Song Exploder - St. Vincent - New York

Episode Date: August 15, 2017

Annie Clark grew up in Texas, studied the guitar, and moved to New York in the mid-2000s. She started recording and performing under the name St Vincent in 2006. She’s released five albums, and won a Grammy for Best Alternative Album in 2014. Earlier this year, in 2017, St Vincent released this song, called “New York,” partly inspired by the city and neighborhood she calls home, although nowadays, Annie splits her time between coasts, with a studio in Los Angeles. She collaborated on this song with Grammy-winning producer Jack Antonoff. songexploder.net/st-vincent

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. This episode contains explicit language. Annie Clark grew up in Texas. She studied the guitar and moved to New York in the mid-2000s. She started recording and performing under the name St. Vincent in 2006. She's released five albums. She won a Grammy for Best Alternative album in 2014.

Earlier this year, in 2017, St. Vincent released this song, called New York. about the city and neighborhood she calls home. Although nowadays, Annie splits her time between coasts. I spoke to her about this song at her studio in Los Angeles. And if you missed it earlier, just a heads up that this episode contains explicit language. A lot of explicit language. Starting. I get a lot of pleasure from saying fuck.

I love that word. It's so satisfying. It's such a satisfying word to say. It just came out. I mean, it was just very natural. The only motherfucker in the city. and I just like the idea of using, you know, really blue language as a term of endearment. This motherfucker, like that motherfucker, no way.

Like, motherfucker better get his shit together. I think it's funny. You know, my mother would be horrified, but I've been cursing like a sailor since I was eight. I mean, it's just how you talked on the playground in public school in Dallas. So I'm sure there are a lot of people who find it objectionable. All of them, I apologize for your ears, but I just, it's, Motherfucker says like, I know you inside and out. I know you.

And you know me. Like, don't pretend. My name is Annie Clark and I make music as St. Vincent. The original genesis of the song was, I was back in New York and I texted a friend of mine who had moved away. New York isn't New York without you. And I was like, oh, hmm, maybe I'll squirrel that away. New York isn't New York without you love. I still live in New York sometimes. I don't think I can ever give up that as part of my homeland or identity. But ask me tomorrow and I'll say that Texas

is my heart and soul. And then there's Los Angeles, which is fine, which is nice. The weather's great. But New York has my heart and my favorite people in the world. There was another line that I kept kicking around, which was, I've come so far in these few blocks, which, again, was about my neighborhood in New York. And so that became so far in a few blocks to be solo. So far in a few blocks to be so low. Which is a pun, to be alone and so low. So I wrote it on guitar

At this point Annie pulled out her phone And hit play on a voice memo recording Oh boy Then we go Then it turns into Lilith Fair Oh no You know what my worst nightmare is

That my voice memos get like Hacked in like Way more than like nude photos Or anything Like no one needs to hear But then I ended up, I decided it wasn't a guitar song anyway. I was working on it with Jack Antonoff.

We were in Jack Antonov studio in New York, and he just started playing it on piano, and it was so nice. If people are aware of my music, they know that I play guitar, but if the song is best suited for piano, insisting that I play it on guitar is really just this, like, insane act of ego. Why would I, you know, why would I do that? It's a certain amount of maturity that says, like, I don't need to paint with all the colors all the time. So when Jack and I put the outline of the song together, and he'd played the piano part originally.

And then I went to my friend Thomas Bartlett, who's just my favorite piano player. He's the guy who played on all the national records. And so I threw it to Thomas, and he played on it because he has this really lovely upright, and he has felt on the strings, and so he just gets this very intimate kind of pillowy sound. He's just a real genius. So I had the verses, but I felt like the verses were so airtight

that I wasn't sure exactly where to... I knew it needed something else. I knew it needed another section, but I was kind of waiting patiently for that section to come about. And then Jack Antonoff, He put a really beautiful set of chords in between the second verse and the third verse and said, you know, I think it needs to breathe. I was like, yeah, I like these chords.

And then I had this other song that I was working on called We Were in Paris, and it had the line, I've lost a hero, I've lost a friend, but for you, darling, I'd do it all again. I was like, maybe I can take that melody and put it here. Because you just have to be ruthless with parts and go, is this serving the song? Is this good enough? And so I was like, oh, this melody works over these chords. The line for me, I've lost a hero, it's referencing the kind of spectral figures of our collective heroes. But it's also very personal for me.

And 2016 was like, the earth was like, let's purge ourselves of geniuses. And it's very silly to make something like, David Bowie's death about me. I mean, it has nothing to do with me, but I will say that I was really, I was really affected and I cried. I really, I cried for somebody I didn't even know. And I don't know that I've ever done that before. And a lot of people were affected by his death, but it's just, you're like, you can't die. And then Prince a few months later, it was, oof then Leonard Cohen It's just like what in the world is going on

but it's not just about our big heroes New York is really a composite for me it's everybody I love in that song it's everybody I love and it's everybody in New York it's my whole life in a song Jack has a modular synth set up I mean okay here's the truth

I also have a modular synth but it takes me about seven years to get one mediocre sound so but Jack actually knows how to use his modular synth so he put that on there I really like the intimacy of just two people in a room and I trusted his instinct

yeah he just put a lot of pretty things in there and it was lovely that's Jack on a Model D which is some Mogue It's model left or a mini mode, but it's kind of modernized version of it. It's like a comma. It says, and here we go. It's kind of like a wind-up, wind down, like, and here's the punchline.

And if I call you from first, I've been new, the only motherfucker in the city who can handle me. At this point, again, speaking of guitar player ego, I was like, you know, I really should put some guitar on this. There just wasn't any obvious thing. It's not like it needed a guitar solo. It didn't really need a counter melody. So we experimented with adding a couple bars of like swelling, feedbacky tremolo guitars. Jack put those to help swell into the next section.

The drum part is a four on the floor. so much of my musical life has kind of been spent on wishing live drums sounded different than live drums sounded different than live drums sound so I was way less tweaky on like well we've got to make a drum part that's clever I just wanted to write these just airtight songs and so everything was just in support of the song so it's just a really simple beat augmented by the modular sense and the arping mogue. You just want it to go. You just want this feeling of quiet propulsion. And then I said, let's get your Model D. And I said, let's do some of those like filter sweeps of the kind of sounds. Because I don't want a symbol, but I want just the feeling of just like a big,

exhale. After I finished my last record, I was like, whatever I do in the future, it's going to be programmed beats, and it's going to be pedal steel. That's Greg Lease. He's an incredible pedal steel player. I'm obsessed with pedal steel. I didn't grow up on country music. It was on the radio, like I more or less knew the hits, but I was specifically not into country music. To me, country music was like really uncool in the early 90s, whatever. I've since gone back and been like, country's amazing. But there's another touch point of pedal steel, which is Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon. That was something I was definitely referencing.

No one's ever referenced that record before. I think this song should be the kind of song that you dance to in your bed. Like you can cry to it and dance to it. I've written, I guess, a lot of songs now. And it's the first song I've written that I thought, oh, this might be someone's favorite song. I've never had that experience before. I mean, I maybe thought, like,

maybe someone will like this guitar part, you know? Or, oh, that's a nice lyric, but never, ever. Oh, this could be someone's favorite. I got kind of bored with cleverness. I think that the song just goes straight to the heart. heart. It doesn't pull any punches. It doesn't try to be something. It's not. It doesn't really say, hey, look over here, look over here. It just, it's just a nice song from the heart. And it only took me five albums to write. And now here's New York by St. Vincent in its entirety.

New York is in New York without you love. So far in a few blocks to be so low. And if If I call you from first, Africa in the city you can handle me. New love wasn't true love back to you love. So much for us for a... Visit songexploder.net for more on St. Vincent, including a link to buy this song. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length.

And this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishi Kesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists. And it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April,

and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city. Like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage. and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light,

and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. If you love Song Exploder,

please leave a review or a rating over at iTunes.com slash Song Exploder. And if you want to show everyone how much you love Song Exploder, you get a Song Exploder t-shirt at SongExploder.net slash merch. Song Exploder is produced by me, along with Christian Coons. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary cutting-edge podcasts,

made possible by the Knight Foundation and listeners like you. Learn more about all the shows at Radiotopia.fm. Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Song Exploder. You can find all the past and future episodes of the show at SongExploder.net. or wherever you download podcasts. My name is Rushi Kesh, your way. Thanks for listening.