Annie Clark is St. Vincent. ▼ Music Zackery Michael DIVINE COMEDY T he wig is off. Touring life is briefly at a halt and so is the blinding shine of rock stardom. St. Vincent is in Los Angeles, but she’s soon flying home to North Texas as “Just Annie.” It wasn’t even two decades ago that An- nie Clark was a promising Lake Highlands graduate looking for gigs around town, buy- ing gear at local guitar shops. Today she’s better known by her performing name, St. Vincent, with whom “Just Annie” shares “just” two Grammy wins plus collaborations “just” with David Byrne, Paul McCartney, Fiona Apple, Andrew Bird and Taylor Swift, among many others. The alt-rocker has earned a place in the pantheon of guitar gods, she’s become an ac- tor and director and been featured in fash- ion campaigns, Pirelli calendar covers and ads for Tiffany’s. She was the jewel standing in as Kurt Cobain for Nirvana’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame performance in 2014, and is an occasional tabloid rebel-darling whose unconfirmed liaisons with celebrities fasci- nate and frustrate a curious public. You may even remember her steamy per- formance with Dua Lipa at the 2019 Gram- mys. Or any of her Late Night, Oscar ceremony or SNL performances. For all her accolades, though, she’s still got her stiletto heels planted into the sweet spot, right on the edge of indie and mainstream. The artful artifice of St. Vincent. BY EVA RAGGIO A female colleague once told me she was irritated that it took “cool girl” St. Vincent’s endorsement to legitimize Swift’s talent in the eyes of indie music snobs. Two other male colleagues got slammed by fellow crit- ics for getting St. Vincent “wrong” in re- views and yet another colleague recently said he thought St. Vincent was a breed of horse. This is probably an accurate sample pool representing the way she’s widely per- ceived. In some ways, she’s designed her stage persona to not be known at all except only in the deepest of ways. Time, for Clark, holds the highest value (if she had more of it she’d “Probably spend time with my family. Even though I do it quite a bit, you know, nobody’s going to be around forever. So make it worth it,” she says) and she’s made formidable use of her pandemic stock. In the past year alone, she’s released and toured for Daddy’s Home, her seventh studio album. She was the subject and star of The Nowhere Inn, an existential, meta mockumentary which she cowrote with musician-comedian Carrie Brown- stein. She remixed McCartney’s song ‘Women and Wives” at his request. She was nominated for a fifth Grammy (she’s won twice, the last in 2019), though the cere- mony has been postponed. Yet her show goes on, always. When we speak to the singer just a few days before Christmas, she’s gearing up for a big, yet ex- clusive production meant for an audience of one: her mother. “I’ve got a family version of A Christmas Carol to put on called A Clarkmas Carol,” she says. The Clarkmas cast is large, which is why there’s technically only one actual, passive spectator. “Yeah, well, that’s the thing, it’s a pretty big production,” Clark says. “So last year, which was the first year that we did it, we kind of ended up having nobody in the audi- ence but my mother. So, you know, it’s not really, I’d say, for the audience. It’s more for the merriment of a bunch of people. As you might imagine it was born out of the bore- dom of COVID.” In Clark’s 2001 high school yearbook, which recently surfaced online, she was quoted as saying, “I definitely plan on being very involved with theatre for the rest of my life.” Her family’s theatrical production in- volves “Victorian costumes, the whole getup,” Clark says. Naturally, the question comes up as to whether she’ll use this inspiration for her next look. Like a true pop icon, Clark goes through defined new aesthetic periods to match her defined new sound periods. She lives, breathes and wears each new album. 2019’s Masseducation brought on a period of slick short hair and futuristic neon pink cou- ture with pointy, shiny boots that cut up at her thighs. The album cover showed a bent- over backside — belonging to a model — in a leopard-printed thong leotard and hot pink tights. The album’s entire rollout was an explod- ing ode to hyper-femininity, using overtly pretty pictures to call out the ugliness of sex- ism, but the irony was so polished that it was often entirely glossed over. Then again, who ever really knows with St. Vincent? Clark’s press at the time was mostly done “in char- acter,” and she largely answered questions about the album in front of a bright pink backdrop and pink microphone. For last year’s Daddy’s Home, St. Vincent made a record rich with the glam and grit of the 1970s. Inspired by her father’s return from prison where he spent over a decade for fraud and money laundering, the album’s hard-grinding funk and glittery rock is a con- fessional hangover after a night at Studio 54. But for all her anachronistic inclinations, Clark laughs at the thought of throwing her look that far back to the wretched days of Charles Dickens. “You know, Victorian turns into steam- punk real quick,” she says. “Steampunk is basically Victorian plus arcane gadgets, so I think, maybe not, but I’ll think on it for sure.” Of her to-do list from the last year, the first item that comes to mind is her >> p16 15 15 dallasobserver.comdallasobserver.com | CONTENTS | UNFAIR PARK | SCHUT |ZE | FEATURE | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | MOVIES | DISH | MUSIC | CLASSIFIED | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS DALLAS OBSERVER DALLAS OBSERVER MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 JANUARY 27–FEBRUARY 2, 2022
