St. Vincent On The 'Brutalising Rock Show' & 'Ecstatic Rave' Powering Her 'All Born Screaming' Tour

When St. Vincent (aka Annie Clark) last toured Australia in June 2018, she was a different version of the artist she is today.

Then plugging her fifth album, Masseduction, Clark was making music as performance art, presenting a jarring fantasy sexuality that was simultaneously alluring, uncomfortable, and perhaps even a bit mocking.

St. Vincent has built quite the reputation for herself in the years since releasing her debut album, Marry Me, in 2007. She’s recognised as one of the most influential, accomplished guitar players in rock music with a style that’s melodic, memorable and distorted, appealing to anyone who enjoys music.

No matter how much or little you know about guitar playing, you know that what St. Vincent does is impressive, and it sounds great.

Clark is a chameleonic musician whose visual and sonic output never repeats across any of her albums. Prior to her new album, All Born Screaming, released back in April, St. Vincent dropped Daddy’s Home in 2021, a conceptual period piece that engrossed listeners in the gritty, glam rock scene of New York City in the ‘70s.

For the Daddy’s Home era, Clark donned a blonde wig cut to a bob and wore a stylish trench coat. With All Born Screaming, she’s back to her signature black hair, said farewell to producer Jack Antonoff (Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey), and embraced her independent era. For the first time in her career, Clark took the reins of producing one of her own albums, a release that needed to be wholly hers.

Australia didn’t get to see St. Vincent on her Daddy’s Home tour, which saw her getting more personal and offering callbacks to funk akin to Stevie Wonder and moments of tender glory captured by the likes of Pink Floyd.

But we will see her as she presents All Born Screaming, one of her most fascinating records to date. An album that features scattered pianos, electronic and industrial metal flourishes, the industrial and the beautiful, All Born Screaming is an instant classic in the already legendary St. Vincent catalogue.

To make her live shows of this era even more interesting, Clark has been opening her shows with album highlight Reckless, one of her most breathtaking compositions yet. Opening with the piano, her voice vulnerable and demanding as what starts as a ballad becomes an industrial dirge, Clark explores the feeling of being “truly unmoored by grief.” She sings:

And I've been mourning you since the day I met you/ Stranger, come in my path and I'll eat you up/ I, I’ll tear you limb from limb or I'll fall in love

It’s a hell of a way to build up anticipation of what’s to come, and it’s very intentional.

Catching up with St. Vincent just after she announced her return to Australia as part of Victoria’s ALWAYS LIVE program in partnership with Frontier Touring, she offers, “Part of the concept for me with the show was that, like the record All Born Screaming, we need to start in darkness or desolation or a moment of reckoning and grief and end with ecstasy. So, the show, in my mind, kind of travels through that path.”

Released in April, All Born Screaming marks the “most unfiltered” St. Vincent album to date.

For one, Clark doesn’t mind if she disturbs with the unhinged or uncomfortable (Broken Man), if you weren’t ready for a rave (Big Time Nothing), or if grief is something you don’t feel like addressing head-on (Sweetest Fruit, her ode to the electronic music pioneer SOPHIE).

By describing the album as “unfiltered,” she also means, in a practical sense, that All Born Screaming is the first St. Vincent album she’s ever co-produced. In terms of being in the producer’s seat, Clark had to find a “very different mindset” than what she utilises as a performer.

“So much about production is about taking things away and becoming egoless with sounds that you really love,” Clark explains, “because, ultimately, everything has to be in service of the song. That doesn't mean it needs to be prim, tamed, or stale; it just has to be in service of the song.”

Using an example that there might be a moment that you love the sound of, but it takes away from the vocal in a negative way, she says about the way to handle that instance:

“You have to tell people where to look and point first, set the expectation and lead them there. Production is a lot of making those choices of what to leave on the cutting room floor, and trust me when I say, there's hours and hours and hours and days of music that didn't make an end to this album.”

She continues, “[Production requires] a very different mindset than being a performer. You have to be completely open—open to throwing this out and throwing this at the wall and throwing that at the wall. And what if I try this, and what if I try that? And then, the producer’s job is to navigate and corral that. When it's the same person, honestly, it's a pretty big mental tap dance that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, but there’s no way I could have made this record any other way.”

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Clark said of where the album took her—and why she couldn’t make an album like it before: “I've known I was going to make a record called All Born Screaming since I was 23, but I just wasn't ready. I wasn't really worthy of the title 'cause you have to live a lot to be worthy of a title that really says it all. It's the beauty, it's the brutality, and it's all part of the same continuum.”

And when she announced the album, she backed those thoughts, stating: “There are some places, emotionally, that you can only get to by taking the long walk into the woods alone—to find out what your heart is really saying. It sounds real because it is real.”

Clark arrived in those woods not alone but with collaborators who would understand her vision, including Dave Grohl, Josh Freese, Cate Le Bon (who you can hear on the groovy title track), producer and musician Justin Meldal-Johnsen (Poppy, Nine Inch Nails, Paramore), Warpaint’s Stella Mozgowa, and others. They were just as integral to the album as her mindset.

“In so many ways, Cate Le Bon is my favourite modern songwriter,” Clark gushes before describing what she admires most about her friend’s musical abilities:

“The way she thinks about music is like the way people think about architecture. Nothing ever feels forced when Cate does it. I know it takes immense effort because making anything that great does, but she has an effortlessness and patience to her work that I so admire, and I definitely don't have; it's not my natural instinct.”

She also calls Grohl a “great songwriter” and compliments his drumming abilities: “The reason he's one of the greatest drummers is not just because he is like absolute thunder behind the drum set, it's because he's always serving the song. He's never playing over the song; he's going, ‘Cool, I see what you are, and I support you, and I'm gonna take you to the moon and back.’”

When she collaborated with Josh Freese, he wasn’t yet a member of the Foo Fighters. “Josh Freese… I love his drumming, obviously,” she begins. “Josh wasn't in Foo Fighters at the time; we recorded a while ago. He came in and played the drums on [album opener] Hell Is Near with this, like, monk-like restraint, which was beautiful.

“And then, I was like, ‘What if we did ska and reggae really wrong?’ But he played like a ballerina. Honestly, it's such a beautiful drum performance. It's one of my favourite drum performances on the record.”

St. Vincent’s devoted Australian fans will get to experience the majestic terrors and joys of All Born Screaming this November, with the singer and multi-instrumentalist set to perform three shows in Victoria for this year’s ALWAYS LIVE program.

Outlining what fans can expect from her new live show, Clark reveals, “I think it's a brutalising rock show with moments of real beauty, and then also, like a sort of ecstatic rave.”

The last time Clark was in Australia, she played solo St. Vincent shows – conceptual concerts to present Masseduction in its purest form. She went into the polar opposite with Daddy’s Home, bringing a live band back on stage and doing away with the backing tracks. As for this tour?

“This is joyful and loose and a little pervy… I guess I'm always a little pervy,” Clack laughs, telling us that there’s more rigidity in the music of All Born Screaming, but that doesn’t mean the live show is still or boring.

“At the end of the day, it's about five people on stage just murdering their instruments,” she explains. “I mean, just playing, putting on a rock show… that's kind of the ethos I went [for]; very far away from stiff and conceptual. These tours look completely different. These tours are night and day.

“It's always about the music. This band is really ripping and really incredible, you know, everybody up there is a brilliant musician and composer and artist in their own right,” she adds. “I always have a sort of internal narrative framework for the show… anything that you spend an hour and a half with, whether it's a movie or a play or a rock show, should have a shape.”

Explaining that she spent a lot of time on organising the setlist, the show’s video content, her choreography, and the subtle movements that make up a St. Vincent show (“Obviously, that sounds highfalutin,” she quips), Clark trails off, coming to the conclusion that a St. Vincent show represents something quite simple to understand, really: “It's like, let's start a mosh pit and play a rock show.”

St. Vincent will bring her All Born Screaming tour to Australia for three exclusive Victorian shows as part of ALWAYS LIVE. Tickets for her upcoming shows are on sale now via frontiertouring.com/stvincent.

ST. VINCENT

ALL BORN SCREAMING TOUR – AUSTRALIA 2024

Monday 25 November - Palais Theatre, Melbourne

Tuesday 26 November - Her Majesty's Theatre, Ballarat

Thursday 28 November 2024 - The Aviary, Melbourne - An Intimate Audience with St. Vincent ALWAYS LIVE