St Vincent’s Annie Clark is the patron saint of pop
Life must be weird for Annie Clark right now. On the afternoon we are to speak, the internet is on fire with speculation the singer â who, as St Vincent, performs smart and lately sassy alternative pop â is to be engaged to Cara Delevingne, most âsuperâ of the current generation of super-models.
For anyone who has followed Clark from her early days as wistful indie chanteuse, this elevation to official red-top person of interest is difficult to process. That her personal life is now fodder for the tabloids is equal parts strange and disquieting, as is the idea that she is the sort of capital C celebrity who moves in the same circles as the New York Fashion Week set.
At the centre of the hurricane, Clark is strikingly unfazed. A higher profile is fine she says with a matter-of-fact shrug. When you have a top five album and every music journalist in the northern hemisphere is swooning over your record, it is inevitable that your name recognition will increase. On a day-to-day basis, the worst she has to endure is an admirer requesting a selfie. She can handle that.
âI have the best fans,â says Clark. âSometimes theyâll buy me a cookie. Whatâs not to object about someone buying you a cookie? I mean, seriously. My life feels like a steady stream of good things right now. I feel lucky â very, lucky. It is by no means overwhelming.â
Had a great interview with @st_vincent at @Sasquatch in the minivan. She's incredible! pic.twitter.com/4suTvZNdRr
— Mike McCready (@MikeMcCreadyPJ) May 25, 2015
That she is taking insta-celebrity in her stride is probably testament to the accelerated pace of her career this past 18 months. When she released her self-titled fourth album in early 2014, Clark was an up-and-coming cult artist. A year-and-a-half on, she is counter-culture royalty, having won a Grammy for best alternative record and performed as a stand-in for Kurt Cobain at Nirvanaâs Rock and Roll Hall of Fame initiation last summer.
âThat is like something that happened to another person,â she says, her accent containing just a hint of a Texas twang (she was born in Oklahoma and grew up in Dallas).
âI think about that and it is as if it belongs to another life. Nirvana has always been important to me. I remember my older sisterâs friend putting on Nevermind when I was a kid. We spent the whole day skateboarding to it. It wasnât just about the music â it was a whole cultural shift.â
Iâve met Clark (32) on several occasions, always with a vividly different look (her, not me). The first time was in 2007 at a small hotel in Dublin. She was more or less unheard of and, wearing a beret and charity shop coat, was a picture of indie-kid meekness.
Four years later, we sat on a stoop outside the Button Factory venue in Dublin and sipped coffee as she quizzed me on the best jogging route in Dublin (her original plan to trot gamely along the Liffey Boardwalk was, I suggested, not the wisest, given that she was looking for somewhere scenic and âIrishâ).
On our last tĂȘte-Ă -tĂȘte in 2014, however, the transformation was striking. She sported a peroxide dye job and was dressed as Lady Gagaâs idea of Jackie Kennedy â vast mirror shades, an old-style scarf almost, but not quite, concealing her hair. She was pale too â her skin almost translucent, as if sheâd spent the previous six months in someoneâs basement. She came across quirky and edgy â the very picture of an outrĂ© pop star.
The reinvention was carried through to her live show that night, in which she gave it the full BeyoncĂ©, gyrating and head-bopping along to her new recordâs suite of electro-pop.
âYou have to remember that the album wasnât even out at that point,â she says.âWe were very early in the process of working out what we wanted the live show to be. I was trying different things. It was a bedding-in period.â
She enjoys trying out new looks, she adds. From David Bowie on, image manipulation has been part of a pop starâs tool kit. It is something she is fascinated by.
âHonestly, itâs just FUN,â she says. âFashion and all that... Itâs pretty irrelevant. Itâs not going to change the world or anything like that. But I do enjoy it.â
She circles back to the topic of celebrity. âIt is not something I try to be conscious of. [Fame] is not my motivation. I try not to be a âproductâ. For the most part itâs perfectly fine. If someone wants to take a picture of you thatâs great. I donât mind saying âhiâ.â
What she probably wonât do is âlikeâ your Facebook posts. Clark is wary of social media â a topic she addresses with considerable insight on âDigital Witnessâ, many peopleâs favourite track on St Vincent. It can be read as a broadside against those who live vicariously through the internet.
âI was questioning the premise that, with all of this documenting of the mundane, we are not living for ourselves,â she says. âWe were living to be the product. I am still very self-conscious in terms of what I put out into the world through social media. However, it is a double-edged thing. I judged an event in Brooklyn recently â there are all these incredible comedians and jugglers. I asked âhow did you learn to do that?â The answer was that they learned it from YouTube. So it can be a tool as well.â
Clark canât wait to return to Ireland in July. Her family traces its roots to Cork and, though sheâs never been there, the county has a assumed near-mythic status in her peopleâs folklore (her middle name is âErinâ).
âComing from Texas, I feel we have a lot in common with Irish people. The Irish, when they arrived in America, were not welcomed with open arms. There is a bit more of the underdog thing â Irish people are really grounded. They donât have that [sense of superiority] that neighbouring countries might have, shall we say.â
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