From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction
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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 Annie 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 Sufjan 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 Toko Yasuda, 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 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 other 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 thesis? Because the album is 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 grim sides. I mean, the kinds of things that can have a...

total hold over you, be it 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. I think you told Nick Poundgarten who wrote a profile of you in the magazine. Sex, drugs, and sadness. Sex, drugs, and sadness. Be so dull. Be so dull.

Now, has it been that kind of period for you in the last few years? It's been three years since you've had an album. It was a wild three years. 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. Maybe reading a book here and there. Yeah. And then work. And then work. Yeah. Yeah.

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's, it's, it, it seems like I, 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, 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, I sought ways to cope with it creatively and

and felt safe in being able to make something. Pills to wake, pills to sleep Pills, pills, pills every day of the week Pills to walk, pills to think Pills, pills, pills for the family I spend a year My mind on the gap My head on the stairs Wake, pills to sleep

And there's a song on the album where you, well, embrace and reject the pharmacological way of getting out of pills. Yeah. Was that a struggle for you? You know what? I don't want to overstate it because truly, as it pertains to drugs, I'm kind of a Pollyanna. I never really...

Like I, I still like, I've only seen cocaine like three times in my life, which is so stupid. Like you, 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, um, so I don't want to overstate it, but I was in a period of my life where I was working so much that I, and I didn't know how to get a hold of my life in any way.

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-depressant by any means or anything. 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 Port Chester, 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. No, I've been playing it for over 20 years, so it's so much a part of my person. But there's a certain amount

of guitar playing that is about pride that isn't about the song. 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 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, um,

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 these 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. You said, I'm playing a minor second, which creates a sound that feels like the floor is coming out under your feet.

And then at one point 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 stuff that you learned in music school? You went to Berklee 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. And your uncle, we should say, was a terrific guitar player. Oh, yeah. Tuck Andrus, he's one of the greats, one of the jazz finger style master. I mean, it's unbelievable. Yeah.

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 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.

So much fun with some blue bloods.

You said that it's the first song where you thought, this might be someone's favorite song. What do 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. 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 that the melody and everything, it kind of came rather quickly. And it was one of those songs that I was, it felt like I just sort of pulled out of the ether more or less fully formed and was like, thank you. Thanks for that. Yeah.

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 is a book that was often assigned in school. 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, um, brutalized and that something like that. Um, all of these things are empathy exercises. Um, and at its best, that's what, 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, um, that art, music, theater, um,

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 something.

But it took the top of my head off somehow. I mean, I was really young, seven years old or something like that. And you were a similar age and were 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,

um, intuiting, but they have all, they have all of the same emotions just in this tiny body. Um, and I had a lot of the anxiety emotion. I have a lot of fear. Um, and so hearing the kind of purge of that fear through Kurt Cobain and nevermind and, um, was liberating. It said to me, you're not alone. It said to me, um,

We're all in this. Like, you have a tribe, is what it said to me. And you could hear that at eight or nine. That's fucking Lutely. I'm sorry. Sorry. Absolutely. You just, 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. I'm so happy Because today I found my friends They're in my head

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?

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 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 the

It can 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. Um, 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, um,

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, 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, 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'd you decide to do this? And it's not what I expected, but I know to expect the unexpected. Well, um,

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 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 Alinsky, who was amazing.

What was 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 and

Elizabeth Taylor, a 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.

It's the dead dad. And then the kids scream and it's over. Yeah. Now with the Oscar Wilde thing, you're going to keep it pretty much on the Oscar Wilde plot or you're going to take it into horror land? Okay, so that was the entire plot of The Birthday Party. See it now. It's on Netflix. And...

But the Oscar Wilde thing, yeah, I was approached by Lionsgate about being involved in an adaptation of Dorian 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 Elle, which is the French film, Paul Verhoeven and Isabelle Huppert. Elle is the best thing I've ever seen. I'm totally obsessed with Elle.

And so 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 Highline Studios, which is an events performance place. And you're, the evening that we're meeting, we're meeting during the afternoon, you're 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. Okay.

I'm going to play New York and I'm going to, I basically picked the saddest songs in my repertoire of, of, of which there are many, but I picked the absolute, um, most bleak for this party tonight. Glamorously sad songs. Um,

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 amazing... 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. I dig a pony. We can celebrate anything you want. Yes, we can celebrate anything we want.

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 haul of military and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. I hope you'll join us for that. Until then, have a great week.

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