The incendiary talent recounts her brief childhood fantasy of escaping into the Colorado sunset
“I remember going to a dude ranch in Colorado with my family when I was young, and riding horses the whole week. At the time I was really into the idea of survival and living off the land and was intrigued by the idea: if you were out there on your own, could you make it? It wasn’t even a question of if: of course I would. When I got home, I concocted a plan to run away to Colorado, find my horse, and ride off into the sunset. So I packed clothes and a compass – because I was running away – and a lot of fruit and vegetables. I hid the bag under my bed, and promptly forgot about it. I was looking for something a month or two later, and found this rotten bag of fruit and clothes. I never told my parents. Now, I’m not particularly outdoorsy; I don’t even know how to make coffee.”
When Annie Clark straps on a guitar and walks on stage as St. Vincent, there’s a palpable transformation from delicate Texan belle to pop-rock crusader. Perhaps it stems from the heady days of her youth, riding horses in Colorado and dreaming of escape. Clark, who now lives in New York, gained rapturous acclaim for her self-titled fourth album (fifth if you count Love This Giant, her collaboration with David Byrne), and where her last solo record Strange Mercy was driven by a love affair with cinema, the new one could be described as an ongoing conversation with pop music, more recently hip-hop. Early loves, such as Madonna and Wilson Phillips (“I remember practising the harmonies with my sisters”) were later replaced by Nirvana, Pearl Jam and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in her teenage years. Her songs hone in on that tension: one moment they’ll be lovely and honeyed, the next they’re stridently glam and geometrically rocking.
A version of this article originally appeared in the S/S14 issue of AnOther Magazine.
