Speaking to Annie Clark occasionally felt a little awkward, and it wasn’t just in the way that phone conversations with transatlantic lags can do, nor because “anyone trying to speak to her would just be crippled with a schoolgirl-like giggling fit” as a fellow writer suggested. However it’s only listening back and transcribing that I noticed particularly why: the lack of likes, kindas and incoherent sentences one commonly finds in conversation are replaced by frequent pauses (accentuated by the connection), much consideration over each word uttered and a frank matter-of-factness. In essence, Clark’s extremely professional interview patter is almost as chiseled as her immaculate image and idiosyncratic, thoughtful records. Almost to the extent that it’s a little worrying – you have to wonder if she even sweats sometimes.
St. Vincent’s self-titled new album, out this month, follows hot on the heels of lengthy tours on the back of her own previous solo record, 2011’s Strange Mercy and the slower-burning brass-based collaboration with David Byrne in 2012, Love This Giant. The latter in particular prospered on the back of a stunning, choreographed, large ensemble live show (hinting at Byrne’s production values rather than Clark’s).
St. Vincent is tauter, sharper and groovier than Clark has proffered before, part-inspired by the reaction to the Byrne tour, but still feels woven from the same threads as her previous high-watermark Strange Mercy, with Clark’s dirty, skronking guitar filling the foreground against queasily inorganic, synth-heavy backdrops.
Meanwhile the visual presentation, inspired by the Memphis Design Movement, mirrors this feel of the sound with Clark’s electric shock hair and Star-Trek-alien dresses gives off ‘near-future cult leader’ vibes, slightly terrifying but human rather than robotic.
The title of the new record is quite plain – it’s just self-titled – why is this?
I was reading Miles Davis’ autobiography and he talks about how the hardest thing for a musician to do is to sound like yourself – and I would agree with that. It’s one thing to learn how to sing or play some notes, but it’s another thing to have a voice. And I feel like I do on this record, so I self-titled it.
Was there a distinct concept that you wanted to spell out? On *Love This Giant*, working with a lot of brass instruments was a very definitive parameter. Was there something similar on this record?
I wanted it to have the feel of humans but the sound of machines, so what you hear on the record is really people playing in a room – really good players playing – but it’s been synthesised and made to sound more inhuman. And I was really thinking about the energy of the live show, what’s going to make something that I can really dig into live. So all of that informed this [record].
Digital Witness seems to be mulling over this over-exposure that becomes available to people connecting through the internet, do you think its really a shift in behaviour of people or do think the scale of it has changed?
We’re very obsessed with documenting our lives these days. And anything that is being watched and knows that it’s being watched changes it’s behaviour, so I just was curious about how we are changing our behaviour with the knowledge that we’re being watched. I mean we’re being watched by the NSA here in the States and then also documenting ourselves – the mundane has been put on a pedestal. So I’m just curious about how that’s affecting us in the long term. But I don’t look at it as a wholly bad thing at all, I’m just exploring the idea of what it is and trying to unpack it for myself because I find myself using technology compulsively and sometimes looking for things in technology, looking for a connection in technology that actually is something that I should be looking inwards for.
It certainly seemed that Arcade Fire were trying to reinstate a record’s release as a monumental thing – I think because it’s gone away because people absorb music digitally and it’s so easy to come by. I think maybe it’s a nostalgic thing, people talking about the same event.
When records used to come out it *was* a big event. I think Beyoncé did a really smart thing which is rather than putting all that capital into marketing a record, she put that money into creating more content, so that the record itself was more than a record. Obviously that wouldn’t work for everybody because you have to have an enormous amount of capital to get things made on that scale and that quality, but also because she’s the biggest popstar in the world right now so there’s a level of interest and intrigue for what she would do that not everybody has. But it certainly was a game-changing thing. We don’t have the same technological constraints that we used to have. It used to be that, okay, a vinyl LP held 20-minutes of music per side, so that’s where album-oriented rock music – re-thinking what a record could be, because it wasn’t all about the singles format. Then with CDs you have 75 minutes of music until people started making longer records in the ‘90s which was sort of ill-fated and fatiguing! But now you don’t have the same hardwired, hardware constraints that say ‘A record is 40 minutes long; that’s what a record is’. So I think in the coming years you’ll see a whole series of ideas in rethinking what a digestible form of music is and you’re going to see people start to branch off from this antiquated idea of an ‘album’. It works out nice in a couple of ways because of when touring, 10 songs is about as much new material as you want to bring out to your fans at one time, but I just think that there’s a whole lot of other ways to go with it that people are going to start experimenting with even more.
How was it working with David Byrne – with an equal partner in that kind of creative relationship?
I think the main take-away from working with David was that he’s totally fearless and he never looks back and he’s always in-the-moment. That was really inspiring to be around because when you remove fear, really anything is possible. So I approached what I was doing, going forward with that similar spirit – anything is possible, I can do whatever I want – so that’s the main thing I’d say.
St. Vincent is out on Loma Vista Records on Friday February 21st.
