Sexy & Silly: Working At The 'Intersection Of The Ridiculous & The Dominatrix'

We chat to St Vincent - aka Annie Clark - at 3am local time in Britain, about three weeks out from her appearance as part of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ All Points East Presents line-up in London. 

We're chatting ahead of Clark's return to Australia, where she'll be performing just two shows: one at Sydney's Carriageworks for Vivid, and another at Hobart's Dark Mofo festival. "It never feels like work coming to Australia," Clark says. "It just always feels like vacation. It's beautiful and friendly, and like all this food is organic... It's just very mellow."

The festival dates are an extension of her one-woman Fear The Future tour, as distinct from the full-band live show she premiered at Coachella in April. She describes the concerts, which chronologically trace and reimagine her work from her 2007 debut Marry Me to MASSEDUCTION, as "more like a theatre piece than a straight-ahead rock show". 

Her plan while between shows is to hit up Sydney Theatre Company, and to "see whatever art is up and around". But when Clark travels, she says, her modus operandi is to just "eat the food and walk around and drink good coffee".

This way of moving through new spaces - "getting to see how people live in all kinds of places, and to meet all kinds of different people" - informs her songwriting. She says it reinforces in "a real, real, real, real, visceral way that human beings are basically all the same everywhere and everybody wants the same things, and everybody wants somebody to love them".

"My favourite thing to do is just kinda watch people. People are fascinating. I don't think I'll ever get tired of writing about people or writing about the human condition."

The people Clark sees and encounters often end up in her songs in some way or another - from people she overhears on the subway to passing by someone who "has something captivating about them". She describes a "blue-collar Chicago tough guy" she spotted on a train years ago, who "basically gave the equivalent of a David Mamet monologue on the train". It was "completely authentic", she says, "so human, and so beautiful".

"[You'll] see people suffering, see people falling in love, see people running down the street screaming at each other or whatever it is. All these things are useful - writers are cannibals; it's just the nature of the game."

Is it possible to avoid the current, arguably toxic, political climate in the US - say the 'masseduction' of fake news - from seeping into her music? Clark says, with Trump's noxious behaviour getting headlines, and taking up so much "psychic space", that there's "no way to shut it out just 'cause you're a person walking around the world". But while she acknowledges that "things about the political climate are gonna come into what I do in some ways, I don't think I would ever make a quote-unquote political record".

"It really is like a disobedient toddler ruining dinner for everyone. But the election of frankly an idiot was in some ways the natural conclusion of the celebrity-worship and capitalism-worship that's been going on for a long time. And it speaks to the haves and the have-nots, and how that gap keeps getting bigger, and the quality of life for people is not good, because of a lot of greed and a lot of not looking out for your neighbour."

What she's interested in writing are "human songs about human beings going through life as it is now, and that which is topical, yeah, of course", but says that preachy political albums don't usually work as an artistic statement. "The quality of the art usually goes down in relation to it being overtly political only because you're judging it by a different matrix, right? You're judging it by how long it maligns this that or the other, or makes explicit what it does or does not believe. You're not judging it on like 'Is this a good song? Does this move me?' And shit like that where, like, there's some assumed moral high ground, that shit just drives me crazy.

"Don't - just don't. The human condition is suffering and everybody's just trying to do the best they can, and everybody is afraid and freaked out and wants basically the same thing so just can it with that moral high ground shit, it doesn't make your art any fucking better."

Instead, Clark's work is anything but self-serious: her songs combine diverse musical styles and genres, dark and joyful themes, upbeat music with moody lyrical undertones, and the artful with the playful. She says a sense of humour is fundamental to her artistic practice:

"You would be surprised how many decisions I make on songs or on videos because they make me laugh, because there's something in them that's either absurd or uncomfortable. I don't know what it is, and I'm not interested in dissecting what it is: I just know that I reacted to it and that it's funny, it's ludicrous.

"The cover of my album is an arse - that's like junior-high [Years Seven to Nine] kid stupid, but I love it, and it says it all. It says what it needs to say too. It's like, 'Where's that line between sexy and silly?'... Because that's definitely the place I was trying to live on this album. I think maybe not as many people try to go to where that Venn diagram intersects, but I'll go there. I'll be there at the intersection of the ridiculous and the dominatrix."

With every record - MASSEDUCTION is St Vincent's fifth - Clark receives ever-more critical praise and a higher position in the charts. That kind of attention does matter to her in so much as it allows her to keep doing what she's doing: "I want to play music for my whole life and if nobody was listening that really wouldn't be feasible.

"I'm so glad about it, in the sense of more people are listening to the music and that means that it's connecting with people, and that's really all I wanted to do with this record. [But] who knows when the other shoe's gonna drop on anything.

"I've just been lucky to get to have a whole life because I got pretty good at moving my fingers over a piece of wood and steel. I've seen the world. I've met the most incredible people. I've seen things I never thought - I never dreamed - that I would see, and all because I just loved this thing. I hope I get to keep doing that for a long time."