Annie Clark, shot for SPIN's September 2011 cover by Tom Allen. Styling by Heathermary Jackson.
Some artists find their voice by conquering their fears. Annie Clark turns hers into nervous -- and nervy -- pop songs.
When Annie Clark was ten years old, she had her first panic attack. She was at a Texas Rangers game, not far from the Dallas suburb where she grew up. Around the second inning, she caught a glimpse of the sky where it met the end of the stadium bleachers, like a horizon line.
"I remember looking at the sky and thinking that the universe is so big and it's all chaos," she tells me 18 years later on a hot July afternoon in downtown Manhattan. "I call it 'the dark fear.' At any moment, the dark fear could come in."
She still gets panic attacks, but not as often, and the stimuli that provoke them needn't be as ponderous as realizing the world is enormous and you are inconsequential. (When I was ten, the thing that freaked me out the most was that fake Saturday Night Live commercial in which Victoria Jackson had extra fingers.)
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Whatever the anxiety's source, I get a sense that it's one of the most crucial things about Clark that not only makes her who she is, but do what she does, which is, most notably, create intricate, ambitious music under the name St. Vincent. Clark, whose pre-St. Vincent credits include an 18-month, tunic-clad membership in the Polyphonic Spree, has played guitar since she was 12, and when she does, she holds the instrument right below her collarbone, like a virtuoso. She is blisteringly talented.
She is also something of a cultural-reference hoarder. The title of her first album, 2007's Marry Me, comes from an Arrested Development joke (and has a cocktail-jazz finale called "What Me Worry?"), while 2009's Actor was inspired, at least in part, by Disney movies and Terrence Malick's Badlands. She calls herself St. Vincent because of a line in a Nick Cave song about St. Vincent's hospital in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, where Dylan Thomas passed away. ("That's me," she joked to the New York Times, "the place where poetry comes to die.")
Her new album, Strange Mercy, is equally dense with allusions to art, film, books, and miscellaneous iconography -- for starters, the opening track, "Chloe in the Afternoon," takes its title from a 1972 Eric Rohmer movie. But highbrow references aside, the music exposes more of her, jitters and all, which may go a long way toward explaining why it's her most focused and accomplished record so far and why she's reached a career point where her idols are clamoring to work with her: She's currently doing an album with self-described "dweeby fan" David Byrne, who first met her at the Dark Was the Night show at Radio City Music Hall in 2009.
"I went up to her and told her how much I liked her 'Actor Out of Work' video and how disturbing it was," Byrne says in an e-mail. "I was kind of stunned at her playing and facility with all she was doing."
Clark is at Quartino, a restaurant near her apartment in the East Village, when I arrive. She's wearing something chic and black, looking slight and effortless, and reading a book about shamanistic psychoanalysis and surrealist exercises written by Alejandro Jodorowsky, the director of El Topo. We talk about that, and about films and serial killers and podcasts, and she says she listens to "Savage Love" sex columnist Dan Savage in the van when she's on tour.
"I love him," she says. "I want him to be my best friend. I saw him speak in Dallas and wanted to talk to him afterwards, but I was too scared." I mention a recent article about Savage, in which he questions whether monogamy is essential to marriages, and her enormous, anime-character-through-a-peephole eyes widen even further with interest.
Like her new collaborator Byrne, Clark seems starving for inspiration. All art is text, all text is source material. She carries a notebook around and jots down ideas constantly, scanning the cultural landscape for fodder, for fuel, for food. She's burning sugar, or nectar, as fast as she's flapping her hummingbird wings. It's the stuff of anxiety and, at once, of prolific talent at work.
Clark is 28, but can seem younger at times -- if only in her approach. The novelty of making new art, the siren call of hard work, and the cynicism-free earnestness of success with repetition, all drive her music as much as her unstated philosophy that the dark fear can't bring you down if you're moving constantly.
"I don't know how you are at taking a compliment," I say, before asking her whether it feels like she's about to explode, in terms of fame, success -- whatever it's called when you're no longer a cult artist.
"It's really weird," she says. "But it's not out of the blue."
"You've done the work," I add.
"It's amazing," she says. "I'm incredibly happy right now."
Happy, she explains, means busy. "I went out to Seattle to write," she says. "[Death Cab for Cutie drummer] Jason McGerr had an office that was closing. He offered me the space for a month, for all of October. I was alone. I stayed at the Ace Hotel downtown, in one of the rooms with a shared bathroom.
"I would just get up in the morning and caffeinate, and run, and go to the studio for 12 hours," she says, "come back, eat dinner alone with a book, have a glass of wine, and go to bed. And do it all over again."
No Internet dog videos? No snacking? No Celebrity Rehab breaks? It wasn't always easy for her, if that makes you/me/us feel better.
"Sometimes I felt like, 'Things are going great and I'm loving this,' " she says. "Some days it was just terrible. I'll listen and think, 'This is shit, what was I doing?' Sometimes I'll be in a moment of shame, and then I'll try this, or maybe this, and then the next day I'll think that it's better than I thought. Feelings aren't fact."
This record abounds with the dark fear, with twists and turns and memorable lyrics that trigger unease. Then there's the last song, "Year of the Tiger," which Clark also uses to describe 2010, a year in which she "lost some people." It wasn't a breakup -- I asked. But she's not revealing much more, so I ask her how she managed to make her voice sound so different on this record, even from track to track. She starts to talk about breathing and musculature and what helps and doesn't, then adds, smiling with sparkling eyes, "Don't write, 'We met at an organic restaurant and we talked about voice lessons and yoga.' "
