American multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter Annie Clark makes art look effortless. After stints performing as a band member of The Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens, Clark released her first solo record under her moniker St. Vincent. Marry Me (2007, Beggars Banquet) was a lush, precocious record that earned her comparisons to her more established peers like Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors and Beirut, while many eagerly proclaimed that she was second coming of Kate Bush.
Since her solo debut in 2007, Clark continues to dazzle listeners with her innovation, winsomeness and unique writerly voice. Clark’s sophomore release, Actor (2009, 4AD Records), catalogs a rich array of her personal literary, artistic and filmic inspirations. With its sweeping narrative arcs and canny sense for theatrical flair, the record was influenced by her love of film scores, including Badlands, Pierrot le Fou, The Wizard of Oz and Sleeping Beauty. And the lyrical tone of the record, Clark told the Ithaca Times, was hugely indebted by the works of Philip Roth and Charles Bukowski. (Clark has also admitted that her nom de guerre was inspired by the hospital where the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas spent his last hours).
Clark’s songs are a beguiling, heady stew of dreamy pop, chamber rock and cabaret jazz, driven equally by her desire for ornate orchestration and more straightforward indie rock tropes. Clark’s presence — at once humble and disarming, intimidating and vaguely mysterious — feels as complex as her intricate art-rock records, in which melodrama and quirk reside synchronistically. The resulting product vibrates intently between something sweet and something ominous — even creepy.
Clark’s moment in the current cultural zeitgeist marches on, unabated: A new song, “Rosyln,” penned by Clark and Bon Iver, was written specifically for the Twilight: New Moon soundtrack, which was released earlier this week. The Ithaca Times recently spoke to Clark from the road, as she was winding through the farm land of Ohio-what Clark, who is Tulsa, Oklahoma native, called “the real America,’ tongue placed firmly in cheek.
Popcorn Youth: You’re currently on tour with Andrew Bird. How’s it going?
Annie Clark: It’s going so great. Playing with Andrew every night is a delight. This might be the most fun tour we’ve ever done. (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: What makes a tour fun for you?
Clark: Well, for me, it’s like, being able to sleep enough. Not having insane drives every day. That’s a very tactile answer, but it makes for a much easier tour. And Andrew is wonderful, obviously a wonderful musician and showman. He’s so engaging to watch, in addition to being talented and making such beautiful music. It’s very inspiring.
Popcorn Youth: What kind of “performer’ do you consider yourself?
Clark: Well, when I think of good performers, obviously the master of that is James Brown. Obviously. He is the master of that, and probably will always be. I can’t see anyone being a better showman than he is. I just don’t know if it’s possible. So that’s one kind of extreme for a dynamic on stage. And then there’s another extreme, which is like, a total shoegaze situation.
Unfortunately, I’m more on the side of the shoegaze. (Laughs) I wish I were more like James Brown! But I play the guitar and have all these pedals by my feet, and I have to focus a little bit on what I’m doing. Of course, I like scoping out the audience, getting energy from that.
Popcorn Youth: So you feed off of the energy of the audience?
Clark: You’ll have to forgive me if I’m about to start talking in hocus-pocus terms, but when there is a really great vibe, you just feel like you’re flying. It’s amazing, it’s the best. Everything else feels way more effortless when you can tell that a crowd is really there with you. It’s a symbiotic relationship, I think.
Popcorn Youth: What about specific places? Does that play a part in the overall experience when you’re on tour?
Clark: What I’ve seen a little bit of on this tour is that we’re going to a lot of places that you don’t necessarily go to on your first tour out. You know? We’re going to Cincinnati, Knoxville… Ithaca! They are all small towns or small cities. And in my experience, those places can be way more fun and engaging to play in, simply because they don’t get as much as music as, say, New York, so they’re not as cynical or spoiled. They’re excited and engaging, and that is refreshing.
Popcorn Youth: You live in New York City now. How big of a role has the city played in your own artistic development?
Clark: Well, I moved to Manhattan [from Brooklyn] not too long ago. I can’t speak from tons of experience because I’ve been on the road so much lately, but when I am home, I really just do routine, boring domestic things, like eat at my same two favorite restaurants. You know, what everyone else does! (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: “Stars: They’re Just Like Us!”
Clark: (Laughs) Really, it’s a boring thing when I’m in New York. Because I’m there so little, it’s more about rest and recuperation. But for me, the thing that New York has over other places for right now, in my life, it’s just access. Access. I have really wonderful friends who are musicians and artists and doing really exciting things and I feel lucky to even get to be a peripheral part of that. That’s really kind of what drew me there.
Popcorn Youth: Does that manifest itself concretely in your records?
Clark: The new record is pretty influenced by New York, if only in the fact that I couldn’t do what I had done before. It was impossible for me to write a record like the first one, i.e. I couldn’t make noise in my apartment. I was getting noise complaints, so I had to do it internally on a computer, for the most part. It transformed the writing process and influenced the entire record.
Popcorn Youth: How did more sophisticated technology influence your creative process?
Clark: Well, I wrote so much of this record in GarageBand, just drawing MIDI notes onto a computer. It sounds… kind of dull. And it kind of was, to some degree. (Laughs) I mean, if you sit down with a guitar and your voice, it’s instant and visceral and feels good.
Popcorn Youth: You have to wait longer this way.
Clark: (Laughs) Right. There was a lot of delayed gratification.
Popcorn Youth: Is that a methodology that you’d like to continue to explore for your next project?
Clark: I’m not really sure what I’m going to do for my next thing. Probably a combination of the two modes. I found that when I was writing on the computer, I was letting my ears make more of the judgment calls; they were the guide. And when I was writing on the guitar or the piano, the physicality of that, the body, was more the guide. The fingers, they want to go certain places. Voices, they’re comfortable where they are.
Popcorn Youth: Did you find that you were scoring impossible passages in GarageBand, like something that would be a challenge for you to replicate live?
Clark: All the time. A lot of things got to be a challenge to figure out how to sing or play them. The notes don’t necessarily fall in a way that is intuitive to what I would normally do with my hands. It was a challenge.
Popcorn Youth: When you’re out playing live every night, are there things that you do to keep the material interesting or fresh?
Clark: I think that more than anything the audience keeps it fresh, at least for me. Because no matter how many times I’ve played “Marry Me” — and I’ve probably played that song 1,000 times, easily — and there are 1,300 people in the audience, maybe two of them have heard that song, and want to hear me play it. People want to hear what they want to hear; they don’t care that you’re bored or whatever. It’s kind of like, in that regard, you have to remind yourself to honor the music and not honor your own personal narrative, like “Ugh, I have to play, but I ate this weird dinner!” (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: (Laughs) Well, that’s a very generous mentality. What was the transition like going from being in a band to being a solo artist, in terms of live performance? Is there a sense that there’s more on the line, when it’s just you?
Clark: Well, [on this tour] I play a couple of songs with Andrew every night, and I play guitar and sing little background vocals. And I’m reminded that it’s so much less pressure and so fun to just be in someone’s band! (Laughs) It’s great. I mean, I forgot! (Laughs) That said, it’s still super rewarding to do what I’m doing, to be a front person and a singer and a songwriter.
Popcorn Youth: Your music has been described as “spooky.” Do you celebrate Halloween? Will you be dressing up?
Clark: Well, I’m performing with Grizzly Bear that night in London, and I think if I came out in, like, a Catwoman suit… that would be a little bit of a headscratcher. (Laughs) How about this. I’ll go trick or treating afterwards.
St. Vincent will perform at Castaways this Thursday, Oct. 22. The show begins at 8pm.