“I WOULDN’T really call this a pop record,” says St Vincent describing her new album All Born Screaming.
“I did call it ‘post plague pop’ at the start but I then retracted that idea as I wouldn’t call this ‘pop’ in a straightforward sense,” claims the singer, AKA Annie Clark of her seventh album.
“It’s the rawest thing I’ve ever done. Artists are the psychic mirror to the culture they live in.
“I don’t mean to sound too highfalutin, but we’re like little weathervanes. We catch wind of the feeling of where something’s going. It’s a violent world and you have to make sense of that in some form and keep going.
“Songs have a premonitory power in my experience.”
We meet at the three-time Grammy winner’s central London hotel. Dressed in a red polo neck jumper, black leather jacket and with her dark hair scraped back, this is a more serious-looking Clark from the look of her last album, 2021s Daddy’s Home, where she playfully donned a blonde wig and Seventies-style green suit.
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The prodigious US musician and singer, 41, who has been compared to Prince and David Bowie, says her new album is divided into two moods and two distinct parts.
‘Dave is my buddy, so I just called him up’
“Without tying the record up in too much of a bow, it’s a more brutal first half and then there’s hope.
“It’s a season of hell to get to the people we love — which is all we have. The message is we only have one life — so we better live it.”
The superb All Born Screaming is a collaborative album and features Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl and the band’s new drummer Josh Freese, Cate Le Bon, Beck/Nine Inch Nails producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen and War-paint drummer Stella Mozgawa.
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“Dave is my buddy, so I just called him up,” says Clark of the Foo Fighters singer who plays drums on first single Broken Man. Clark played with Grohl when she fronted the remaining members of Nirvana at their 2014 induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame.
The electricity is actually coming through your fingers. It’s Dave Grohl’s touch in the room and the way he plays
She says: “I sent him Broken Man and called him up. I was like, ‘Hey, are you around anytime? Can you come over to the studio?’
“And yeah, he’s Dave Grohl so he rolls up in his truck. Smokes some Parliaments has some coffee tells more stories, we laugh and then he’s like, ‘Great, I’m ready to go’. And then he plays the song, and it sounds like Dave f***ing Grohl. And it’s so exciting.
“It was the first song that people heard from the record and I wanted to be shaken around like a rag doll by music and Broken Man does that.
“The electricity is actually coming through your fingers. It’s Dave Grohl’s touch in the room and the way he plays.
“And the guitar! The noise took me back to my first band when I played guitar in a band called Skull F***ers. That was my first foray into how the guitar is a violent noisemaker. There wasn’t any jazz fingerstyl! I just made a cacophonous hellscape unto the Lord.”
Grohl and Meldal-Johnsen also appear on St Vincent’s new single, Flea, playing drums and bass. Clark says: “When I was listening and heard Dave coming through, I immediately stood up, just because there’s so much energy. It’s so exciting.
‘A greatest hits of people I love’
“That track is a homage to every one of my musical heroes. There’s a nod to Joni Mitchell’s Free Man In Paris, there’s PJ Harvey’s Rid Of Me; there’s a Tori Amos nod in there; there’s Blood Roses, there’s a bit of Sleater-Kinney and Steely Dan’s Aja in there and Dave Grohl is playing on it!
“From the music nerd perspective Flea is a greatest hits of people I love.”
All Born Screaming is St Vincent’s first self-produced record. She produced Sleater-Kinney’s 2019 album, The Center Won’t Hold, and co-produced her previous two albums Daddy’s Home and 2017s Mass- eduction with Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey producer Jack Antonoff.
“I definitely think collaboration is so exciting, and I love doing it but I just needed to make this one on my own,” says Clark.
“I’ve co-produced all my records and I’ve been recording myself since I was 14 in my bedroom, first on a four-track Tascam cassette recorder and then on early versions of digital audio.
“Spending a lot of time alone in the studio and honing my chops playing with my esoteric drum machines and modulars. That’s how I learned to write and find out what I was thinking.
“You feel like you’re a god harnessing electricity. I definitely put the hours in. It’s nerdy s**t for sure.
“That’s how I learned to arrange, so producing is a very natural process for me because I started young. But kids can do it now because they have access to the software and tools and, of course, more women should. And when other women say I’ve opened doors for them it’s so cool and makes me want to cry.”
You feel like you’re a god harnessing electricity. I definitely put the hours in. It’s nerdy s**t for sure
Clark credits friend Cate Le Bon as influential on the record. Not only does she appear on the seven-minute title track, she also lifted Clark when she was going through a period of self-doubt.
“Yeah, I was petulant with the music,” admits Clark. It just wasn’t right and I got very adolescent and petulant with it. Cate came in and was like, ‘Calm it down. This is exciting. Calm it down’.
“With the song, All Born Screaming, I had a programmed beat and a guitar line. And I told Cate I’d tried seven different feels, but I couldn’t quite crack the code.
“Cate was like, ‘You go take a nap. Give me a beer, a bass, and two hours’. And in two hours, the good Welsh girl that she is came back and had written that bassline. I was like, ‘Uh huh?’ She helped get me back on track. And she helped me with the album title.
“I was tossing out various titles and one was All Born Screaming. Cate was like, ‘All Born Screaming is it!’. We are all born screaming — it’s the most primal sound of life ever. And it can mean protest. It’s a title which can be as profound or as flippant as you want it to be.”
The album cover for All Born Screaming shows Clark on fire.
‘I’m not really interested in playing a persona’
“Oh that’s me on fire all right,” she says. “Fire means so many things. Historically, whether you’re Icarus or you’re a Phoenix, or it’s like cleansing, you have to walk through it to get to something, you know, to the other side. And life is a fire dance which is both destructive and constructive.
“I tried to build a world instead of just building the music part. I’ve worked with my friend, artist Alex Da Corte, on the creative direction of this record. He’s major in the art world and I can’t believe he’s slumming it with me in music, to be honest.
“For a number of records, I was very into metaconcept and iconography. I’d think that was what it was to be a modern pop star and play with idolatry.
“For this album I’m way less interested in playing with that construct. This is just me. At this point, I’m not really interested in playing a persona.
“If the work is good, and the songs speak to people, you don’t need much of a narrative.”
There’s a tremendous amount of anxiety in music and I’ve had an anxiety disorder since I was eight. It never stopped me from doing anything, it just robbed me of the joy of doing it
Next month, Clark plays two dates in the UK, including a night at London’s Royal Albert Hall. She says: “It’s going to be hard-hitting. The show will have an element of ‘Just don’t stop the groove!’, which is something I learned from DJing.
“You get a whole new level of respect for the groove when you DJ, because a groove is so exciting, but also so comforting.
“If there’s a groove and people feel good and feel safe they can relax, and enjoy themselves. And as an artist, feeling the energy of the crowd is exciting and drives you too.
“There’s a tremendous amount of anxiety in music and I’ve had an anxiety disorder since I was eight. It never stopped me from doing anything, it just robbed me of the joy of doing it. And with music you’re metabolising the chaos of the world anyway so with a show you leave all your blood, sweat and tears on stage and get it all out.
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“So when people get to see this show, I hope they enjoy it.”
