Why St. Vincent’s Self-Titled Album Matters
The importance of Annie Clark’s fourth LP 10 years later
St. Vincent was a busy woman in the early 2010s.
Not that she’d been known extended time off since she left behind gigs like being one of the assembled multitudes in Polyphonic Spree and being in Sufjan Stevens’ touring band.
But her self-titled album, released ten years ago today, was the product of a particularly active time.
Annie Clark, who’d taken the St. Vincent name from Nick Cave’s 2004 song “There She Goes, My Beautiful World,” spent the latter months of 2010 and much of 2011 working on the album Strange Mercy.
The following year, she started a tour for it, but then threw in the release of Love This Giant, an album she’d worked on with David Byrne since 2009. That album also had tour dates off-and-on for a year, into the fall of 2013.
Towards the end of that tour, Clark started work on what would become St. Vincent. “I got a good night’s sleep and laid around on the couch, and then the next day I was writing again,” she told Brooklyn Mag in 2014. “I didn’t have a big plan. I started just taking things out of my little idea chest and without any judgment going, ‘Oh, what’s this? What’s this? Can these go together?’ and just writing pretty furiously.”
Her long-time producer John Congleton told Consequence in 2022: “The self-titled record really bled in from the last record, so it’s hard to even remember when we stopped or started. But by the time we were making that record, there was obviously an audience and we were aware of that. But it didn’t really change the process too much other than the fact that she was very busy at that point.”
Lead single “Birth In Reverse” started a day or two after Clark got home from the end of the tour with Byrne. She wrote the song “Music first, but I had mouthed — certain syllables and sounds were suggesting themselves when I was singing gibberish to the melody,” according to a Salon interview.
The key was remembering the title phrase in Lorrie Moore’s book Birds in America, which referred to the way a room opened up.
VIDEO: St. Vincent “Birth In Reverse”
Clark started singing it as the chorus, which unlocked the rest of the chorus, if not its full meaning.
“I wrote the chorus, and I took it into the studio and I actually even, I sang it — I laid down the whole track — with the sense that it was right, it was right for the song,” she told Salon. “Without the sense that I had every nook and cranny of this figured out. And John Congleton, my producer, was like, ‘Wow this is — so a birth in reverse is death right?’ And I said, ‘Oh my god! You’re right.’ For some reason — that’s exactly what death is — that never occurred to me.
The song itself is too frantic to sound like the Grim Reaper’s approaching, with its lyrics seemingly glimpsing into a high-strung modern life: “Oh, what an ordinary day/Take out the garbage, masturbate/Ha, I’m still holding for the laugh.”
Musically, it playfully melded the avant garde (the guitar sounds Clark injects) with the accessible (the chorus).
“Digital Witness” marries the funky sheen of its music (staccato horns and all) with commentary on social media oversharing in the pre-TikTok era where Instagram was in its dominant period –“Digital witnesses, what’s the point of even sleeping?/If I can’t show it, if you can’t see me/What’s the point of doing anything?”
There’s a certain seeming irony in a song that takes a look at the performative aspects of social media from someone who seemingly needed to perform the way sharks need to swim.
But then again, Clark tends to be one of the least public people in the public eye. While not inscrutable, if you want to know which of her lyrics are the most personal, you’re going to have to guess. She’s not here to spell it out for you.
VIDEO: St. Vincent “Digital Witness”
The loping trip hop groove of “I Prefer Your Love” is an exception. Written about her mother, who was fighting (and beating) a serious illness at the time, it’s the album’s most moving song.
It’s apparent in her voice, as it took her just one take to do the vocals, after which tears were shed.
The “I prefer your love to Jesus” line in the chorus is provocative on its face. But then you realize that it’s not about casting aside faith, but rather coming from a woman in her early 30s, facing the threat of losing a parent (“All the good in me is because of you”), wanting continued real affection rather than comfort from an unseen deity.
“Rattlesnake” was inspired by an encounter Clark had au naturel with a rattlesnake on a friend’s Texas ranch (basically involving running to safety and drinking tequila). Its electronic groove burrows under the skin as Clark grows progressively more distressed before unleashing a memorable guitar solo where bleeding for her art was not a metaphor.
“I was obsessed with playing on one string to get this serpentine sound,” she told Rolling Stone in 2014. “So you play it like a violinist: You overshoot the note, slide into it. I sliced the fuck out of my finger.”
“Huey Newton” came from a day on tour in Finland where Clark took an Ambien to get over jet lag. Rather than sleep, she wound up semi-awake and hallucinating a conversation with the murdered Black Panther leader in her sleep.
The lyrics, which are basically Clark free associating, reflect that not fully awake state. The music does as well, as she spends the first half of the song singing liltingly over a loop-driven groove before the keyboards get louder, heralding the arrival of fuzzed-out bass and guitar. It works as a random dream shift and continued exploration of what she directly spelled out in “Digital Witness,” tossing out lines like “I’m entombed in a shrine / Of zeroes and ones / You know.”
The arrangements weave around more on “Regret” — the distorted power chords on the verses, the melodic vocals and the gliding bass on the choruses, all anchoring its themes of isolation.
“Prince Johnny” is, like “I Prefer Your Love”, set up to let Clark’s vocals take the lead, all the better to put across notions of offering comfort against self-destruction, sometimes mutual.
It also plays with gender exploration, a topic that would soon make right-wing extremists, the type who believe people’s bodies are state property, angry.
““It’s unpacking some of what it means to be a ‘real girl’ and a ‘real boy,’ ” Clark told Rolling Stone. “We get handed down these ideas of gender and sexuality: You’re supposed to be this or that. What happens if you float around the cracks and don’t fit into these narrowly prescribed things?”
“Psychopath” is shimmering dance pop (inspired by a date that led to friendship instead of romance), yet another reminder that Clark’s way with words extends to when she’s not singing words at all.
Things get weird on “Bring Me Your Loves”, which Clark herself described as “totally bananas.” It’s more disorienting than lusty fare usually gets, but she gets off a great line in “We both have our rabid hearts/Feral from the very start.”
If isolation induced by social media and modern living in general permeates St. Vincent, Clark keeps trying to find a crack in that wall. She does through the shifting rhythms of “Every Tear Disappears”, where she pleads “Come on 21st Century/Give us a break.” There’s no shortage of irony in that lyric, given how authoritarianism seemed so much less of a threat ten years ago.
VIDEO: St. Vincent performs “Severed Crossed Fingers” on Austin City Limits
Clark returns to that Lorrie Moore short story collection again, taking the title of “Severed Crossed Fingers” from it. It might seem bizarre that a sentence like, “He thinks of severed, crossed fingers found perfectly survived in the wreckage of a local plane crash last year” could wind up inspiring a lovely song. But then again, consider the artist we’re talking about.
Even with its imagery, there’s a hopeful sway to it, of trying to work things out, even in vain, until the end.
Clark’s confidence and command throughout St. Vincent remains intoxicating, due in no small part to the creative groove she was in.
“This album was more relaxed as a writing effort. I wasn’t really white-knuckling it,” she told the Guardian in 2014. “It was kind of like … I don’t have children, but this is what I imagine having children would be like. I’m from a family with a lot of kids, and I was later down the line … by the third kid, or the seventh kid, you’re just like: ‘Yeah, stay out as late as you want! Do whatever!’ You learn to just let them be what they want to be.”
That looseness went hand-in-hand with her awareness of a growing audience. Rather than feel pressure, she trusted her instincts as usual, knowing that’s where the audience came from in the first place.
Part of what made the album distinctive is that, while nobody would mistake it for left-of-the-dial, late at night avant garde, Clark was willing to embrace weird touches.
As she told the Guardian: “A lot of the sounds are just conventional instruments that are manipulated by my dear friend John Congleton to the point where they sound a little alien or perverse. There are certain sounds that are just like: ‘Ooh, that’s the creepy guy hanging out at the kids’ playground!’ It makes me feel uncomfortable, but I like it.”
At the same time, Clark was more accessible and direct than she had been. Even if one doesn’t know the specific who or what, in most cases, the emotion came through. “I think you can’t write about things you don’t know, or don’t [at least] know on some kind of intuitive, emotional level,” she told the Guardian.
As frustrating and fatigue-inducing as the stresses of 21st Century life were at that point, there was a warmth to the songwriting.
She told Oxford Student: “I wanted to make a record that had the feel of human beings but the sound of machines. So everything is a real instrument, it’s just been distorted to the point where it sounds inorganic.” The results still feel like flesh and blood, with a degree of absurdist wit.
The album’s cover signaled Clark’s willingness to play with her persona. Her brunette curls are wilder, with more volume, dyed gray. While Memphis designed chairs were known for their impracticality for homes, this one on which she sits in a dress here is perfect to function as a throne, the overall look she described as “near-future cult leader.”
The album made numerous year-end critics lists while audiences also responded. The St. Vincent tour kept Clark busy, with the first dates that February and the final ones in late Summer of 2015.
Clark did something unusual when that tour finished. She took a break.
The next album, the sleek, more personal Masseduction didn’t arrive until October, 2017. The theatrical, retro Daddy’s Home was released in May, 2021. Both saw Clark move on to working with omnipresent producer Jack Antonoff.
Thus, St. Vincent stands as the final album in a period of constant artistic motion, where albums and tours bled together and Clark seemed unacquainted with the phrase “extended time off.”
A decade later, the album’s themes haven’t dated themselves as the social media landscape has only mutated since. Rather than read as simple hectoring about the evils of the internet, it dwells in the gray where social media personae can reveal our true selves (and the fluidity of those selves) as much as they can obscure it.
Musically, it’s as intriguing and entrancing as the day of its release. If it’s not her peak (Masseduction has a strong case), at worst, it’s the K2 to its successor’s Everest.
With results like that, staying busy definitely paid off.
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