St. Vincent finally overcame her fear of Strats on All Born Screaming
Annie Clark wanted to get lost. Really lost. Lost lost. There was a new St. Vincent record to make, and in order to do that she decided to hole up alone at her Los Angeles studio, chasing down every loose thread, following each bad idea to see if it became a good one. There would be freedom, excitement, and boundless creativity. There would be “so many fucking manuals,” she says, entirely deadpan. “Analogue synthesis, modular synthesis, sequencing and programming…”
The resulting album – her alternately brutish and exploratory seventh LP All Born Screaming – has been out for a few months when Clark joins our Zoom call, but there’s still a whiff of its creative cordite in the air. “I’m in my studio right now,” she says. “I’m sitting here looking at so many synths, they’re all clocking, and the delays are clocking…”
READ MORE: Five Essential St. Vincent Songs That Guitarists Need to Hear
The important thing, though, is that they’re all poised and ready to go. Clark notes that all that this gear, all the book learning, all the lessons from her engineer, were employed in service of keeping the ball in motion once it had started rolling. You can’t get lost lost if you’re stuck on the side of the road, hazards blinking to no-one in particular.
“You’ve got drum machines playing things straight, synths that are swinging, and it’s exciting – the main thing is to not have to stop that flow because I’m not getting a signal,” she says. “I spent a lot of time in my studio hitting those roadblocks and realising it’s hard to switch from the creative brain to the technical brain. There’s a price to that, to going back and forth.”
Clark’s refusal to pay that price is evident here. If 2021’s Daddy’s Home – a retro dive into 1970s New York glam that picked the bones of her father’s imprisonment for white collar financial crimes – found Clark wearing a costume that didn’t always fit quite as snugly as it could have, then its successor sounds all the more organic.
All Born Screaming investigates death, emptiness and what she recently described to the Guardian’s Michael Cragg as “a baseness that we all have” while leaning on the pyrotechnic leads, snaking melodies and filling-rattling bass grooves that burst from her skin on 2014’s breakout self-titled. Crucially, despite its painstaking creation, the whole thing feels alive.
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Born Again
There are moments here, such as the drawn out, almost Rush-esque melody and countermelody of Flea, or the squelchy bombast of the ensuing Big Time Nothing, where Clark’s guitar is almost in freewheeling conversation with itself. It seems spontaneous when it could have quite easily become inert or fussy, with natural interactions crushed beneath a search for perfect phrasing.
She traces some part of that impulsiveness back to her experiences performing live in tandem with Jason Falkner who, in addition to playing in Jellyfish, the Grays, and the Three O’Clock, is also a longtime fixture in Beck’s band. The trust and chemistry they developed on the road apparently opened the door for Clark to get way out there in the studio without sweating what came next. “One thing that really informed my world was going out on tour with a great guitar player in Jason and giving him some parts to play,” Clark says.
“Then, I get to choose rather than doing everything I did on the record. I could do [that] but it would hinder my ability to just perform. So, let me do what great blues players have done for a century and sing something and then play something. The song Cruel, from many records ago, that’s a complicated guitar part that I’m also singing a hard thing over. It’s like, ‘Can you rub your belly and pat your head?’ Yes, I can. But do I want to? I don’t need to prove that I can.”
One of the major challenges when making a record such as All Born Screaming – which strives to get as close to the ideal of a ‘solo’ construction as it possibly can – comes with hearing your own voice win every argument. If Falkner’s influence was like a Force Ghost from Star Wars, guiding Clark’s hand without direct, tactile involvement, there were times when she deferred to several key collaborators when she wanted someone to change the picture in front of her. “It was just me and my friends,” Clark says.
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Fine Friends
But your friends and her friends are a different thing altogether. A few years on from Clark performing Lithium with the Nirvana rhythm section at their Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction, Dave Grohl drums on Flea, while current Foo Fighters sticksman Josh Freese plays on a couple of songs. Multi-instrumentalist Justin Meldal-Johnsen and pianist Rachel Eckroth beam in from the St. Vincent live band. Special props, though, go to Cate Le Bon, whom Clark calls her favourite living artist.
The Welsh polymath appears alongside Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa on the title track, but she also provided the right sort of sounding board at vital junctures, such as when Clark was about to go rap-rock. “Cate saved me on one song from a monstrosity,” she admits.
“You don’t have to take everything they say, but you have to work with people who respect you enough to tell you the truth,” she adds. “You work with people whose music you love, people who can bring in something you wouldn’t have thought of. Even though I took on this record as me proving to myself that I could do all these things, there’s a reason why people love to collaborate. It is fun. It is fun. To have ears on what I was working on from people who have no reason to lie was immensely helpful.”
Equally, from a guitar perspective All Born Screaming was about leaning on the things you know you can rely on while simultaneously doing things that had previously been verboten. Goldie, Clark’s Ernie Ball signature so-christened because of its Music Man gold foil mini-humbuckers, remains her “home base”. “I ended up using it in the bridge and centre positions which, ironically, are chimier,” she says, somewhat obliquely teeing up the record’s liberal use of an iconic guitar she’d previously avoided like the plague.
Now that she’s on tour – with another batch of dates beginning in North America in September before shows in Europe, Mexico, Indonesia and Australia – this versatile aspect of Goldie’s sound means she can also cover ground staked out on the record by a Stratocaster. More specifically, one of Mike McCready’s signature Fender Custom Shop 1960 Strats, gifted to Clark by Pearl Jam’s long-serving guitarist. “I never ever would have picked up the Strat if Mike hadn’t given me the guitar,” she says. “I’ve never played them.”
“One of the things that was exciting about making my own guitar, and starting from scratch with the shape and everything, was I was making something with no cultural baggage,” she continues. “Look at a Strat and you think of Jimi Hendrix, you think of Stevie Ray Vaughan. They’re some of the greatest guitar players of all time, of course, but there’s history to Strats. And there’s also a history of people trying to play like Jimi Hendrix and sucking. But this guitar is great. It’s so playable. Now, I understand. I didn’t get it before because I was too scared to touch them.”
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Wrestling Match
Clark describes each guitar choice on All Born Screaming as “intentional”, whether that’s in reference to a specific piece of equipment or how the instrument, which is so readily associated with her as a performer, interacts with the other elements of a song. There are moments, such as the oddball soloing on Sweetest Fruit, or the moment 90 seconds into Hell is Near where her undulating riff takes hold, that this effort and judiciousness is rewarded with melodic twists and head-turning drops.
“I have such a strange relationship with it,” she observes. “I love it so much but I’m also a producer who knows that not every song needs a guitar. You’re either wrestling, trying to shoehorn a guitar into a place where it doesn’t need to be, or you’re going ‘Sorry, you’re gonna sit this one out.’ It’s a delicate thing. When it’s there, it’s really meant to be there. Also, a guitar is an interesting instrument from a sonic perspective. A lot of the time it can sit in the mid-range, which is where a lot of things typically sit in music that isn’t based on modern hip hop. How do you dance in this [space] when most things are trying to come through the same tunnel?”
At different points during our conversation Clark calls the process behind All Born Screaming “my albatross” and “my cross to bear”. But she’s also obviously at peace with it. Now that the record is here, bucking and whirring, stomping and smashing, the many dead ends she bloodied her nose on are just part of a longer story with a cool ending. “My brain works with a lot of things going on all at the same time,” she says. “I know that there’s a linear process that would have been faster – I just don’t work like that.”
St. Vincent’s All Born Screaming is out now through Total Pleasure/Virgin.
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