St. Vincent Sheds Her Personas on All Born Screaming : "It's not in the third person. It's not from a distance, not at a remove. This is just life."

Alex Da Corte/Courtesy Virgin Music

All Born Screaming, Annie Clark’s new album as St. Vincent, has a baroque quality—a grandiosity revealed as the songs expand beyond their initial pop sound, suggestive of the kind of subliminal violence that defines our times. There’s the single “Broken Man,” a dark dance track that Clark drives with her shrieking rock n’ roll voice and parallels with her guitar riffs. There’s “Violent Times,” a dreamy ballad with a little bit of Portishead, a little bit of Kate Bush, Clark’s voice in between a scream and a diva-esque belt.

On the album’s cover Clark wears a simple black and white outfit, stockings with white socks and black pumps, a hint of eroticism despite being buttoned-up. Somewhere in between a dance and an exorcism, she contorts her body, which is in flames. It’s unclear if she is turning in order to snuff out the flames or embrace them.

I talked with Clark on the phone on a rare day off from rehearsals about the album's inspirations.

GQ: You’re rehearsing your new record now in LA. Is this the first time performing the songs? How does it change your relationship to the music?

ANNIE CLARK: Maybe ask me in six months when I've played the music for people. There are certain songs from the new album, like “Reckless,” that I can't sing casually. It kind of rips me open every time I sing it. I'm not in any way emotionally calloused.

This is the first record that you produced all yourself. How did you decide to do that and what was the experience like?

I have been recording myself in my room on early digital recording platforms since I was 15. So that's kind of how I learned how to write and arrange and think about music. So it's always been a part of my process to record myself and make extensive demos. But this time, I mean, I just knew that there were emotional places that I wanted to go and also sonic places that I wanted to go. You know if you have a painting in your head, you can't ask somebody else to paint it for you. You just have to dive in and do it. And that meant a lot of discovery alone in a room. I was reading obscure drum machine manuals and shit. I mean, like, really, really nerdy stuff on some level, but also just finding new sounds.

That’s interesting—finding new sounds and textures through a new set of skills, and being able to convey something different.

I'm endlessly curious about it too. I had my engineer — who engineered a lot of this record, drums especially, and mixed it — I would have him come over and give me engineering lessons. Music is so fascinating and vast you'll be a student of it for your whole life and never even be anywhere near the edges of it. So I just followed my curiosity and kind of studied. I wasn’t just about sharpening the tools in my toolbox but about actually getting some new tools.

For the visuals for this album you collaborated with the artist Alex de Corte. Can you talk a little bit about how you decided to work with him and how did you meet?

We met while making my video for “New York” and I'm just a massive fan of his work. I was in a piece of his called Fresh Hell, where he had me put on a wig and hold a one eyed cat. Then he just yelled directions at me that I was reacting to: “You're shocked” “You're so happy to be here.” “You just heard the phone ring.”

Then we met up in Madrid this summer. He was over there working and I was playing shows and we went to the Prado and saw Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. It’s incredible. Then we saw Goya’s Black Paintings. That really felt like, okay, this record is kind of touching on those paintings — black and white and the only color comes from fire. There's a little bit of burn the witch, there's a little bit of black mass. We also went to Philly—we went to the Philly Museum and we saw Duchamp’s final piece, Étant donnés, that I would say in a lesser way had some sort of an impact on the creative. And then we just went to a studio, and we just talked and talked and looked at Erica Beckman and Jack Goldstein. We looked at Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Longo, and Jack Pierson. Some of these artists who had just survived another plague and that, energetically, felt correct.

Your look on this record seems a little simpler. It’s less of a developed persona with exaggerated style than on past St. Vincent records—you’re just in black and white with straight hair.

The album's not about persona or deconstructing persona—it's all, like, lived experience. I’ve heard various takes like: “Okay, so “Broken Man” is your cultural-critic critique of toxic masculinity?” And I'm like No, that's just how I feel sometimes. It's not in the third person. It's not from a distance, not at a remove. No, this is just life.

Do you see a record and the production around it as an opportunity to present yourself in a different way? Do you feel like each is an extension of the last? Or do you like to start with a blank slate?

I think with every record— however I present is really just coming from the themes and the music. If it's Masseduction, it's all about a certain kind of masochism, power and sex and structure. I was like, “Okay, well, you know, what that means is I'm in latex, because that is the most strict clothing I could possibly wear.”

With this record, I’m just wearing black and white. It’s like She just got off work. But there's also like, this sort of nod to Balthus with the white panties—just, like, a peek of white underwear. It’s perverse in a way I find really funny. It kind of lights me up. It's a little bit buttoned-up, but you know that there's a fire underneath which is a little more disarming.

How do you feel about the release? Do you have a postpartum thing after it comes out?

No. To me, it kind of feels like, once a record is actually out in the world I feel sort of liberated to start on the next thing. Just quietly. It feels like, “Okay, great.” And then that’s when the life of the music really begins. I'm not saying like, if a tree falls in the woods…Obviously, making music genuinely has its own reward. But I think once the music is out in the world, it's for other people. It's not about me anymore. I don't want to over-explain anything or be too autobiographical because I think it can rob people of their own experience with it. Ultimately the hope is that if they love it, they bring their whole lives to it. It becomes about them and where they were when they heard it, who they were in love with etc. And that's the approach that feels most generous to me.

Originally Appeared on GQ