St. Vincent: "Every one of us is in this shit together"

ST. VINCENT’s new album ‘All Born Screaming’ is a unifying record that traverses life, death and love. Check out the latest cover story for our New Music Friday playlist edit, PLAY.

Words: Ali Shutler.
Photos: Alex Da Corte.

"Music is still so mysterious to me," says St. Vincent's Annie Clark. Since 2007's debut 'Marry Me', she's created seven brilliant but very different solo albums including the beautiful, snarling purge that is 'All Born Screaming'. There has also been a string of gorgeous collaborations with everyone from David Byrne and Dua Lipa to Gorillaz and the surviving members of Nirvana.

"You do gain a level of expertise the more you do something, and I'm always learning new skills, but it seems that the more proficient I get, the more mystical music becomes," Annie explains. "Isn't that funny?"

Rather than trying to wrestle inspiration into something tangible, Annie just follows it. "It's all about trusting your gut," she says. "The main thing is being able to follow that instinct, even when you are faced with self-loathing and self-doubt, which are endemic to the process. All I know is that if you follow it, chase it, put the hours in, struggle, love and hate, the whole thing will eventually reveal itself. It just takes the labour."

The industrial electro sneer of 'All Born Screaming' follows on from the 70s psychedelia of 'Daddy's Home' and comes in the wake of Annie co-writing Taylor Swift's recent megahit 'Cruel Summer' and Olivia Rodrigo bonus 'Guts' track 'Obsessed'.

Despite this crossover from critically acclaimed art-pop into something more stadium-sized, no part of 'All Born Screaming' was written to continue that journey. "None of that stuff is ever on my mind," admits Annie. "I just try and make work that I think is excellent, and that means something to me. Anything that comes as a result of that is a pleasant surprise," she explains. "I have no great advertising instincts and even thinking about that stuff makes me tired," she adds, having already slept through a pilates class this morning. "Rock'n'roll," she grins.

Previous records have seen Annie explore our relationship with technology via a "housewife on pills" (2014's 'St. Vincent'), while 2017's follow-up 'Masseduction' saw her take on the role of cult leader to pick apart sex and power. There is no character-player on 'All Born Screaming' though, with the fantastical replaced by the urgent everyday. "It's not concept in any sort of way. It's just life, death and love."

Annie goes on to explain that 'All Born Screaming' is a record of two halves. "The first half is the season in hell and dealing with the violence of life. The second half is the realisation that, of course, there is suffering, great loss and self-hatred in the world, but there's also great joy and beauty. I'm keenly aware of how short life is, and there's really nothing else to live for except love," she says, with 'All Born Screaming' stripping things back to the basics. "It's the hardest thing in the world and yet dead simple at the same time."

Lead single 'Broken Man' was designed to "throw a little dynamite onto the dancefloor" with a little help from Dave Grohl, while Cate Le Bon and Warpaint's Stella Mozgawa also feature across the record. It might be the first self-produced St. Vincent album, but it's still full of community.

"The record ends with the ecstatic mantra, which is that we're all born screaming. We are all in this together," she explains. "You today, me tomorrow. Not to be fully kumbaya about it, but I do believe that a lot of modern life is designed to put us in factions and echo chambers, so we forget that every one of us is in this shit together. That's the human condition, the beauty and the brutality of it," she adds.

Annie describes herself as an optimist with an asterisk. "Some things are undeniably better than they were 100 years ago, some things are worse, and then there are things that are the same as they ever were, but we just know about it all now. I don't think we're all on a doom spiral," she says. "Some things are absolutely, horrendously hideous, but I also think there's hope." Every great religion has its end-of-the-world idea; every generation thinks that theirs is going to be the last, she offers. "Maybe that's just people trying to cope with their own mortality, but we persist." She also thinks it's not the planet that's in danger, it's humanity, and one day the entire human race will be shaken off "like a bad case of fleas."

Annie has co-produced every St. Vincent album, but 'All Born Screaming' sees her go it alone. "I had a lot to prove as a producer," she says. "I wanted to make something that was completely emotionally raw but sonically perfect because I care. I care that things sound good. I care that it will stand up for the ages."

Speaking about the decision to produce the album herself, Annie says, "There are some places, emotionally, that you can only get to by taking the long walk into the woods alone - to find out what your heart is really saying. It sounds real because it is real." She doesn't believe this makes 'All Born Screaming' any more authentic than previous records, though.

"I don't really go back and listen to my own records because I'm not one for masturbating in a mirror, but I have had to revisit them recently because I'm currently putting the show together for the All Born Screaming tour," says Annie, who's rediscovering just how personal every record has been. "It's interesting to realise how I hid my suicidal ideation in a song like 'Digital Witness', which sounds like a song about the perils of social media."

"With those records where I've played with persona or deconstructed identity, I don't look at that as hiding," she continues. "It's just where I was at the time and what I was interested in exploring," once again following her gut wherever it took her. "Also, I'm queer, so I know how to code switch. I've been doing that since Jump Street, so of course I would explore that in my work. Of course, I would explore identity, and costume and gender as performance, because that's all been part of my consciousness since I was a child. With 'All Born Screaming' though, that's just not where I was."

Instead, Annie was going through "the big clarifying, galvanising forces that are great loss and great love" when she was making 'All Born Screaming'. "I love this record," she says. "Every song is a lived experience, but I also wouldn't ever put out anything that I didn't fully believe in because what's the point?"

While 'All Born Screaming' sees St. Vincent explore grand topics, previous album 'Daddy's Home' was incredibly personal. "That album was about me reconciling a lot of painful experiences and coming out the other side. I was honest about the autographical part of 'Daddy's Home' because I thought, perhaps a little naively, that naming the record 'Daddy's Home' and having lyrics about signing autographs in a prison waiting room was so obvious," she explains. "However, that era quickly became about why I was personally responsible for the for-profit prison system in America and if I had suffered enough for the sins of my father. That's really not what that record was about, but whatever. I'm not too fucked off about it."

"I feel very strongly now about making sure that I don't explain too much about the song," she says a little later. "I know that as a fan, and I don't know if this is just me being hideously selfish, but I just don't care what the artists were thinking when they wrote one of my favourite songs. I don't care what they were trying to say. I just care what it means to me. It's not my place to correct someone who's allowing my music to make its way into their life. That's so egocentric. That's so not generous."

With 'All Born Screaming', you certainly don't need the backstory to make sense of the record "because the backstory is universal," says Annie. "The backstory is what every single person in their life unfortunately will have to go through. Sometimes the music says it all," she shrugs. "You don't need a backstory to make it meaningful. It's all about the art and whether or not it is built sturdy."

There was no grand vision for 'All Born Screaming'. No deliberate desire to fight fury with fury. "The genesis of this record was building a studio that I loved, where I could fully explore," says Annie. That resulted in hours of playing with synths and drum machines until something felt right. "I was just playing with electricity," says Annie. "I was turning knobs and finding sounds that lit me up inside." The bassline of 'Big Time Nothing' came directly from that careful play, as did most of 'Broken Man'. "'Sweetest Fruit' was me being turned on by sound and then figuring out the story," says Annie.

Likewise, the meaning of St. Vincent's snarling journey from hell and back is similarly open-ended. "I hope people get whatever they want and whatever they need from it. If they love it deeply, that would make me so happy, but if they hate it, great. It's for them now. It's not about me, which is the way I think it's supposed to be."

That sense of ownership travels all the way back to St. Vincent first falling in love with rock. "Obviously, I've always loved music," says Annie, who grew up on 80s pop institutions like Madonna and George Michael. When she was nine years old, though, her best friend and his older brother were building a half-pipe in their front yard and learning to skateboard, which is where she was introduced to the likes of Bad Brains, Circle Jerks, Butthole Surfers and Nirvana. "The other stuff that our parents listened to was great, but this felt like our music. It felt dangerous," says Annie. "It's heavy. It gets your heart pumping. You get a violent catharsis from it."

With her upcoming tour, St. Vincent hopes to offer "a pummeling and an ecstatic rave before a bleeding heart."

Despite the heaviness, the rage and the loss, 'All Born Screaming' is still incredibly ambitious. 'Flea' sounds a bit like a musical, 'The Power's Out' is dreamy and lush, while 'Violent Times' has all the epic drama of a Bond theme. The whole thing is dark and menacing, but never oppressive. There's humour, beauty and a whole lot of romance to it. "I just go where my brain and my heart take me," says Annie. "And pacing-wise, you have to disturb and console, disturb and console, because that's what life is." ■