“She can’t help but be herself,” the late David Yaffe wrote in AIR MAIL last year. “And we, who love her, don’t want her to be normal.” He was talking about Annie Clark, the 43-year-old singer and writer known as St. Vincent, who at the time was about to tour her seventh album, All Born Screaming, in Europe. “She can shred on guitars like no one else,” Yaffe added. “Her voice has a chilly beauty that can go straight for the heart when you least expect it. She makes people uncomfortable. She’s got three Grammys. She’s not in it for trophies.” What more is there to say? Perhaps that St. Vincent is now surprising us once more by waving goodbye to the big stage for a little while, and taking up her first residency at the Café Carlyle, the Carlyle Hotel’s storied cabaret, where jazz giants like Eartha Kitt and Bobby Short held court. Accompanied only by her keyboardist, Rachel Eckroth, her guitar, and her voice, St. Vincent will bring intimacy to her usual chaos. “There’s a part of me that, for a long time, has lived in fear of the jazz police,” she recently told David Kamp in The New Yorker, “and I think this is something that will liberate me from that fear.” —Jeanne Malle