An alien made my new favourite album
The internet is full of clips like this one - two-minute interviews in which famous people do their best to respond to a presenter’s shallow-yet-somehow-almost-impossible-to-answer-satisfactorily questions (what exactly is an appropriate, intelligent reply to ‘You’ve had a fantastic year, haven’t you?’, especially when you’re expected to do it in no more than ten seconds.). Usually these clips are excruciating to watch, particularly when the famous person seems blissfully unaware of just how inconsequential, vain and cliched everything they’re saying is. Even more so when the interviewer is too.
This one is fun, though. Annie Clark, aka St Vincent, is being interviewed at an award ceremony called the Plug Awards. A clever and canny woman, she here demonstrates her clear understanding of two things: 1. that being a pop star, and in particular doing interviews like this, is a faintly preposterous thing to do for a living and 2. that, despite this, it’s in her interest to play the game, at least to an extent.
So, she is polite and engaging but, in her deadpan way, ridiculing the whole thing. ‘How are you feeling tonight at the Plug Awards?’ asks the interviewer. ‘I feel fantastic tonight at the Plug Awards,’ she repeats robotically, looking for all the world like she has no idea what the Plug Awards even are, or what she is doing there. Asked what she has been up to lately, she says: ‘I’ve been on the road quite a bit bringing it to the people live and direct.’ Which is the kind of thing that pop stars say all the time in a feeble attempt to sound ‘street’, but Clark says it like a prim schoolteacher setting a homework assignment. Later, asked what we can expect from her next year, she replies: ‘You can expect me to sleep a lot, and read a lot of books.’
Out of the mouths of some people - Damon Albarn, say - this kind of thing would sound arrogant and a little rude. Clark pulls it off mainly because she’s so otherworldly. With her milk white skin and enormous yet oddly blank eyes, she looks like an alien hazarding a guess at how a human pop star might behave, so her answers seem quite appropriate. I think the whole interview is hilarious, but I’m guessing a lot of people would just think she’s weird - especially if they’ve also seen the pop video she mentions in the clip, in which she plays a sort of surreal scoutmaster…
Otherworldliness is a rare quality in pop music these days. We’ve become used to people being laid bare for our prurient pleasure. We seem to like the idea that celebrities are Just Like Us, with the same insecurities, flaws and embarrassing sweat patches. St Vincent, though, is doll-like and inscrutable. I interviewed her once, face to face for an hour or so in a Glasgow cafe, and felt like I’d learned nothing about her whatsoever. We got on well, I think, but I wouldn’t say we made any connection.
In real life, of course, it’s probably just a shy, wary person’s defence mechanism. Other than the saucer eyes, which seem to look through you rather than at you, the main thing that puts a distance between her and the world is her sense of humour, which is so deadpan it can be very hard to tell if she’s telling you the truth or not. I remember her cooing ‘cool remix’ at the music in the café where we were sitting, and wondering for a moment if she knew the CD was stuck (she did). Later she told me her live show included a song by ‘kind of this obscure band from the 1960s and 70s’, which turned out to be Dig a Pony by the Beatles (here she is playing it in a London taxi for a Black Cab Session).
I loved St Vincent’s first album, Marry Me. It’s got the arch grandeur of Rufus Wainwright and the Divine Comedy, the icy wit of Aimee Mann, the eccentric, fashion-be-damned flourishes of Kate Bush (the squeaky backing vocals on Jesus Saves, I Spend are very Kate Bush), and the artful, New York cool of Laurie Anderson. I love the fact that she writes lyrics about things like wartime Paris - this song being Paris is Burning, not to be confused with Ladyhawke‘s fantastic single of the same name. Here she is singing it in the street for some reason…
The title Marry Me, she told me, was about ‘romantic ideals, but also poking fun’. To this end, she chose a cover photo in which she looks completely bonkers - wide-eyed (even for her) and wild-haired, in an unflattering grey top, staring blankly at the camera - because she thought it would be funny to have the commanding statement ‘marry me’ under a photo like that (a lot of people didn’t find it funny at all, she added, which seemed to amuse her even more).
The song Marry Me’s peculiar chorus, ‘Marry me John, I’ll be so good to you, you won’t realise I’m gone’, sprang from her amused observation that pop music is full of songs by men that go, as she put it, ‘I’m on the road, I’m a rambling man, you can’t pin me down, and there are so many songs by women to men that go, you’re gone, or you’re no good, or whatever. I’d just come off the road so I’d experienced that, so I kind of subverted it, consciously and unconsciously.’
A slight hiccup with Marry Me is that the humour is so deadpan that it doesn’t always come across. Musically too, Clark is too understated, self-aware and instinctively subversive a writer to play to the crowd. So she might never become as big a star as, say, Feist. Fine. That means fans like me get to keep her for ourselves.
I could be wrong, though. Her new album, Actor, is tremendous, a huge leap forward from Marry Me. It’s a concept album of sorts. In each song, she plays a different character in an imaginary movie (which suits her very well), and the music is richly cinematic - think of Michael Nyman, Ennio Morricone, Yann Tiersen, Ryuichi Sakomoto, David Arnold even. It’s audacious, unpredictable, hugely inventive and ambitious in its structure and arrangements.
To finish, here’s St Vincent rehearsing the first single from the album, Actor Out Of Work, before a show at South by SouthWest last month. The album version is quite different, but this stripped down take on it is thrilling in its own way. Actor itself is out on 4 May. For what it’s worth, it’s the most exciting pop album I’ve heard so far this year.
Andrew
