Angst and anger fuel the fire

Texan singer St Vincent tells Ed Power why her new record continues a penchant for creating music that is so personal and intense

I just knew I needed to detox from the constant stimulation of email and phone. I needed space

ANNIE CLARK, aka St Vincent, is speaking in a soft, sad whisper. “Recently my life has been difficult and challenging and dark,” says the 29-year-old Texan singer. “I’ve had a very trying year. So when I got the chance to go back into a room and write songs, it was an amazingly straightforward process. I realised I was lucky that I get to play music for a living.”

She won’t go into the details of her personal upheaval. Whatever she went through clearly had a profound impact. Strange Mercy, her new record, is intense and cathartic. Clark yelps and snarls and plays angry, distorted guitar. She is audibly channelling demons.

For all that, the songs give little away. Clark favours ambiguous lyrics. Listening to the record you can tell she is troubled. But you won’t be able to figure out why. Her unhappiness is cloaked in mystery. The best music always is, she says. “Every record I release is intensely personal,” Clark elaborates. “It’s a matter of how you choose to interpret what is going on in your life. My songs are full of characters. I need that sense of being in the third person, that suspension of disbelief, to get into a song.”

Despite the fraught circumstances Strange Mercy was a remarkably easy to compose, she says. Rather than dragging her down, her personal difficulties placed everything in perspective. “Real life is hard,” she says. “It is full of sorrow. When you go from dealing with all that to making an LP it’s like, ‘Hey, It’s music … I’m not gonna stress about it’.”

Clark’s songs are ethereal and angst ridden. She has toured as backing singer with alternative folkie Sufjan Steven and shares his love of star-crossed whimsy. However, she can rock out too. On Strange Mercy, she wrenches angular, Sonic Youth-style distortion from her instruments. The resulting cacophony is at once engaging and disconcerting.

“The guitar has really become sort of the central focus of the show,” she says. “I play it a LOT on the album. And as I’ve toured it, the songs have stretched out and grown more dynamic.”

Strange Mercy has been a big hit for St Vincent. With a clamour of critical acclaim ringing in her ears Clark is playing to some of the biggest audiences of her career. She is pleased but won’t get carried away. I don’t mean this in a self aggrandising way — it’s obvious coming off my most recent tour that the album has brought me to a new level.

“It’s nearly a year since the record came out. There is still some sort of vitality with it out there. I’ve noticed a new rapport with my fans. I’ve played music my entire adult life. It’s nice to see the fruits of my labour in terms of fan response. Starting out, I never dreamed I’d never reach the stage I have.”

Clark lives in the super-hip East Village in lower Manhattan. She loves life in the heart of the metropolis. There’s a downside, though, as she discovered when she sat down to write Strange Mercy. There were simply too many distractions. Surrounded by the non-stop hubbub she found it impossible to concentrate. So she did something radical. Clark turned her mobile phone off, stopped checking her email and booked into a hotel in Seattle. A week later she returned to New York with the bones of Strange Mercy in the bag.

“New York can be difficult to deal with. It’s constantly on the go. My idea was to get to somewhere that didn’t have distractions. It happened really quickly. I knew I needed to detox from the constant stimulation of email and your phone. I needed space.”

Success has opened doors. She has contributed to the soundtrack to HBO’s drama Boardwalk Empire. And she has dipped a toe in acting, playing an exaggerated version of herself in the hipster-baiting comedy Portlandia.

“I’ve never had a burning desire to act,” she says. “I don’t need to build a fucking temple to my ego. You know, actors who sing tend to get a hard time of it. Musicians who try to act don’t necessarily receive an easy ride, either. I decided I would only do it if it was fun and I knew it was something I could do well.”

For Boardwalk Empire she got to spend the day in a studio with a professional orchestra, crooning her way through a suite of pre-war jazz songs. Coming from the hard-scrabble world of independent rock, the experience was an eye-opener. “It blew my mind to be in a studio with 16 great musicians, to be able to play music together with them. It’s rarer in my world.We did a song in three takes. It was an amazing experience.”

But not quite as amazing as her trip to the White House last year. At the invitation of American Public Radio she travelled to the annual Press Correspondents’ Dinner, where the key speaker was Barack Obama. Her date for the evening was ex-Talking Heads singer David Byrne, with whom she is writing an album.

“It was surreal. I remember seeing Rupert Murdoch talking to Arianna Huffington and thinking, ‘Wow, look at those rich people — they keep on getting richer’.”

Getting to know Byrne was a curious process in itself. Initially she was in awe. Gradually, she stopped seeing him as a musical legend. He was an interesting guy with similar musical tastes. “He makes it easy,” she says. “He isn’t a self aggrandising type. With David there is no huge ego. Very quickly you learn to get past all of that. We communicate on a very simple level, in that we are both musicians.”

* St Vincent headlines the Body and Soul Festival at Ballinlough Castle, Co Westmeath, Jun 22-24