Annie Get Your Strum

Ghostly pale, her doe eyes rimmed with fatigue, Annie Clark descends into the murky bowels of a Dublin music venue. “Follow me, turning left at the sex dungeon,” she quips, swerving suddenly and opening the door to her dressing-room. Inside, her drummer is spread on the floor, grunting. “Oh my,” says Clark, a little embarrassed. “Maybe we should get out of here.”

Twisting on her heels, Clark – who records esoteric orchestral pop as St. Vincent – bounds back up the steps, the fashion victim-y wide brim hat she donned for a surprise television interview earlier in the afternoon wobbling precariously.
“I just want to get some fucking fresh air,” she says. “I’ve got the world’s worst hangover right now.”
Leaving the drummer to his yoga session, Hot Press follows, eventually joining the singer on the stoop across the street from the venue. Her take-out coffee set on the pavement between us, we shoot the breeze about St. Vincent’s critics slaying new LP Strange Mercy, the peculiar circumstances in which it was written (she went cold turkey on her BlackBerry and holed up in a dingy Seattle hotel) and her blossoming creative relationship with ex-Talking Head David Byrne. Mostly, though, Clark is trying to glean some local advice re: good jogging spots in Dublin.
“Which way is the river?,” she asks, shielding her eyes from the uncharacteristically intense November. Hot Press points in the correct direction, before feeling it necessary to add that maybe a patch of the capital healthily populated with junkies and aggressive beggars is perhaps not the best spot for a lycra-ed indie chanteuse to get her exercise zen on. Instead we recommend a walk up Grafton Street to Stephen’s Green. Granted, it’s not quite Central Park but she would dramatically reduce her chances of returning smelling of Dutch Gold and urine.
She jogs every day on tour. It’s one of the ways she stays sane when she starts to forget what continent she’s on.
“I’m not a great runner or anything,” Clark offers. “I’ve never done a marathon, for instance. It keeps my brain from eating itself. It gets my blood going. I’m not as good as my drummer. He’s doing yoga and the rest of us are hungover as fuck.”
It sounds as if she finds life of the road to be somewhat of a trial.
“Running helps. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t. It has probably been a major factor in my happiness over the past year. I mean, everybody has good days or bad days. Today is a hangover day.”
The success of Strange Mercy means that St. Vincent will probably be clocking up a lot more road-miles in the year to come. A mix of the sublime and the cathartic, the LP represents a conscious effort by Clark to plug in and rock out. She’s moved emphatically away from her last LP, 2009’s Actor, a psychedelic orchestral piece that can be interpreted as a precursor to Sufjan Steven’s bonkers chamber rock odyssey, The Age Of Adz. This time out, she wanted to strip things down a bit.
That was true of her life too. Originally from a suburb of Dallas, Clark loves being a young and carefree Manhattanite. However, she’s still enough of a girl from the ‘burbs to find the manic energy of the East Village neighborhood where she lives occasionally overwhelming. Hence her decision to flee to Seattle for a week to write the new record. She didn’t go there because she was a child of grunge or likes rain or coffee or anything like that. She just needed to slow the fuck down.
“I couldn’t deal with New York,” she sighs. “It’s so ‘on’ all the time. I wanted to go to a place where I didn’t know anyone. The plan came together in 72 hours. The next thing I knew I was on a plane, heading west. I needed to get away because I realised I’d become beholden to the blinking light buzz of a cellphone or the clocking of an email – this constant hit of dopamine from being stimulated all the time. It was really starting to get under my skin. And I didn’t realise just how bad it was until I started detoxing. I was able to breathe again. Breathe and write.”
Clark was born in Dallas in 1982. Her parents are of Irish extraction and Catholic, an anomaly in a part of the United States where Evangelical Protestantism is regarded as part of what it is to be American. She won’t go so far as to claim this left her feeling alienated – but says there was definitely a sense of being an outsider.
Then again, perhaps this had less to do with religion than with the fact she seems to have been an unusually intense child. Aged 11, she recalls being overwhelmed with existential despair upon suddenly realising man’s insignificance in the universe. This prompted a panic attack, something which would reoccur throughout her adolescence.
She no longer suffers sudden moments of quivering terror, she says. That isn’t to suggest she’s cultivated a rosier view of the cosmos. She still thinks human beings are small and essentially unimportant. The difference is that, as a grown-up she can understand her angst for what it is – and perhaps even channel it into her music (besides if you can tour with the scarily upbeat cult collective The Polyphonic Spree and return with sanity intact, then anxiety about the meaning of life surely feels trivial by comparison).
In parallel with recording the new LP, she’s been working on a collaboration with David Byrne. Slated for release in the new year, and to be called simply David Byrne And St. Vincent, the record promises to be a compelling union of two unique voices from different generations. Clark is having a lot of fun writing with Byrne. However, she admits that, initially, she found it difficult to get past being awestruck.
“Of course, that’s there. You do have to deal with it. I mean, it’s David Byrne. The thing is, he doesn’t self-aggrandise himself. He’s actually a delight to be around. There isn’t a big ego. So I got past the sense of him being this famous person very quickly. We connect on the level that we’re both musicians.”

Strange Mercy is out now