St. Vincent (musician) Informations

Anne Erin "Annie" Clark (born September 28, 1982), known professionally as St. Vincent, is an American singer-songwriter and record producer.

St. Vincent began her music career as a member of The Polyphonic Spree. She was also a member of Sufjan Stevens's touring band, before forming her own band in 2006. Her debut album was Marry Me (2007), followed by Actor (2009), Strange Mercy (2011), St. Vincent (2014) and Masseduction (2017). She released a collaborative album with David Byrne in 2012 titled Love This Giant.

St. Vincent contributed backing vocals for Swans on their 2014 album To Be Kind. Her fourth solo album, St. Vincent, was released that same year and was named album of the year by The Guardian, Entertainment Weekly, NME and Slant, as well as second best album of the year by Time. The album won her a Grammy for Best Alternative Album, her first Grammy Award. She was the first solo female performer in 20 years to win a Grammy in that category. In 2018, St. Vincent was included twice in NPR's "200 Greatest songs by 21st Century Women" at number 181 with "Digital Witness" and number 38 with "Cruel".

Clark was born on September 28, 1982, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her mother is a social worker and administrator for a non-profit organization, while her stepfather works in corporate tax administration. Her parents divorced when she was three years old, and when she was seven years old, she moved with her mother and two older sisters to Dallas, Texas. Her father continues to live in Tulsa. Clark is of Irish, and a small amount of Ashkenazi Jewish, ancestry. She was raised Roman Catholic and Unitarian Universalist. From her parents' blended families, she has four brothers and four sisters.

Annie Clark was fond of the movie La Bamba and Ritchie Valens himself at a very early age and had received a plastic red guitar at the age of five that her mother had gotten her from a local Target store for Christmas. She began playing her first real guitar at the age of 12 and worked some of her teenage years as a roadie for her aunt and uncle, the guitar-vocal jazz duo Tuck and Patti. In 2001, she graduated from Lake Highlands High School, where she participated in theater and the school's jazz band, and was a classmate of actor Mark Salling.

Clark attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts for three years before dropping out, studying with Professor Lauren Passarelli. She felt that art institutions such as Berklee can be more directed towards the athleticism of art rather than the product. In retrospect, Clark said, "I think that with music school and art school, or school in any form, there has to be some system of grading and measurement. The things they can teach you are quantifiable. While all that is good and has its place, at some point you have to learn all you can and then forget everything that you learned in order to actually start making music."

In 2003, she released an EP with fellow Berklee students entitled Ratsliveonnoevilstar. She also worked with Heavy Rotation Records, where "she revealed a much more private and intimate rendering of 'Count' for Dorm Sessions Vol. 1", and studied with Professor of Guitar Lauren Passarelli. Shortly after leaving Berklee, Clark returned home to Texas where she joined The Polyphonic Spree just before they embarked on a European tour. In 2004, she joined Glenn Branca's 100 guitar orchestra for the Queens performance, and she was also briefly in a noise-rock band called The Skull Fuckers. Clark left The Polyphonic Spree and joined Sufjan Stevens' touring band in 2006, bringing with her a tour EP entitled Paris is Burning.

In 2006, Clark began recording a studio album, under the stage name St. Vincent. In an interview on The Colbert Report, she said that she "took [her] moniker from a Nick Cave song", which refers to the hospital in which Dylan Thomas died. The reference is to the line "And Dylan Thomas died drunk in / St. Vincent's hospital" from Cave's song "There She Goes my Beautiful World" from the album Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus. The name is also a reference to her great-grandmother, whose middle name was St. Vincent.

Clark released her debut album, Marry Me, on July 10, 2007 on Beggars Banquet Records. Named after a line from the television show Arrested Development, the album features appearances from drummer Brian Teasley (Man or Astro-man?, The Polyphonic Spree), Mike Garson (David Bowie's longtime pianist), and horn player Louis Schwadron (The Polyphonic Spree).

The album was well received by critics, with Clark being compared to the likes of Kate Bush and David Bowie. Clark was lauded for the album's musical arrangements as well as themes and style; in their review of the album, The AV Club noted: "There's a point where too much happiness turns into madness, and St. Vincent's multi-instrumentalist Annie Clark knows this place well".Pitchfork said "at every turn Marry Me takes the more challenging route of twisting already twisted structures and unusual instrumentation to make them sound perfectly natural and, most importantly, easy to listen to as she overdubs her thrillingly sui generis vision into vibrant life."

The songs featured on Marry Me were largely written when Clark was eighteen and nineteen years old, and, according to Clark, "represented a more idealized version of what life was or what love was or anything in the eyes of someone who hadn't really experienced anything." The album featured its one single, "Paris Is Burning", as well as a music video for "Jesus Saves, I Spend".

In 2008, Clark was nominated for three PLUG Independent Music Awards: New Artist of the Year, Female Artist of the Year, and Music Video of the Year. On March 6, 2008, she won the PLUG Female Artist of the Year award.

In 2008, after returning to New York from a lengthy tour, Clark began working on her second album. Her inspiration reportedly came from several films, including Disney movies: "Well, the truth is that I had come back from a pretty long — you know, about a year-and-a-half of touring, and so my brain was sort of all circuit boards that were a little bit fried", Clark said. "So I started watching films as sort of a way to get back into being human. And then it started to just really inform the entire record."

Clark, who did not have a studio at the time, began writing the album in her apartment on her computer using GarageBand and MIDI, because she had been getting noise complaints from neighbors. The songs were largely inspired by scenes from various children's films; Clark has stated that she would imagine a soundtrack for certain scenes from films when constructing the music and lyrics, including scenes from Snow White (1937) and The Wizard of Oz (1939).

The second album, entitled Actor, was released by 4AD Records on May 5, 2009. The album was also well received and gained more commercial attention than its predecessor.Spin gave the album eight out of ten stars, noting its "[juxtaposition of] the cruel and the kind, and here, the baroque arrangements are even more complex and her voice even prettier, with both only underlining the dark currents running through her songs".Entertainment Weekly said the album "plays up the contrasts, [with Clark] letting her church-choir voice linger on lyrics that hint darkly at themes of violence, sex, and general chaos", and branded the album "a uniquely potent cocktail of sounds and moods".

Actor charted well for an independent release, peaking at #9 on Billboard's Independent Albums Chart, and #5 on the Tastemaker Albums Chart. It peaked at #90 on the Billboard 200. Although the album spawned no singles (except in the UK where "Actor Out Of Work" was issued as a 7" vinyl single), music videos for "Marrow" and "Actor Out of Work" were released, and aired on several music channels. A promotional music video for "Laughing With a Mouth of Blood", featuring Portlandia's Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein (then of ThunderAnt), was also filmed.

Two soundtracks for The Twilight Saga have featured songs from her. The first, "Roslyn", was in collaboration with Bon Iver and appeared on the 2009 soundtrack for New Moon; her second, "The Antidote", was written for and appeared on 2012's Breaking Dawn – Part 2.

In November 2010, Clark appeared alongside American rappers Kid Cudi and Cage, on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, to perform "Maniac", from Cudi's Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager.

Clark spent much of her time in Seattle writing her third album, Strange Mercy, in October 2010. In an interview with Julie Klausner for Spin Magazine, Clark recalled, "[Death Cab for Cutie drummer] Jason McGerr had an office that was closing. He offered me the space for a month, for all of October. I was alone. I stayed at the Ace Hotel downtown, in one of the rooms with a shared bathroom. I would just get up in the morning and caffeinate, and run, and go to the studio for 12 hours, come back, eat dinner alone with a book, have a glass of wine, and go to bed. And do it all over again."

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