“We’re all born screaming,” sings Annie Clark, who performs as St. Vincent. Her name comes from a lyric by Nick Cave—“And Dylan Thomas died drunk in St. Vincent’s hospital.” That’s me, she said, “where poetry comes to die.” She was joking.
All Born Screaming is the title of Clark’s 2024 album and tour, and an idea she has been carrying around for nearly 20 years, since just after dropping out of Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Out of the womb, we’re all terrified and traumatized; we have no words, no defenses. Gradually we get cuter, and then we become alienated from each other. St. Vincent, now 41, grazes the mainstream, but she can’t help but be herself. And we, who love her, don’t want her to be normal. She can shred on guitar like no one else. 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.
In 2017, on Masseduction—an album that could have been her monster breakthrough, but masses be damned, she only seduces those who can handle the truth—there’s a song called “New York.” She concluded that, for the first time, here was a work that could be someone’s favorite song. It’s that good. But the kicker, as writ, is not for all ears: “You’re the only motherfucker in the city who can handle me.” Which hits us where we live, especially if where we live is New York.
Indie artists don’t go mainstream the way they used to, and, musicianship, exploration, originality, these things can’t be mass-produced. St. Vincent’s new studio album, All Born Screaming, is her seventh. It’s also her first to be self-produced in a studio she built herself, the sound wholly Annie-worthy—with modular synths and digital analog, echoes of the past and a voyage to the future.
Dave Grohl, of Nirvana and Foo Fighters fame, plays thundering drums to support her inspired chaos. The video for “Broken Man” has her bursting into flames. She doesn’t care. She keeps playing. The song progresses and the flames get bigger. She keeps singing, keeps dancing, and everything she does to put the fire out just backfires. No one is really getting hurt, but it’s a hell of a horror flick.
The writing and musicianship on Masseduction were reaching a peak, but it was hard to hear over a sound that was, at times, aggressively trying to break through to the present. The next year, St.Vincent released piano-and-vocal versions of the same songs and they sounded exquisite, like German lieder. Peel off the layers and you hear the beauty on its own. All Born Screaming doesn’t sound calculated. It came from within. It is the Annie Clark of Annie Clark. Annie will inevitably sing “New York,” and if it isn’t already your favorite song, when you see her this Thursday in Bend, Oregon—or at any of the venues on her 2024 tour—it could still happen. You’re the only motherfucker who can handle her.
St. Vincent tours the U.S. this summer, with a European tour to follow, beginning October 13
David Yaffe is a professor of humanities at Syracuse University. He writes about music and is the author, most recently, of Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell. You can read his Substack here
