ST. VINCENT:
THE HITS INTERVIEW

St. Vincent will vie for a career hat trick at the Grammy Awards in February when she seeks to join Beck, Radiohead and The White Stripes as the only three-time winners in the Alternative Music Album category. The album bringing her back to the show is All Born Screaming (Total Pleasure/Virgin), home to Best Alternative Music Performance contender “Flea” (as well as Best Rock Song/Rock Performance candidate “Broken Man”).

Her previous Alternative Album wins came in 2022 for Daddy’s Home and 2015 for St. Vincent. (In 2019 she won the Best Rock Song trophy for “Masseduction.”)

The artist born Annie Clark continued to turn heads in 2024 with her seventh LP, which dabbles in modular synthesizers and drum machines and features guest turns by members of Foo Fighters and Beck's band.

In November she re-recorded the album in Spanish (Todos Nacen Gritando), which will surely entertain fans during high-profile support slots for Olivia Rodrigo this spring in South America and Mexico. Clark will also open two April U.S. arena gigs for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds after her own headlining dates, starting 4/6 in Dallas.

Managed by John Silva for Silva Artist Management and booked by UTA, St. Vincent jumped on Zoom with HITS to recap her year of writing, creating—and avoiding interviews like this one.

Have you ever dominated anything the way you've dominated the Grammy Alternative categories?

The short answer is no, and I'm honored to now be in a category with Nick Cave and Kim Gordon, and in the rock stuff with The Beatles, for God's sake, and Pearl Jam. It's very sweet company.

As far as you know, has anyone else ever shared the stage with both Olivia Rodrigo and Nick Cave in the span of a few weeks?

I don't know, but I’ll tell you what: I'm so fond of both of them personally. They're good people.

You were onstage with Dua Lipa in 2019. It may look glamorous, but is performing at the Grammys any more tolerable than other TV appearances where you're sitting around all day before you go on?

Oh yeah. There is the “hurry up and wait” but also the excitement of being in a room with a whole lot of your peers and heroes. And it's live TV; it doesn't get more high-stakes than that. But the real payoff of playing the Grammys—and winning one—is that it’s a celebration for everybody near and far who ever believed in you or helped you. It’s for your high-school jazz-band teacher. It’s a marker of validity for someone in your extended family who isn’t really sure what you do and would tell you, “I don't think I like your music, but I'm sure I'm proud of you.”

How did you come up with the idea of rerecording All Born Screaming in Spanish?

I've been lucky enough to play shows in Mexico and South America and Spain over the course of my career. Every time I've played shows in Spanish-speaking regions, I'm blown away by the fact that the fans are singing along to me in perfect English. It’s maybe their second, third or fourth language, but they know every word. They've been coming to me for this long, so maybe it would be a nice thing if I met them halfway in their own language. By rerecording the album I got to get back to being fluent in Spanish, which is a passion of mine.

It was a beautiful exercise, in song meaning as well as translation. A lot of it's not a direct, literal translation, because obviously that's not how language works. But I found a lot of very poetic moments. I not only translated the lyrics, I had to redo all the vocal production on the record. I got about halfway through and was, like, I'm too far from the shore to go back, so we're doing this.

It sounds like it was a way to reinvent the entire body of work.

That was something I was not expecting, but it absolutely happened. It made me fall in love with music in a different way. In Spanish, I got to connect to the emotion in a way that was a shortcut through the inherent inner-monologue of self-criticism. I'm a person who can be really enjoying a song, but one lyric strikes me as trite or, just, I don't buy it and then suddenly I can't suspend my disbelief. Whereas if I'm listening to music in a language that’s not my first language, I’m just reacting to the feeling.

Have you begun compiling new material?

I'm writing any chance I get. A lot of All Born Screaming was written in moments of downtime and repose between Daddy's Home tours. You have to keep the faucet on as much as possible or the water will be brown every time you turn it back on. So, yes, I'm currently writing songs every time I'm in my studio. If I don’t get in and write and make new things, I start to feel frustrated and clogged.

With All Born Screaming, I really went to town on production; I went to town exploring sound, finding new ways to write and playing with electricity and machinery. I didn't know how all the equipment worked, but I was going to sit with the manual and figure it out, or at least turn knobs until it felt exciting. So in some cases the songs were almost reverse-engineered; I started with a lot of complexity and then winnowed it down to the song.

The way I'm writing songs at the moment is sitting down and writing songs. Going, OK, it's one instrument. It's not a crazy modular loop and 17 drum machines. It's a Wurlitzer and my voice or it's a guitar and my voice. You’ve got to rotate the way you create. Otherwise things will get stale. In this case, I'm very excited to go, What's a melody? What's a lyric? Because at the end of the day, with all the production and bells and whistles, the song is the thing that's going to save the world.

I imagine it hasn't been lost on you that female artists have taken over the charts this year.

Yeah, it's been a really good year. Pop and dance girlies are just dominating. But a record I really enjoyed this year that made me want to write songs was MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks. I love the lyrics. I love the delivery. I hear shades of Wilco and Pavement, but he sounds like his own artist, and that's what we need. I'm not a big Americana head, but it really reached me and inspired me.

So we can make our headline “St. Vincent Americana Album Incoming?”

Hell, no! I mean, God bless, but…