From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction

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Speaker 6 These are just anecdotes, but it's building up into something more coherent.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I think it'd be interesting to really try to unravel what his ties are.

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Speaker 7 From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Speaker 6 Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Speaker 6 Not long ago, I spent the afternoon at a concert hall on the west side of Manhattan where Annie Clark was getting ready for a show.

Speaker 6 Clark performs under the name Saint Vincent, and she started out in indie rock. She played with artists like Sufion Stevens.
But St.

Speaker 6 Vincent was an old school shredder, a terrific guitar player and a rock star.

Speaker 6 As a solo artist, she's been compared to David Bowie, and her music is heady and layered, and not always easy, but it's catchy and somehow seductive.

Speaker 6 You trace

Speaker 6 the Andes with your index

Speaker 6 and brag of when and when who you gonna bend next

Speaker 6 Vincent's new album just out is called Mass Seduction.

Speaker 6 I asked her about the title track.

Speaker 7 This is Toko Yasuda, who plays in my live live band. I wanted her to pretend like she was an alien describing how to seduce someone, but in Japanese.

Speaker 7 Why in Japanese?

Speaker 7 Because

Speaker 7 a couple reasons. One, a totally self-serving one, which is that I love Japan and I want to be big in Japan so that I can go there all the time.

Speaker 7 I mean, I'm not above strategy.

Speaker 6 Why did you decide to make this track the title track? In other words, how does it shape the whole of the

Speaker 6 album, the conception of the album, the themes of the album?

Speaker 7 It's more or less kind of like a thesis.

Speaker 7 It's more or less, it contains all the characters that you meet on the album. It's,

Speaker 7 I thought of it, I thought of it like a graduate thesis or something.

Speaker 6 A graduate thesis? Yeah. Well, how would you summarize it?

Speaker 6 What is the thesis? Because the album is just coming out. How would you describe it?

Speaker 7 I would say it's

Speaker 7 an exploration of power

Speaker 7 and the rosy sides of of power, you know, and and also the really the grim sides. I mean, the kinds of things that can have a total hold over you, be it, you know,

Speaker 7 drugs or sex or

Speaker 7 is it telling that those are the only two things I can think of?

Speaker 7 There's a no, there's a third thing. Sadness.

Speaker 6 I think you told Nick Pamgarten, who wrote a profile of you in the magazine, sex, drugs, and sadness.

Speaker 7 Sex, drugs, and sadness.

Speaker 6 Now,

Speaker 6 has it been that kind of period for you in the last few years? It's been three years since you've had an album come in.

Speaker 7 It was a wild three years.

Speaker 7 Yeah,

Speaker 7 a lot of life happened in those three years, for sure.

Speaker 6 I also read a Nick's essay about you that you said that you've been living through while recording this album, which takes a lot longer than people would imagine. Yeah.

Speaker 6 A life of kind of monastic aloneness, that your life was a Pilates class.

Speaker 7 I love Pilates.

Speaker 6 That you're reading a book here and there.

Speaker 7 Yeah. And then work.

Speaker 6 And then work.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 7 I just, I hit a point where I just needed everything but the most vital things for creativity to just go away.

Speaker 6 Were you in trouble? Or did you feel

Speaker 7 off balance?

Speaker 7 Well, certainly off balance. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Certainly off balance. I just needed to do sort of a radical

Speaker 7 reorganizing of my life

Speaker 7 In order to fulfill,

Speaker 7 this sounds really like a Tolkien thing or something, but like in order to fulfill my destiny as a creative person, I needed to just clear a path.

Speaker 6 Otherwise, what would happen?

Speaker 7 You know, otherwise, just depression would

Speaker 7 take its jaws and just swallow me completely. That's That's where you were.
That's what would happen. Yeah.

Speaker 6 And that's a long-standing problem, or that was a problem of the moment.

Speaker 7 I mean, well, one, I mean, talking about anxiety and depression,

Speaker 7 it seems like

Speaker 7 it doesn't seem like anything that's stigmatized to me anymore, because all of my friends are, you know,

Speaker 7 have dealt with it over their entire life. So

Speaker 7 I've been a really anxious person since I was a kid, and more or less, I think that's helped me because I sought ways to cope with it creatively

Speaker 7 and felt you know safe and being able to make something.

Speaker 5 Pills to wake, pills to sleep, pills, pills, pills every day of the week. Pills to walk, pills to think, pills, pills, pills for the family.

Speaker 5 I spent a year

Speaker 5 suspended in air,

Speaker 5 my mind on the gap, my head on the stairs, from healer to dealers, and then back again from guru to hoodoo and voodoo zen.

Speaker 6 There's a song on the album where you,

Speaker 6 well, embrace and reject the pharmacological way of getting at it, pills. Yeah.

Speaker 6 Was that a struggle for you?

Speaker 7 You know what?

Speaker 7 I don't want to overstate it because

Speaker 7 truly, as it pertains to like drugs, I'm kind of a Pollyanna. I never really,

Speaker 7 like,

Speaker 7 I still, like, I've only seen cocaine like three times in my life, which is so stupid. Like, you would think that it would just be,

Speaker 7 you know, be lying on people's naked bodies at parties, but that's just like not the vibe. So,

Speaker 7 um.

Speaker 7 So I don't want to overstate it, but I was in a period of my life where I was working so much that I and I didn't know how

Speaker 7 to

Speaker 7 get a hold of my life

Speaker 7 in any meaningful sort of centering kind of way.

Speaker 7 And yeah, I was certainly relying on

Speaker 7 more pills than I should have been taking to deal with anxiety and depression. But I'm not anti-

Speaker 7 depressed. I'm not anti-antidepressant by any means or anything.

Speaker 7 Those kind of of things have really helped me at certain times.

Speaker 6 Now, I have to ask you a musical question. So I'm

Speaker 6 the kind of

Speaker 6 dork that watches,

Speaker 6 I'm making a big confession on national radio,

Speaker 6 guitar instruction stuff

Speaker 6 on YouTube. And as you know, there's gazillions of them.
If you want to learn how to play something, some Norwegian kid will teach you how to do it.

Speaker 6 embarrassing. All that stuff that as a kid you didn't know how to do, some kid teaches.
I'm watching you with some guy guy whose name escapes me backstage

Speaker 6 at the Capitol Theater in Porchester. And he's asking you all kinds of dorky questions about

Speaker 6 playing the guitar.

Speaker 6 And yet the guitar seems to be getting stripped away. Conventional instrumentation seems to be less and less a part of your music.
Sometimes you'll have a straight piano.

Speaker 6 but more and more it's electronic. Tell me about that, that conversion from being one of the great guitar players and shredders

Speaker 6 to somebody that's changing her sound and why.

Speaker 7 I will say there are definitely guitar moments on this album.

Speaker 7 It's not without guitar, but

Speaker 7 it's a funny thing.

Speaker 7 The guitar, I've been playing it so long. I've been playing it for over 20 years,

Speaker 7 which is weird because I'm 25. So,

Speaker 7 no, I've been playing it for over 20 years, so it's so much a part of my

Speaker 7 person,

Speaker 7 you know.

Speaker 7 But there's a certain amount

Speaker 7 of guitar playing

Speaker 7 that is about pride

Speaker 7 that isn't about the song.

Speaker 7 And on the side of the song.

Speaker 6 You mean macho speed and all that kind of thing. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 7 It just didn't. That's not the way that I want it.
That's not the way that I want to hear guitar, and it's not the way that I want to present it in my life.

Speaker 6 Do you want to hear guitar? What do you mean?

Speaker 7 I want it to be

Speaker 7 like

Speaker 7 a perverse tornado. Or like I want it to be

Speaker 7 a lot of times really uncomfortable. I want it to be the one thing that comes in and disrupts the scene completely.

Speaker 6 Well, you make these sounds on the guitar like nobody else. In other words,

Speaker 6 on that video I was watching, you're showing this guy who knows a fair amount. He said, I'm playing a minor second, which creates a sound that feels like the floor is coming out under your feet.

Speaker 6 And then at one point you say to him, and here's a Debus C voicing, and I thought his face was going to fall.

Speaker 7 My uncle taught me that. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 6 How much is that stuff that you learned in music school? You went to Berkeley Berkeley School of Music, and how much is just screwing around at home?

Speaker 7 Man,

Speaker 7 do you ever feel like you have been coasting on the books you read in high school?

Speaker 7 Because that's the time when you are just the most absorbent?

Speaker 7 In some ways, I feel like I've been coasting on

Speaker 7 the

Speaker 7 things I learned when I kind of first started playing guitar, when I was watching my uncle play.

Speaker 6 And your uncle, we should say, was a terrific guitar player.

Speaker 7 Oh, yeah, Tuck Andress. He's one of the greats,

Speaker 7 one of the jazz, jazz fingle, jazz finger style master. I mean, it's

Speaker 7 unbelievable.

Speaker 7 I forgot your question

Speaker 7 is what happened.

Speaker 6 In other words,

Speaker 6 the sounds that you want to make on guitar are to match your emotional life, not to impress anybody.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I think

Speaker 7 I'm not that interested in

Speaker 7 guitar being a means of

Speaker 7 poorly covered up pride.

Speaker 6 You said something interesting

Speaker 6 about this song, New York, which we want to play.

Speaker 5 New York is in New York without you, love.

Speaker 5 So far in a few blocks to be so low.

Speaker 5 If I call

Speaker 5 you from first,

Speaker 5 I've been new.

Speaker 5 Well, you're the only motherfucker in the city who can handle me.

Speaker 5 New love wasn't true love back to you, love.

Speaker 5 So much for a home run with some blue bloods.

Speaker 5 If I last trod you

Speaker 5 Ethere, I've been new.

Speaker 5 You're the only motherfucker in the city who can stand me.

Speaker 5 I have lost a hero,

Speaker 5 I have lost

Speaker 5 a friend.

Speaker 5 But for you,

Speaker 5 darling, I tell it all

Speaker 5 again.

Speaker 6 You said that it's the first song where you thought

Speaker 6 this might be someone's favorite song. What do you mean by that?

Speaker 7 Some songs are hard labor. And I mean,

Speaker 7 every word, every note is just like deeply labored over until it finally gets to the right spot.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 6 so these things take a long time.

Speaker 7 Sometimes. Sometimes, yeah, super hard.

Speaker 7 And then

Speaker 7 some songs feel like they're floating around in the ether and they could have gone to your next door neighbor, but like you were the lucky recipient of them somehow.

Speaker 7 And New York was one of those songs, the melody and everything, it kind of came rather quickly.

Speaker 7 And it was one of those songs that I was, it felt like I just sort of pulled out of the ether more or less fully formed and was like, thank you. Thanks for that.

Speaker 6 In your own life, have you ever had records or books or any work of art that changed you in a in an apparent way politically deeply for example um

Speaker 7 black like me

Speaker 7 i read that when i was 13.

Speaker 6 right which was a school that was a book that was often assigned in school this was not assigned in school oh you were on the outside it was it was somebody who gets his skin darkened and tries to enter the experience of an African-American man.

Speaker 7 Yes, and he does, and he's brutalized. And

Speaker 7 that,

Speaker 7 something like that,

Speaker 7 all of these things are empathy exercises.

Speaker 7 And at its best,

Speaker 7 that's what art is. And

Speaker 7 I really, really, really firmly believe, and I wouldn't be doing what I do if I didn't,

Speaker 7 that art, music, theater,

Speaker 7 film, I believe that those things

Speaker 7 change people's minds and make them more human and remind them of their humanity and thus the humanity of others.

Speaker 6 So I was really, really young, really young, and heard

Speaker 6 I Want You, Bob Dylan, long before I knew what it was to want

Speaker 1 you.

Speaker 6 But it took the top of my head off somehow. I mean, I was really young, seven years old or something like that, and you were a similar age and were listening to Nevermind, the Nirvarna album, at home.

Speaker 6 What did it do to you that, that young?

Speaker 6 How does art penetrate somebody eight, nine years old?

Speaker 7 I mean, children have,

Speaker 7 they might not have the lexicon to describe the emotions that they feel and the things they're

Speaker 7 intuiting, but

Speaker 7 they have all of the same emotions just in this tiny body.

Speaker 7 And I had a lot of the anxiety emotion. I had a lot of fear.

Speaker 7 And so hearing the kind of purge of that fear

Speaker 7 through Kurt Cobain and never mind and

Speaker 7 was liberating. It said to me, you're not alone.
It said to me,

Speaker 7 we're all in this.

Speaker 7 Like, you have a tribe, is what it said to me.

Speaker 6 And you could hear that at eight or nine.

Speaker 7 Fucking, I'm sorry.

Speaker 7 Sorry. Absolutely.
You just, you,

Speaker 7 you, you go,

Speaker 7 okay,

Speaker 7 okay, I'm not alone in this.

Speaker 6 It must have been an incredible experience for you to stand up, you, as Kurt Cobain for Nirvana, and sing in front of that band.

Speaker 6 And this was at the induction ceremony for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Brooklyn.

Speaker 5 I'm so happy, cause today I found my friend. They're in my head.

Speaker 5 I'm so happy.

Speaker 5 That's okay, cause so are you.

Speaker 5 We broke our mirrors

Speaker 5 Sunday morning, it's every day for all I care.

Speaker 5 And I'm not scared,

Speaker 5 light my candles in the days. Cause I found God.
Yeah,

Speaker 5 yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah,

Speaker 5 yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah,

Speaker 5 yeah.

Speaker 6 Can you describe that experience?

Speaker 7 You know, David,

Speaker 7 I kind of can't.

Speaker 7 I don't know.

Speaker 7 That's one that I don't know. I don't know where to put that experience.

Speaker 7 Because

Speaker 7 everyone

Speaker 7 wishes that Kurt was there doing that.

Speaker 7 And I wish that too.

Speaker 7 So

Speaker 7 I don't know where to put that experience. It feels very strange to

Speaker 7 be joyful about it.

Speaker 6 What were you feeling up on stage when you were singing?

Speaker 7 Something like transcendence,

Speaker 7 something like it.

Speaker 6 How often does that happen on stage? You tour and you play night after night and set lists or, I assume,

Speaker 6 they alter, but they're pretty much the same. You're playing a show.
It's called show business.

Speaker 6 How often is it transcendent and how often does it feel like a night at work?

Speaker 7 There's something in the structure

Speaker 7 and building a really solid structure and foundation architecture of a show that to me feels safe.

Speaker 7 And what I mean by safe is that

Speaker 6 what is safe?

Speaker 7 What I mean by safe is that

Speaker 7 it means that I know that the show is always going to be at a certain level of quality because I've beta tested it, you know, extensively.

Speaker 7 And then so that I have this platform on top of that just like baseline level of quality to experiment with exactly how emotional

Speaker 7 it can be. And the thing about it is that

Speaker 7 performing night after night, it's a little bit like being an actor in that you need to be able to say your lines. You need to remember them.
You need to stand in your light.

Speaker 7 You need to be, you know, have all the blocking down.

Speaker 7 Because at that point, it's not about you, and it's not about your experience in a lot of ways. It's about the audience's experience.

Speaker 7 So, sometimes, sometimes I'm so in it, and I'm reliving every moment of the heartbreak of the song and singing that. And then sometimes I am

Speaker 7 totally disassociated, but I don't think you're outside your own body.

Speaker 7 It's hard to explain. It's

Speaker 7 It's not, unfortunately, that

Speaker 7 ghost floating above the bed looking down. It's not that, but

Speaker 7 sometimes it is just this sort of, I went from this dot to that dot to that dot

Speaker 7 and we did the show.

Speaker 6 I've just heard that you're going to direct a film version of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Speaker 6 Oscar Wilde's great novel. How did that come about? Why'd you decide to do this? And it's not what I expected, but I know to expect the unexpected.

Speaker 7 Well,

Speaker 7 a couple years ago, I was asked to be a part of an all-female horror anthology called The XX.

Speaker 7 And my ethos in life is to

Speaker 7 do things that are scary. And, you know, luckily for me, most things are scary, so I do a lot of things.

Speaker 7 So I

Speaker 7 did this horror short, even though I don't like horror movies. Mine was more of a black comedy.
It starred Melanie Linsky, who was amazing.

Speaker 7 What's the plot? Oh boy. I keep describing it as weekend at Bernie's 2 meets who's afraid of Virginia Woolf.
It's like,

Speaker 7 it's like,

Speaker 7 oh, it's so stupid.

Speaker 7 A mother wakes up on the day that she is throwing her child a seventh birthday, and she finds her husband dead of an overdose of some kind. And we don't know if it's suicide or an overdose.

Speaker 7 and

Speaker 7 she decides that hella high water she's going to throw her daughter she's going to give her daughter a good birthday no matter what so she's sort of frazzled um elizabeth taylor hairstyled woman and um she

Speaker 7 hides the body and eventually hides the body in a

Speaker 7 big

Speaker 7 bear suit

Speaker 7 and puts it at the front of the table as all the kids are you know, coming in and they're about to blow out the candles at the cake. And

Speaker 7 he accidentally gets nudged by the nanny who's bringing in the cake, and then his face falls into the cake, and then the nanny takes the hood off, and it reveals

Speaker 7 it's the dead

Speaker 7 dad. And then the kids scream, and it's over.

Speaker 6 Yeah, yeah, with the Oscar Wilde thing, you're going to keep it pretty much on the Oscar Wilde plot, or you're going to take it into

Speaker 7 it's okay. So

Speaker 7 that was the entire plot of the birthday party. Um, but see it now, it's on Netflix.
And, uh,

Speaker 7 and

Speaker 7 but, but the Oscar Wilde thing, yeah, I was approached by Lionsgate about being involved in an adaptation of Dorian Gray, but um, this time with a female protagonist and set in more or less modern times.

Speaker 7 And I said, Yes, I'm very interested in doing that, but only if I can work with David Burke, who wrote Elle, which is the French film,

Speaker 7 Paul Verhoeven and Isabelle Perre.

Speaker 7 It's the L is the best thing I've ever seen.

Speaker 7 I'm totally obsessed with L.

Speaker 7 And so I contacted David.

Speaker 6 It's scary as hell.

Speaker 7 It's hilarious to me. To be disgusted with that.
That movie, boy. Oh, my God.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 So we're at the High Line Studios, which is an events, performance place, and you're the evening that we're meeting, we're meeting during the afternoon, you're going to be singing for an event.

Speaker 6 What are you going to play?

Speaker 7 Well, I'm going to play

Speaker 7 All You Need Is Love, the Beatles Classic. I'm going to play New York, and I'm going to

Speaker 7 I basically picked the saddest songs in my repertoire, of which there are many, but I picked the absolute

Speaker 7 most bleak for this party tonight.

Speaker 7 Glamorously sad songs.

Speaker 7 Perfect. Perfect.

Speaker 6 On another occasion, you're going to show me how to play I Dig a Pony.

Speaker 7 Yeah, if I can remember it.

Speaker 6 That's an amazing. That's you don't do covers that that often.

Speaker 7 No, because I don't know how to play anyone else's songs.

Speaker 6 I don't believe you.

Speaker 7 No, it's true.

Speaker 7 Yes, we can celebrate anything we want.

Speaker 6 Annie Clark, also known as St. Vincent, her album Mass Seduction is just out.

Speaker 6 That's it for today's show.

Speaker 6 I'm David Remnick, and next week, we'll hear an interview with Chelsea Manning, the former intelligence analyst who served seven years in prison after sending a huge haul of military and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks.

Speaker 6 I hope you'll join us for that. Until then, have a great week.

Speaker 7 The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Toon Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado.

Speaker 7 The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Torina Endowment Fund.

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