For St. Vincent, it's all in the details
At the tender age of 25, Annie Clark waxes rhapsodic about the good old days, days spent locked in her bedroom in suburban Dallas with no clue about what's cool. She didn't have any snobby friends telling her not to listen to jazz. She consumed copious quantities of Alice Coltrane, Captain Beefheart, and cabaret. She discovered the riot grrrls and Patsy Cline. Noise-rock and chorales and nursery rhymes went into the industrial-strength blender that is Clark's musical mind and out came "Marry Me," the first album from St. Vincent, Clark's nom de plume.
"I got a taste," she says, "for experimental awesomeness."
Indeed. "Marry Me" is a fanciful, intricate pop collection that, ironically, was one of the coolest releases of 2007. It has made St. Vincent an indie darling and supplied Annie Clark, one imagines, with plenty of opinionated pals. The music is lovely, dark, and meticulous. It's full of surprises, toggling from ethereal to apocalyptic according to Clark's quirky inner compass.
Spend enough time with St. Vincent and it becomes hard to parse sweetness and grit. A self-confessed control freak, Clark plays guitar, bass, piano, dulcimer, triangle, xylophone, synthesizer, and a few other instruments on the album and is credited as coproducer.
"Annie's like an absorbent sponge," says Polyphonic Spree drummer Brian Teasley, who began at the helm of St. Vincent's record but quickly took a back seat. "She learned quickly and just became the producer over the course of making the record."
The songs are so stamped with the St. Vincent sound (twee prog? orchestral shredding?) that they seem as if they might have tumbled out of her fully formed. On the contrary, Clark is a tinkerer. She was one of those lucky 12-year-olds whose parents let her build a little recording studio out of computers in her room, and multitracking became an integral part of her songwriting.
"A lot of this album was just me, late at night with four-hour-old coffee and headphones on, being really, really detail-oriented," says Clark, who calls from a van heading from Fargo, N.D., to Minneapolis. She's something of a Dr. Frankenstein in the studio. "The songs usually start with a guitar part, but then I've got to go about adding skin and cheekbones and mascara."
Clark, the self-sufficient middle child of nine, has overcome her aversion to delegating and hired a trio of musicians to accompany her on a tour that stops at the Middle East Downstairs tomorrow. The singer will use three microphones, each with a different tone and timbre, and a rack of pedals to synthesize her guitar. Clark is a seriously skilled guitarist, "able to jump in there with any man, woman, or alien," according to Teasley. There's a violinist who plays bass pedals, a bass player who doubles as keyboardist and clarinetist, and a drummer who cues samples.
It might look like four people onstage, but "it's a 16-piece band," Clark cracks, which puts her live show more in line with her previous gigs as guitarist for the Polyphonic Spree and a member of Sufjan Stevens's touring band.
Those were enviable apprenticeships, but Clark's real musical education began much earlier with her uncle and aunt, the husband-and-wife new age/jazz duo Tuck & Patti. Tuck is Clark's mother's brother, and during school breaks the pair took their niece all over the world as a roadie. By the time she was 18, Clark says, she had developed a powerful fondness for life on the road.
Clark lived in Boston for most of 2001 while attending college; she recalls it as "a snowy, bleak time." She escaped from Dallas again in 2005, moving to New York (where she has recently relocated once more) for no better reason than it was the place to be. Clark's time there was brief and not especially fruitful, despite finding a bit of work with avant-garde musician Glen Branca's 100-guitar orchestra and recording her first demos.
"I wanted to be there, but I didn't have my finger on the pulse," says Clark. "I was just sort of doing odd jobs and making rent. I didn't have money or space. I didn't know what to do. I was floundering."
Let's call it the year of paying dues, because three weeks after Clark returned to Dallas with her tail between her legs, she was asked to join the Polyphonic Spree. She toured with the symphonic rock group, played on its latest album, "The Fragile Army," and in short order was invited to join indie-pop maestro Stevens's ragtag ensemble on the road. All the while she was writing the songs that would wind up on "Marry Me," which came out in July on Beggars Banquet. She says she's bowled over by the glowing reviews the album has received, from the blogosphere to mainstream news outlets.
"I made the record pre-label, pre-funding, pre-any expectations," Clark says. "At the risk of sounding cheesy, the positive reception is humbling. It makes me go, 'Oh, I just need to put my head down and work.' "
As for the musical alias - Clark chose it a couple of years ago after coming across a photo in a family album of her great-great-great grandmother, St. Vincent - Clark says it's not about hiding, but rather freedom.
"There's something about giving something a name and creating a space for yourself to play that is really empowering. On some level I think people have a certain expectation from songwriters, especially female songwriters, who go by their own name. I wanted to decontexualize the sound," Clark says, "from me, really."
Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com.
