Annie Clark strolls through the Dallas Guitar Show, a three-day convention for all things axe-slinging, on a “nerdy” excursion (her words) to scope out vintage guitars with her mom. Clark’s striking visage — a combination of black curls, doe-like green eyes and pale skin that’s frequently compared to porcelain — contrasts drastically with the abundance of Hawaiian shirts and button-downs half-consumed by screen-printed flames adorning the mostly male crowd. As tempting as it is to dismiss their questionable dress code on the grounds that they’re guitar players from Texas, keep in mind that Clark herself is guilty on both counts.   

Before the day is over, Clark buys a 1967 Harmony Silhouette with a super-sensitive whammy bar from what she calls the “golden age of awesome-looking guitars.” It will feature prominently on Actor, her second album under the name St. Vincent. But at one point, while nerding out over a vendor’s collection of Silvertones, the guy comes over to see if he can be of assistance by asking, “Oh, are you looking to get your boyfriend a birthday present?”

“I couldn’t touch that,” she says, still incredulous even a year and a half later as she recounts the story over the phone from her new apartment in Manhattan. Apparently some folks didn’t learn anything from the riot grrrl movement.

Not that Clark sees herself as, say, a Sleater-Kinney disciple. OK, she is an indie-pop singer/songwriter who was, until recently, living in the hipster hotbed of Brooklyn, but her brutalized guitar noise serves as a brilliant foil to the crystalline timbre of her soprano voice rather than a third-wave feminist reclamation of the phallic instrument.

She has, however, titled her new album Actor, not Actress, after David Mamet’s point about not needing to gender-specify the term. “[He thought it was] misogynistic to gender-specify because the job is the same,” Clark says. And her role as co-producer/arranger/multi-instrumentalist/bandleader means she has far more in common with Frank Zappa and Björk than Au Revoir Simone and Regina Spektor.

Take the stylized photos of Clark adorning the front and back covers of Actor. Her placid, almost vacant stare simply invites people to draw their own conclusions about St. Vincent as the indie-rock version of a manic pixie dream girl. Of course, those conclusions are almost always wrong. Actor is full of subtle violence (“Laughing with a Mouth of Blood” and “hiding under the bed with a Smith & Wesson”) and bleakness (“Paint the black hole blacker” from “The Strangers”); what Pitchfork’s glowing (“Best New Music”) review of the disc deemed “undercurrents of anxiety and discomfort hidden just beneath a gorgeous façade.”

Clark describes it as “combining things that I like, like this golden age of the Hollywood score and these fucked-up sounding, agitated and aggressive songs on guitar.” If Madonna and David Lynch collaborated on a Disney musical, it might sound like a St. Vincent record.

Just who is the woman messing around with such a volatile aesthetic concoction? Having grown up in a musical family where her uncle, Tuck Andress, is one half of well-known jazz duo Tuck and Patti — Clark served as their roadie and got her start opening up for them — she says that “I knew from the beginning music was something that it was possible that I could do.” Of course, playing in experimental composer Glenn Branca’s orchestra and joining The Polyphonic Spree (eventually becoming to the Dallas collective what Leslie Feist is to Broken Social Scene) helps make playing music a very real option. In the three years since beginning her solo venture as St. Vincent, she’s gone from being that girl from Sufjan Stevens’ backing band to that girl who played Letterman the other night.



If her rise to prominence in the indie-rock world sounds a little like a fairy tale, well, it kind of is. Watching the Letterman performance, when the lights come up during the first chorus of “Marrow,” Clark flashes a little “holy shit” kind of smile in between singing the line “H-E-L-P. Help me, help me.” When I ask about that moment, she says, “I think I’m probably, like, ‘What the fuck? How did we get here? I hope they don’t stop us mid-song and tell us to leave because this is awesome.’” I doubt a request like that would hinder Clark’s tenacity.

The reality of this fairy tale has a lot to do with Clark’s workaholic nature. She began working on Actor directly after coming off touring in support of her debut, explaining that, “I don’t know what to do if I’m not working. I hadn’t been creative at all when I was touring the Marry Me record. I was figuring out how to be a person on the road, so, when I got back, I just got right into writing because I needed to.”

She’s often talked about her “backwards” writing process wherein she created mini scores to her favourite films and then developed the fragments into full-blown songs, arranging all the parts on her home computer before bringing it into the studio with producer John Congleton. Finding the right words, however, required a different approach and a little guidance from The National’s master wordsmith, Matt Berninger.

“We just had a sit-down when we recorded the Crooked Fingers duet [‘Sleep All Summer,’ for Merge’s 20th anniversary box set] and I was asking him about process. We talked about how the details are the real clinchers,” she says. “You hear [Leonard Cohen’s] ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ and you get that there’s a tear in the shoulder. That’s so much more than ‘I love you but you’re gone, and I saw you the other day and I wonder how you are.’ I mean all that stuff’s fine, but that sort of delicate detail was what I was going for way more. Everybody can relate to the theme — the heartbreak or the desperation — but you have to just juxtapose these images next to one another and let people superimpose and interpolate the story.”

Consequently, Actor is replete with lines like: “I’m a wife in watercolours / I can wash away” (“Save Me From What I Want”), “Back pockets full of dynamite / while neighbours talk and talk” (“Black Rainbow”), and my personal favourite near-couplet from “The Party”: “I licked the ice cube from your empty glass / Oh, we stayed much too late till they’re cleaning the ashtrays.”

Clark’s lyrical inspiration is as diverse as her music; she collects things that people say as well as combinations of words from such disparate sources as Sarah Silverman and Charles Bukowski. “I got a lot of inspiration from Bukowski,” she explains. “He says ‘unkissed’ or ‘unfucked’ a lot. And I got really obsessed with how many ways I could say ‘un-.’ Unkissed is probably my favourite.” Hardly the stuff of manic pixie dream girls.

So how did Clark become the patron saint of post–riot grrrl indie rock experimentalism? “I think [the new trend toward sonic manipulation is] possible largely because of consumer-ready electronics and technology,” she says. “Whoever wants to make music on their own can figure it out. I was lucky enough to get a head start on doing that when I was really young, recording myself and working with computers to record myself.

“For me, the time that I’m not making music is some kind of act of defiance against what my perceived role should be,” she continues. “I never felt like I was working with a handicap because of my gender. That idea is so silly that when I come across it at the Dallas guitar show it’s like, really? It doesn’t have power. It’s just so ridiculous.”