press clipping and late night TV spot. She joked to her sisters that she’d become the belle of the ball there. “I don’t have to make that up,” she says.
There’s an ease to Clark’s interview manner that hasn’t existed before. She seems ready not just to discuss her father’s story, but to own certain elements of herself. “Hell where can you run when the outlaw’s inside you,” she sings on the title track, alluding to her common traits with her father. “I’ve always had a relationship with my dad and a good one. We’re very similar,” she says. “The movies we like, the books, he liked fashion. He’s really funny, he’s a good time.” Her father’s release gave Clark and her brothers and sisters permission to joke. “The title, ‘Daddy’s Home’ makes me laugh. It sounds fucking pervy as hell. But it’s about a real father ten years later. I’m Daddy now!”
The question of who’s fathering who is a serious one, but it’s also not serious. Clark wears the idea of Daddy as a costume. She likes to play. She joins today’s Zoom in a pair of sunglasses wider than her face and a silk scarf framing her head. The sunglasses come off, and the scarf is a tool for distraction. She ties it above her forehead, attempts a neckerchief, eventually tosses it aside. Clark can only be earnest for so long before she seeks some mischief. She doesn’t like to stay in reality for extensive periods. “I like to create a world and then I get to live in it and be somebody new every two or three years,” she says. “Who wants to be themselves all the time?”
‘Daddy’s Home‘ began in New York at Electric Lady studios before COVID hit and was finished in her studio in LA. She worked on it with “my friend Jack” [Jack Antonoff, producer for Lana Del Rey, Lorde, Taylor Swift]. Antonoff and Clark worked on ‘Masseduction’ and found a winning formula, pushing Clark’s guitar-orientated electronic universe to its poppiest maximum, without compromising her idiosyncrasies. “We’re simpatico. He’s a dream,” she says. “He played the hell outta instruments on this record. He’s crushing it on drums, crushing it on Wurlitzer.” The pair let loose. They began with ‘The Holiday Party’, one of the warmest tracks Clark’s ever written. It’s as inviting as a winter fireplace, stoked by soulful horns, acoustic guitar and backing singers. “Every time they sang something I’d say, ‘Yeah but can you do it sleazier? Make your voice sound like you’ve been up for three days.” Clark speaks of an unspoken understanding with Antonoff as regards the vibe: “Familiar sounds. The opposite of my hands coming out of the speaker to choke you till you like it. This is not submission. Just inviting. I can tell a story in a different way”.
One of the very best albums of 2021, Daddy’s Home sounds even stronger and richer than it did last year! People need to revisit it and give it another spin. Featuring some of the best songwriting from St. Vincent, it is awash with incredible compositions. One immerses themselves in the album! This is what The Guardian wrote in their review:
“Only the title track concerns her father’s imprisonment and release, although his presence lurks over the album in more subtle ways. Its sound was apparently inspired by his record collection, which evidently majored in the early 70s. The whole album is liberally dressed with a synthesised sitar sound that cropped up on dozens of the era’s soul singles, from Freda Payne’s Band of Gold to the Stylistics’ You Are Everything. There are dabblings in the fingerpicked acoustic style of the era’s confessional singer-songwriters, the mock-showtune stylings of Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman and the electric piano-driven funk of Donny Hathaway or Stevie Wonder. Anyone with a passing acquaintance with Pink Floyd’s most successful album can’t fail to notice the influence of its more languid moments on Live in the Dream, which comes complete with the none-more-Floydian lyric, “Welcome child, you’re free of the cage / Trying to seem sane makes you seem so strange”.
But these don’t sound like lovingly crafted homages to the past. They seem more like parodies, of varying degrees of knowing grotesqueness. So Live in the Dream starts off not unlike Pink Floyd’s Us and Them, but gradually becomes more discordant and ramshackle: the squeak of fingers on guitar strings is louder than the actual guitar, the massed backing vocals clash with Clark’s voice and the sound of the track surges in a way that doesn’t sound stirring so much as sickly. The acoustic guitar figure of Somebody Like Me is pushed along a little too urgently by the tempo of the drums – it feels discomfiting, rather than warm and earthy – synthesiser tones wail, strings weave in and out of the mix. And, on the title track, the electric piano and syncopated drums sound gloopy and disconnected – funk you couldn’t possibly dance to – while the song’s theatrical affectations feel wilfully overblown and cartoonish: cooing the track’s title, the backing vocals have an eerie, mocking tone to them.
It’s all hugely impressive and striking, the familiar made subtly unfamiliar, Clark’s famously incendiary guitar playing spinning off at unexpected and occasionally atonal tangents, its effect simultaneously heady and disturbing. The implication seems to be that if Clark has been rifling through her father’s albums, they don’t sound the same to her as they once did: for whatever reason, the contents of his collection have taken on a warped, twisted quality.
The lyrics sound similarly unsettled, about everything from the prospect of parenthood – My Baby Wants a Baby wittily reworks the chorus of 9 to 5, Sheena Easton’s unironic 1980 paean to the pleasures of housewifery, slowing it to an agonised crawl in order to wrestle with the proverbial pram in the hall – to the very business of being St Vincent. For a decade now, Clark has invented a persona to inhabit on each new album: the “near-future cult leader” seated on a throne on the cover of 2014’s St Vincent, a latex-clad “dominatrix at a mental institution” for 2017’s Masseduction. There’s another on the cover of Daddy’s Home, in a blonde wig and stockings, the “benzo beauty queen” mentioned in the lyrics, who exudes such sleazy energy that, on opener Pay Your Way in Pain, parents feel impelled to shield their children from her (“the mothers saw my heels and they said I wasn’t welcome”).
But elsewhere, Clark seems conflicted about the whole business of playing with identity, flipping between songs projecting a character and songs that are clearly personal: not just the title track, but The Laughing Man’s eulogy for a late friend. On The Melting of the Sun, she lists a succession of soul-baring singer-songwriters and some of their most personal work – Tori Amos’s harrowing depiction of her rape, Me and a Gun; Nina Simone’s livid Mississippi Goddam; Joni Mitchell’s self-baiting exploration of musical “authenticity” Furry Sings the Blues – and finds herself wanting in their company: “Who am I trying to be? … I never cried / To tell the truth, I lied”.
It makes me wonder where St. Vincent will go next with her seventh studio album. Having mined a particular sound and sonic palette on Daddy’s Home, it will be fascinating hearing what she comes up with next. Daddy’s Home ranks alongside St. Vincent’s greatest albums. This is AllMusic’s take on as masterful work:
“Starting with St. Vincent's self-titled 2014 album, Annie Clark's artistic progression could be best described as a sharpening: Her sounds grew crisper and more angular, her lyrics ever more pointed. This approach peaked on MASSEDUCTION, which reflected a white-knuckle grip on image and identity in its high-definition pop. Control, or lack of it, is also a vital element on Daddy's Home. Using her father's return from jail for white-collar crime as a jumping-off point, Clark explores moral grey areas on songs that are as diffuse as her past few albums were taut. Her musical world-building remains as impressive as ever: Drawing on early-'70s sounds introduced to her by her father, she pays homage to a more permissive time as she traces the best and worst things carried through the generations. Clark's version of the '70s is filled with so many allusions it should have footnotes; alongside the bubbling Wurlitzers and Mellotrons, she name-drops John Cassavetes and Candy Darling. While the swaggering single "Pay Your Way in Pain" pays homage to David Bowie's "Fame" and "Live in the Dream" is a swirling tribute to Pink Floyd, not all the references are cooler than cool. On "My Baby Wants a Baby," which finds the song's protagonist admitting they want creative accomplishment more than a child, Clark borrows the melody from Sheena Easton's "9 to 5 (Morning Train)" (another song about the obligations of relationships) and a spangly sitar-mimicking guitar last heard on a B.J. Thomas single.
Hearing Clark try on the album's bell bottoms and leather vest vibe is entertaining, but though the musical lineage of Daddy's Home may be clearer than on any of her previous work, the same can't be said of its lyrics. With the notable exception of "Somebody Like Me"'s vulnerability, Clark's songwriting remains emotion-adjacent instead of directly confessional. She delivers the album's tenderest songs in the second person ("...At the Holiday Party'') or to long-gone icons ("Candy Darling"). On the wry title track, she brings a little levity to the situation while pondering its deeper ramifications ("Where can you run when the outlaw's inside you?"), continuing the concealing and revealing at which she's always excelled. Clark also revisits her own artistic past as well as her musical and familial influences. She's not mellowing with age -- "Down"'s brittle revenge-funk proves otherwise -- but the album is defined by its introspective tracks like "The Melting of the Sun"'s slow-motion tribute to female truth-tellers like Joan Didion, Marilyn Monroe, Nina Simone, and Tori Amos that also features some of Clark's most inspired guitar playing, and "The Laughing Man," a sardonic ballad that recalls Actor's Disneyfied dystopian reveries. Like the albums of the era it was inspired by, Daddy's Home takes time to unfold in listeners' imaginations. It's much more of a mood than anything else in her body of work, but its hazy reconciliation of the good and bad of the past makes it as an uncompromising statement from her as ever”.
I am going to finish with a recent interview between St. Vincent and CLASH . In addition to talking about politics and dealing with criticism, she nodded back to her sensational 2021 album:
“That journey has led her up to 2021’s ‘Daddy’s Home’, an album that once again found the artist embracing serious subject matter – namely, the release from prison of her father the previous year, following a nine-year stretch as part of a stock manipulation scheme – alongside “black humour,” apparently without fear of contradiction. Alongside all that, there was a shiny new St. Vincent persona inspired by Candy Darling, Cassavetes heroines, and a general love of early ’70s New York chic. But that wasn’t necessarily what drew critics’ fascination.
When I speak to Clark, it’s the day before the album’s first birthday. I wonder if she’s still bothered by how the world – and particularly the music press – received it. “The only thing in the reaction to it that I found quizzical, shall we say, was this idea that all art needs to be educational, and appropriate, and non-fiction,” she says. “Like, it either needs to be a blood-letting, or you need to be solving the prison industrial complex. It’s just some music!”
It's another issue that Clark sees as a representative of a more general malaise in society, a perceived ideology that refuses to allow art to exist in shades of grey. “Everything in the world is being viewed through that prism right now. But you know, that’ll pass. I think if there was anything in the criticism of it that had me scratching my head, it was just this idea that it needed to solve something.”
A slight pause. “It’s a record, my love.”
As an artist, she’s made mistakes, apologised to journalists for being a “royal dick”, grappled with the best use of her platform to leave the world a little better than she found it. But she’s not necessarily looking for validation from any of it. To paraphrase the narcotic lyricism of one of the more grandiose tracks on ‘Daddy’s Home’, Clark doesn’t live in the dream the world has painted around her; the dream lives in her.
“I guess what matters to me more is actually still mystery: going through the entire process of deconstructing everything, and still not having the answer. And I think it’s fine to not have the answer. Some days I think I have the answer, and other days I’m completely in the wilderness. And that’s okay. That’s okay with me, it really is,” she insists. “One thing that makes me feel good about what I do is that, at the end of the day, it’s music. It’s not exploitative. My highest aspiration is that it’s Beautiful with a capital B. But the rest is, like, shoulder shrug.
“And at the end of the day, it maybe makes some people’s lives better. So that’s great,” she says softly, almost to herself. “That’s great”.
If you have not heard St. Vincent’s Daddy’s Home, then I would advise you to do so. It is such a stunning album from an artist who keeps evolving and changing. A supreme producer, songwriter and musician, we are going to hear even more amazing albums from the incomparable St. Vincent. There is so much to enjoy through Daddy’s Home! If you are not aware of the album or have not heard it for a while, I would say that it worth…
SPENDING some time with.