Dear listeners,
One afternoon in late February, my editor Caryn asked if I might be interested in profiling St. Vincent ahead of her new album “All Born Screaming.” I said that I probably wasn’t — though I have long been a fan, my early spring schedule was quite full and the reporting would require a short-notice trip to Los Angeles — but that I would give the album a spin on the way home from work, just to see if it would change my mind. By the fourth track, I was searching flights to L.A.
I’m so glad I took that assignment. Annie Clark (St. Vincent’s real name) was generous with her time and her explanations of her creative process, and I came away with a new appreciation of her work ethic. An accomplished songwriter, guitarist and producer, Clark is palpably fascinated by sound and how it is created, and it was revealing to see the way her eyes lit up when she was in the studio, surrounded by various mics and vintage consoles. At one point, when we were discussing some aspect of engineering, she stopped herself, remembering that this was an interview, and said, “That stuff’s kind of boring to a reader.” But I encouraged her to go on, because I could tell it was incredibly interesting to her, and I hoped that it would be illuminating for listeners to learn exactly what made Clark geek out. Even if those things are mic shootouts, modular synthesizers and the mechanics of signal flow.
We also discussed the long, improbable arc of her career, during which she’s gone from a coy indie darling to a mainstream-adjacent provocateur. “I’m curious, so I’ll say yes to things that are like, ‘I don’t know if I can do that,’ or, ‘I don’t know what this kind of music is like, let me find out,’” Clark told me. “So all those things have led me to crazy places that I’ve never expected.”
Today’s playlist is a map of some of those unexpected places: a collection of my 11 favorite St. Vincent songs, spread across her seven daring and eclectic albums, and featuring a few quotes from my interviews with Clark that did not make it into the profile. You’ll find tracks from her incomparable 2011 release “Strange Mercy,” her boldly slick 2017 LP “Masseduction” and more. I almost settled for 10 songs, but in classic Amplifier fashion, I added one more at the last minute. To make me choose between “Prince Johnny” and “Happy Birthday, Johnny” would have been cru-u-uellll.
Seeing double beats not seeing one of you,
Lindsay
Listen along while you read.
1. “Now, Now”
This prickling, harmonic-kissed leadoff track from Clark’s 2007 debut LP, “Marry Me,” was the first St. Vincent song I heard, and I found its off-kilter tunefulness enchanting. Like much of the work she’d make in years to come, “Now, Now” revels in the precise moment when beauty begins to curdle into eeriness.
2. “Cruel”
The cover art for “Strange Mercy” — still my favorite St. Vincent album — depicts Clark’s open mouth plastered in some kind of a latex-like material, as if to trap a gasp or a scream in midair. A similar airlessness suffuses the single “Cruel,” which features a taut, blurted guitar riff and a gradually building sense of unease — albeit the kind you can dance to.
3. “Prince Johnny”
Johnny is a recurring, possibly fictitious character in the St. Vincent catalog, often standing in as a brash, troubled foil to Clark’s narrator. (“Johnny’s just Johnny,” she said once, when asked about the character’s identity. “Doesn’t everyone know a Johnny?”) Here, on this affecting and atmospheric highlight from St. Vincent’s 2014 self-titled album, he’s an intimate but sometimes indifferent friend, to whom Clark sings in a particularly wrenching moment: “I wanna mean more than I mean to you.”
4. “Broken Man”
This wonderfully abrasive track from “All Born Screaming” features percussion from Dave Grohl and a crunching, industrial-tinged sound that compels Clark to holler herself hoarse. As she told me in one of our conversations, putting this track out as the album’s lead single was, for once, a no-brainer. “Other records, I’ve been like, ‘Oh that could be good, or this could be good for people to hear first,’” she said. But for “All Born Screaming,” “I felt very adamant that ‘Broken Man’ was first. Let’s throw some TNT.”
5. “Masseduction”
St. Vincent’s 2017 album “Masseduction,” featuring production by Jack Antonoff, was in some ways her sleekest and most pop-friendly, but as the title track shows, it still oozed with her own strange style. “I can’t turn off what turns me on,” Clark intones on this cartoonish exploration of desire and repulsion, while her expressive guitar growls and shrieks.
6. “Marrow”
St. Vincent’s second album, the 2009 release “Actor,” further warped the eerie beauty of “Marry Me,” as you can hear on this highlight, which blends a refrain reminiscent of a nursery rhyme with the asphyxiating mood of a horror film. A tiny sonic detail I love here: the physicality of the keyboard’s creak on that riff right after the first chorus.
7. “Live in the Dream”
The campy and chameleonic “Daddy’s Home,” from 2021, is probably St. Vincent’s most polarizing release, and while I was mixed on the album overall, I do love this bit of drifting, Pink Floyd-inspired psychedelia. Even if it’s pastiche, Clark pulls it off with aplomb.
8. “Surgeon”
This “Strange Mercy” track takes its chorus lyric from a line Marilyn Monroe once scrawled in her journal: “Best finest surgeon … come cut me open.” (Clark once said she wanted the song “to sound like it was kind of in a Benzedrine and white-wine coma — like a housewife’s cocktail.”) St. Vincent’s music often interrogates both femininity and depression, and those themes entwine here with haunting effectiveness, culminating in a gloriously unnerving guitar solo.
9. “Happy Birthday, Johnny”
This wry, devastating piano ballad cuts through the polish of “Masseduction” and aims straight for the heart. “Remember one Christmas I gave you Jim Carroll?/Intended it as a cautionary tale,” Clark sings, setting the scene like a short-story writer. “You said you saw yourself inside there/Dog-eared it like a how-to manual.”
10. “The Power’s Out”
When I asked about this creepily vivid apocalypse song, Clark told me, “I’ll be totally transparent: That’s my ‘Five Years’ for 2024,” making a reference to the David Bowie song. In some sense, Clark said, the song taps into a timeless fear: “Every generation, every religion, every culture has its Armageddon. Every generation thinks it will be the last. I think that’s our inability to reckon with death. Like, how could we leave and the world keeps on spinning? It must be that the world is going to end.”
11. “Severed Crossed Fingers”
Finally, this closing track from St. Vincent’s self-titled album borrows its striking, bleakly ironic title phrase from the author Lorrie Moore’s short-story collection “Birds of America.” “When you’re calling ain’t calling back to you,” Clark sings affectionately, “I’ll be side stage mouthing lines for you.” It’s a fitting encapsulation of Clark’s overall outlook, which she described to me as “optimism with an asterisk.”
The Amplifier Playlist
“St. Vincent’s 10 (or, Actually 11) Essential Songs” track list
Track 1: “Now, Now”
Track 2: “Cruel”
Track 3: “Prince Johnny”
Track 4: “Broken Man”
Track 5: “Masseduction”
Track 6: “Marrow”
Track 7: “Live in the Dream”
Track 8: “Surgeon”
Track 9: “Happy Birthday, Johnny”
Track 10: “The Power’s Out”
Track 11: “Severed Crossed Fingers”
Bonus Tracks
From the great, now defunct website Rookie: the former youth soccer player St. Vincent demonstrating how to do a rainbow kick.
Also, this week’s Friday Playlist has new music from Pearl Jam, Nilüfer Yanya, Thom Yorke and more — including a previously unreleased Johnny Cash track. Listen here.
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