The New Yorker Radio Hour - From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

Annie Clark, known as St. Vincent, launched her career as a guitar virtuoso—a real shredder—in indie rock, playing alongside artists like Sufjan Stevens. As a bandleader, she’s moved away from the explosive solos, telling David Remnick, “There’s a certain amount of guitar playing that is about pride, that isn’t about the song. . . . I’m not that interested in guitar being a means of poorly covered-up pride.” Her songs are dense, challenging, and not always easy, but catchy and seductive. Remnick caught up with Clark before the launch of her new album, “MASSEDUCTION.”  They talked about the clarity of purpose she needed in order to “clear a path” to write the “glamorously sad songs” she’s become known for.This segment originally aired on October 13, 2017. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

These are just anecdotes, but it's building up into something more coherent. I think it would be interesting to really try to unravel what his ties. There's a sort of country-city divide for their own convenient, and it's not clear where it goes next. From one world trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Not long ago, I spent the afternoon at a concert hall on the west side of Manhattan, where Andy's Clark was getting ready for a show. Clark performs under the name

St. Vincent. And she started out in indie rock. She played with artists like Sufian Stevens. But St. Vincent was an old school shredder, a terrific guitar player and a rock star. As a solo artist, she's been compared to David Bowie, and her music is heady and layered, and not always

easy, but it's catchy and somehow seductive. St. Vincent's new album, Just Out, is called Mass Seduction. I asked her about the title track. This is Tokoyasuda, who plays in my live band. I wanted her to pretend like she was an alien describing how to seduce someone, but in Japanese. Why in Japanese? Because a couple of reasons. One, a totally self-serving one, which is that I love Japan and I want to be big in Japan so that I can

go there all the time. I mean, I'm not above strategy. Why did you decide to make this track the title track. In the words, how does it shape the whole of the album, the conception of the album, the themes of the album? It's more or less kind of like a thesis. It's more or less, it contains all the characters that you meet on the album. It's, I thought of it, like a graduate thesis or something. A graduate thesis? Yeah. Well, how would you summarize it? What is the, what is the, what is the, what is the, what is the, what is the, because the album is just just coming out? How would you describe it? I would say it's an exploration of power and the rosy sides of power, you know, and also the really the grim sides.

I mean, the kinds of things that can have a total hold over you, be it, you know, drugs or sex or, is it telling that those are the only two things I can think of? I know there's a third thing. Sadness. Sadness. I think he told Nick Poundgarten, who wrote a profile of you in the magazine, sex drugs and sadness. Sex drugs and sadness. Now, has it been that kind of period for you in the last few years? In three years since you've had an album come in.

It was a wild three years. It was a, yeah, a lot of life happened in those three years, for sure. I also read a Nick's essay about you that you said that you've been living through while recording this album, which takes a lot longer than people would imagine. Yeah. a life of kind of monastic aloneness, that your life was a Pilates class? I love Pilates. You're reading a book here and there?

Yeah. And then work. And then work. Yeah. I just, I hit a point where I just needed everything but the most vital things for creativity to just go away. Were you in trouble? Did you feel off balance? Well, certainly.

Off balance, yeah, certainly off balance. I just needed to do sort of a radical reorganizing of my life. In order to fulfill, this sounds really like a Tolkien thing or something, but like in order to fulfill my destiny as a creative person, I needed to just clear a path. Otherwise, what would happen? You know, otherwise just depression would take its jaws and just swallow me completely. That's where you were.

That's what would happen. Yeah. And that's a longstanding problem or that was a problem of the moment? I mean, well, one, I mean, talking about anxiety and depression. It seems like It doesn't seem like anything that's stigmatized to me anymore because all of my friends are, you know, have dealt with it over their entire life.

So my, I was, I've been a really anxious person since I was a kid. And more or less, I think that's helped me because I sought ways to cope with it creatively and felt, you know, safe and, being able to make something. And there's a song on the album where you, well, embrace and reject the pharmacological way of it pills, pills to think. Pills, pills, pills for the family. Was that a struggle for you? You know what? I don't want to overstate it.

because truly as it pertains to, like, drugs, I'm kind of a polyanna. I never really, like, I still, like, I've only seen cocaine like three times in my life, which is so stupid. Like, you would think that it would just be, you know, be lying on people's naked bodies at parties, but that's just, like, not the vibe. So I don't want to overstate it, but I was in a period of my life where I was, I was working so much that I, and I didn't know how to get a hold of my life in any meaningful sort of centering kind of way. And yeah, I was certainly relying on more pills than I should have been taking to deal with anxiety and depression.

But I'm not anti-depress. I'm not anti-depressant by any means or anything. You know, those kind of things have really helped me at certain times. Now, I have to ask you a musical question. So I'm the kind of dork that watches, I'm making a big confession on national radio, guitar instruction stuff on YouTube. And as you know, there's gazillions of them. If you want to learn how to play something,

some Norwegian kid will teach you how to do it. And it's embarrassing. All that stuff that as a kid you didn't know how to do, Some kid teaches. I'm watching you with some guy whose name escapes me. Backstage at the Capitol Theater in Portchester. And he's asking you all kinds of dorky questions about playing the guitar. And yet the guitar seems to be getting stripped away. Conventional instrumentation seems to be less and less a part of your music. Sometimes you'll have a straight piano. But more and more, it's electronic. Tell me about that, that conversion from being one of the great guitar players and shredders

to somebody that's changing her sound and why? I will say there are definitely guitar moments on this album. It's not without guitar, but it's a funny thing. The guitar, I've been playing it so long. I've been playing it for over 20 years. which is weird because I'm 25. So, no, I've been playing it for over 20 years, so it's so much a part of my person, you know.

But there's a certain amount of guitar playing that is about pride that isn't about the song. And on this. You mean macho speed and all that kind of thing? Yeah. Yeah. It just didn't... That's not the way that I want to...

That's not the way that I want to hear guitar, and it's not the way that I want to present it in my music. How do you want to hear guitar? What do you mean? I want it to be like... Like a perverse tornado, or like, I want it to be... A lot of times really uncomfortable. I want it to be the one thing that comes in

and disrupts the scene completely. Well, you make the... sounds on the guitar like nobody else. In other words, on that video I was watching, you're showing this guy, who knows a fair amount. He said, I'm playing a minor second, which creates a sound that feels like, you know, the floor is coming out under your feet.

And then it went when you say to him, and here's a Debussy voicing, and I thought his face was going to fall off. My uncle taught me that. Yeah, exactly. How much is that a stuff that you learned in music school, you went to Berkeley School of Music, and how much is just screwing around at home?

Man, do you ever feel like you have been coasting on the books you read in high school? Because that's the time when you are just the most absorbent. In some ways, I feel like I've been coasting on the things I learned when I kind of first started playing guitar, when I was watching my uncle play. Your uncle, we should say, was a terrific guitar player. Oh, yeah. Tuck Andrus, he's one of the great, one of the jazz, jazz, jazz finger style master.

I mean, it's unbelievable. I forgot your question, is what happened. In other words, the sounds that you want to make on guitar are to match your emotional life not to impress anybody. Yeah, I think I'm not, I'm not. not that interested in guitar being a means of poorly covered up pride. You said something interesting about this song, New York, which we want to play. New York is in New York without you love. So far in a few blocks to be so low.

And if I go from first, new love. So much for a can stand. You said that it's the first song where you thought, this might be someone's favorite song. What'd you mean by that? Some songs are hard labor. And I mean, every word, every note is just, like, deeply labored over until it finally gets to the right spot.

And... So these things take a long time? Sometimes. Sometimes. Yeah. Super hard. And then some songs feel like they're floating around in the ether and they could have gone to your next door neighbor. But like you were the lucky recipient of them somehow. And New York was one of those songs, the melody and everything, it kind of came rather quickly. And it was one of those songs that I felt like I just sort of pulled out of the ether more or less fully formed and was like, Thank you. Thanks for that. In your own life, have you ever had records or books or any work of art that changed you in an apparent way, politically? Deeply. For example. Black like me. I read that when I was 13.

Right, which was a book that was often assigned in school about a... This was not assigned in school. Oh, you were on the outside. It was somebody who gets his skin darkened and tries to... enter the experience of an African-American man. Yes, and he does, and he's brutalized. And that, something like that, all of these things are empathy exercises. And at its best, that's what art is.

And I really, really, really firmly believe, and I wouldn't be doing what I do if I didn't. that art, music, theater, film, I believe that those things change people's minds and make them more human and remind them of their humanity and thus the humanity of others. I was really, really young, really young, and heard, I want you. Bob Dylan, long before I knew what it was to want you. But it took the top of my head off somehow. I mean, I was really young, seven years old, something like that. And you were a similar age and we're listening to Nevermind, the Nirvana album, at home. What did it do to you that young? How does art penetrate somebody eight, nine years old?

I mean, children have, they might not have the lexicon to describe the emotions that they feel and the things they're intuiting, but they have all of the same emotions just in this tiny body. And I had a lot of the anxiety, emotion. I had a lot of fear. And so hearing the kind of purge of that fear through Kirk Cobain and never mind was liberating. It said to me, you're not alone. It said to me, we're all in this. Like, you have a tribe is what it said to me.

You could hear that at eight or nine. That's fucking looted. I'm sorry. Sorry. Absolutely. You just, you, you, you go, okay, okay, I'm not alone in this. It must have been an incredible experience for you to stand up. You as Kurt Cobain for Nirvana and sing in front of that band.

And this was at the induction ceremony for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Brooklyn. That's okay, because so hard, it's every day for all I care. Can you describe that experience? You know, David, I kind of can't. I don't know. That's one that I don't know. I don't know where to put that experience. Because everyone wishes that Kurt was there doing that.

And I wish that too. So I don't know where to put that experience. It feels very strange to be joyful about it. What were you feeling up on stage when you were singing? Something like transcendence. Something like it. How often does that happen on stage? You tour and you play night after night

and set lists are, I assume, they alter, but they're pretty much the same. You're playing a show. It's called show business. How often is it transcendent, and how often does it feel like a night at work? There's something in the structure and building a really solid structure and foundation, architecture of a show, that to me feels safe. And what I mean by safe is that... What is safe? What I mean by safe is that it means that I know that the show is always going to be at a certain level of quality because I've beta tested it, you know, extensively.

And then so that I have this platform on top of that just like baseline level of quality to experiment with exactly how emotional it can be. be. And the thing about it is that performing night after night, it's a little bit like being an actor in that you need to be able to say your lines. You need to remember them. You need to stand in your light. You need to be, you know, have all the blocking down. Because at that point, it's not about you and it's not about your experience in a lot of ways. It's about the audience's experience. So sometimes, sometimes I'm so in it and I'm reliving every moment of the heartbreak of the song and singing that. And then sometimes I am totally disassociated, but I don't think... You're outside your own body.

It's hard to explain. It's, you know, it's not, it's not, unfortunately, that like, you know, no ghost floating above the bed looking down. It's not that, but sometimes it is just this sort of, I went from this dot to that, dot to that, dot da, da, da, and we did the show. I've just heard that you're going to direct a film version of the picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde's great novel. How did that come about? Why did you decide to do this?

And it's not what I expected, but I know to expect the unexpected. Well, a couple years ago I was asked to be a part of an all-female horror anthology called The XX. And my ethos in life is to do things that are scary. And, you know, luckily for me, most things are scary, so I do a lot of things. So I did this horror short, even though I don't like horror movies. Mine was more of a black comedy. It starred Melanie Olinsky, who was amazing. What's the plot?

Oh, boy. I keep describing it as weekend at Bernie's 2 meets who's afraid of Virginia Woolf. It's like, oh, it's so stupid. A mother wakes up on the day that she is throwing her child, a seventh birthday, and she finds her husband dead of an overdose of some kind. And we don't know if it's suicide or an overdose. and she decides that hell or high water, she's going to throw her daughter,

she's going to give her daughter a good birthday, no matter what. So she's sort of frazzled Elizabeth Taylor-hairstyled woman, and she hides the body and eventually hides the body in a big bear suit and puts it at the front of, the table as all the kids are, you know, coming in and they're about to blow out the candles at the cake. And he accidentally gets nudged by the nanny who's bringing in the cake. And then his face falls into the cake. And then the nanny takes the hood off and it reveals it's the dead

dead dad. And then the kids scream and it's over. Yeah. Now with the Oscar Wild thing, you're going to keep it pretty much on the Oscar Wild plot. You're going to take it into... It's, okay, so... That was the entire plot of the birthday party. See it now. It's on Netflix. And, and, but the Oscar Wild thing, yeah, I was approached by Lionsgate about being involved in an adaptation of Doreen Gray, but this time with a female protagonist and set

in more or less modern times. And I said, yes, I'm very interested in doing that, but only if I can work with David Burke, who wrote L, which is the French film. Paul Verhoeven and Isabella up here. It's the, Elle is the best thing I've ever seen. I'm, I'm totally obsessed with Elle.

And so I, I contacted David. That movie is scary as hell. It's hilarious to me, to be discussed after. That movie, boy. Oh my God. Yeah.

So we're at the High Line Studios, which is an event's performance place, and you're, the evening that we're meeting, we're meeting during the afternoon, going to be singing for an event, what are you going to play? Well, I'm going to play All You Need is Love, the Beatles Classic. I'm going to play New York.

And I'm going to... I basically picked the saddest songs in my repertoire, of which there are many, but I picked the absolute most bleak for this party tonight. glamorously sad songs perfect on another occasion you're going to show me how to play I Dig a Pony

yeah if I can remember That's an amazed You don't do covers that that often No because I don't know how to play anyone else's songs I don't believe you No it's true Annie Clark also known as St. Vincent Her album Mass Seduction is

just out. That's it for today's show. I'm David Remnick, and next week we'll hear an interview with Chelsea Manning, the former intelligence analyst who served seven years in prison after sending a huge hall of military and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks.

I hope you'll join us for that. Until then, have a great week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Toon Yards with additional music by Lexis Quadrata. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Chorina Endowment Fund.