the St. Vincent retrospective
~i can’t turn off what turns me on~
***NOTE: a couple of the featured photos are NSFW. kindly scroll with discretion :)***
it’s still libra season so what better way to honor this than to shine a light on one of my favorite musicians born under the sign? the subject of today’s post is none other than musician Annie Clark, known professionally as St. Vincent.
born on September 28th, 1982, Clark celebrated her 40th birthday this year — and having emerged onto the indie rock scene in the early 2000s, she’s been a fan favorite for many of those years. from 2007’s Marry Me to 2021’s Daddy’s Home, St. Vincent has specifically captivated listeners with witty, thought-provoking lyrics, masterful guitar playing, and artful evolutions of her musical persona.
i’ve been a fan of St. Vincent since around 2012/2013 — whenever i was a college freshman. it would have likely been college radio that made me officially dive into her discography, despite having encountered her name multiple times online prior. my discovery of her music would have happened not too long after the release of her 2011 critically acclaimed album Strange Mercy and 2012’s Love This Giant, a collab with art rock legend David Byrne.
following my musical awakening, i had to go back and do a deep dive to experience her aughties albums: 2009’s Actor and the debut Marry Me. that’s when i absolutely fell in love.
“best finest surgeon, come cut me open”
in sum, experiencing St. Vincent’s music for the first time is quite a treat. but to elaborate, being enchanted by her is really one of those “tell me you’re queer, without telling me” moments. first you feel it, then she kinda confirms it by telling Rolling Stone in 2014 that “I believe in gender fluidity and sexual fluidity. I don’t really identify as anything.” and in 2017 to the New Yorker “I’m queer, but the goal is to be free of heteronormativity. I’m queer, but queer more as an outlook.”
it reminds you of what you’ve never actually said until that point. then, you realize that’s what’s resonating — what’s being said in the music without being spelled out. that quiet knowing of subtext and context, but also some very obvious visual cues that would signal “IYKYK.”
i was the teenager who had went to a thespian convention and came back with a button that said “Mom, Dad…I’m a Thespian.” so even before i came across St. Vincent, i knew something. like many, i knew something when i first watched But I’m A Cheerleader as a pre-teen but i’m digressing.
circling back to the topic at hand, let’s take a look at the St. Vincent-related memorabilia in my collection. as i previously mentioned, Strange Mercy was my official introduction to St. Vincent’s music so i absolutely had to have this on vinyl.
i also have three posters (2 of them being the Stranger Mercy live cd/dvd promo, the other from the self-titled era1) and a ticket stub from her 2014 tour2. last but not least, i bought the deluxe LP version of Daddy’s Home back in 2021, which included a zine, a patch, and another poster.
“how can anybody have you? how can anybody have you and lose you? how can anybody have you and lose you and not lose their minds too??”
my copy of Strange Mercy has a stained cover jacket, which may slightly add to the mystique of what’s being portrayed. prior to owning the physical record, it took me a little while to decipher the album’s art — a mouth cloaked and choked by white latex.
visually, it’s like there’s a painful and subdued story longing to be told, growling and itching underneath the skin ready to be revealed. sonically, you can sense this longing in the lyrics and instrumentation across the album too — there’s a bubbling, hyperactive tone at the start which grows more pensive towards the end of the record.
many themes reappear in Clark’s work over the course of multiple studio albums — among them: the gritty underbelly of cities like New York and L.A. juxtaposed with her own suburban Dallas upbringing, classic signifiers of rock n’ roll with the aesthetics to match, an intellectual type of sex appeal, plus iconoclastic songwriting full of desire, existential dread, and anxiety.
“pay your way in pain”
fast forward to 2021’s Daddy’s Home and the plot thickens: interviews cite the release of Clark’s father from prison as partial inspiration behind this album — hence the name. upon further research, this legal battle and her grief surrounding it inform the subtexual matter of Strange Mercy too. with the albums being about 10 years apart, his sentence somewhat bookends these releases — Clark just went way more ‘70s with the sound and visuals the second time around.
but honestly, no one even really knew about her father’s prison stint for stock manipulation until her profile grew as Clark is a notably private person. but after famously dating model Cara Delevingne (10 years Clark’s junior), working with more mainstream producers, and winning Grammys, there was a time where the media shifted focus to her personal life.
The Nowhere Inn, the mockumentary that she co-wrote and co-starred in with Carrie Brownstein, vividly shows how this ascending star affected her during the MASSEDUCTION era3. released in 2020, this film seems to be her way of addressing certain rumors and cheekily getting in front of her own narrative4. in all honesty, it takes a while to warm up to this quirky, cerebral film, but it’s eventually worth the watch.
Clark’s role as St. Vincent is a masterclass in how a public persona can evolve gradually and gracefully. it’s performance art at it’s finest. she also seems very self-aware regarding this — The Nowhere Inn delves into the potential psychological consequences that could result when the lines between public and private are blurred.
and what hasn’t she done creatively? in addition to her forays into film and fashion, she’s even designed her own signature guitar that was thoughtfully crafted with a unique shape to be 1) more lightweight and 2) to be slimmer at the waist so it doesn’t detract from the natural waist and costume of the stage performer. what a considerate icon!
in spite of any tabloid fodder, Clark is as forthcoming as she thinks the audience deserves. her interviews read like she’s poetically piecing together all of these vignettes of inspiration and references in her mind, but ultimately allowing us as the viewers and listeners to make some of our conclusions.
i’ve been thinking a lot about the spectrum of discretion and vulnerability as of late; i believe that of any rockstar we’ve witnessed during the social media age, Clark is one of the most skilled at keeping the private moments sacred. and i appreciate her even more for it.
i could have sworn that i also had a physical copy of 2014’s St. Vincent, but it’s most likely that i would have borrowed the CD from the library to rip to Windows Media Player & add to my digital collection.
if you get a chance to see St. Vincent live, please do! the night i saw her on tour, i was living on campus and actually stumbled upon a set of lost tickets to the show blocks away from the venue. i already had my ticket so i turned these into the box office, but it just feels like i would have been destined to see her either way!
this week also marks 5 years since the release of MASSEDUCTION.
while Delevingne does not appear in the film, *spoiler* Dakota Johnson plays herself as a nepo-baby love interest of Clark’s, so subtlety rarely factors into this plot.