St Vincent has always crafted her own identity – she reveals how her new album continues the process

The avenues to becoming a St Vincent fan are endless and varied. A Talking Heads follower may have been introduced to the American musician through her 2012 collaboration with David Byrne, Love This Giant. A lover of soft indie folk perhaps caught her early-career performance with Sufjan Stevens as part of his touring band back in the 2000s – a role she later reprised at the 2018 Academy Awards on the song “Mystery of Love” from the modern queer classic Call Me by Your Name. A pop-oriented listener’s first encounter with St Vincent could well have been her electrifying performance at the 2019 Grammys, when she twinned with Dua Lipa in matching haircuts and black outfits during a mash-up of their respective songs “Masseduction” and “One Kiss”. I showed the video to a colleague in the office, and she immediately watched it again, twice, enthralled. “That is so funny,” St Vincent says when I tell her this.

I am speaking with St Vincent, real name Annie Clark, in the lead-up to her performance at this year’s Clockenflap Music & Arts Festival, which will take over Central Harbourfront for three days next weekend. The three-time Grammy winner is calling from Basel, Switzerland, where, that evening, she’ll be attending a television taping and performing a show as part of the tour for her seventh studio album, All Born Screaming; she released a Spanish version of the record this month. Then it is off to France, Mexico and Los Angeles, in the United States, for a short while before making her Hong Kong debut. What is she looking forward to? “Just to be in the city, just to feel the feelings, just to kind of feel – In the Mood for Love.”

All Born Screaming is her first entirely self-produced album and features guest performances by Cate Le Bon, Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl and Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa. The album’s title is about how we arrive in this world against our will, screaming in protest, but as she has said before, that is what it means to be alive.

Billed as “post-plague pop”, the collection of songs was born out of losing loved ones during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. “I think grief has a very clarifying fire … it’s refocusing on the moment and the things that matter, and not the ephemera and the noise. I had to sit with that. And that’s what I always do with music,” she says. “I’m so lucky to get to do it. I get to take the internal and external chaos of life, and go into a studio and sit down with my guitar or my Wurlitzer, and make sense of it – make order out of chaos.”

In an interview with GQ, Clark mentioned that “Reckless” – which opens as a foreboding piano ballad and features the lyric, “And I’ve been mourning you since the day I met you” – ripped her open whenever she sang it, though she did not elaborate on the subject of her grief, and I refrain from probing: Clark has never shown much interest in questions about the autobiographical elements in her songs.

“In the words of Paul Simon, the listener completes the song. I mean this genuinely and not as a way to deflect, but I think it’s about the work and if the work moves people,” she told Music Week. Fans often take this to mean that Clark is a private person. “I am and I’m not,” she said during a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) session in her last album cycle. “I pretty much just tell you everything in my music. I just don’t wanna bore ya’ll with what I had for dinner (it was a cookie).”

Clark was raised in Dallas, Texas, and from the age of five, “I was obsessed with [guitars] – I would draw them, make them out of cardboard and rubber bands,” she says.