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Fairy tale endingSt. Vincent creates a florid fantasy about
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When she wasn’t playing guitar with Sufjan Stevens or the Polyphonic Spree, Brooklyn-based Annie Clark spent the mid-oughts nurturing a solo career, and as St. Vincent, she’s since made two critic-flooring, cult-generating records. Her latest is Actor, a loose narrative about the aspirations of artists, set to gorgeous music evoking Hollywood fantasy—the dream of achieving fame and fortune and the dream quality within the city’s primary product. The music was inspired by her favourite films, namely Badlands, Stardust Memories, The Wizard of Oz, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and (two non-Hollywood films) Pierrot le Fou and Picnic at Hanging Rock. Treating instruments as characters, Clark’s alternate scores are meant to mirror the moods of these films and pay homage, not to disrespect the original music. Of the soundtrack for Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, featuring Django Reinhardt and Louie Armstrong, she says, “It takes my heart and totally breaks it apart. I love that music so much. And the Disney music, to me, is some of the most beautiful music ever—it’s just magic.” Clark describes the songs on Actor as “emotionally true, with situations that are embellished and fictionalized.” She too dealt with the dilemma of the struggling artist (“making art” vs. “making it”) back in her hometown of Dallas, where her first gig was getting a song on CSI: Las Vegas. “I didn’t think I would have to specify, ‘Please don’t use this song that I poured my heart into in a scene where a woman is brutally murdered for a bejewelled cockroach,’” she says, laughing. “I was sitting with my whole family, like, ‘Here it comes, here it comes!,’ and it came, and the room was silent—not quite disappointed, but not totally proud. That was awkward. But sometimes you just have to make strange decisions to find out where your personal lines are.” Clark doesn’t begrudge artists who take advantage of offers that will pay their rent and finance their work, but she appreciates both sides of the sell-out argument. She views her work as “a respectable middle-class occupation” or “a cool 9-to-5,” and doesn’t define success by traditional, mainstream standards. “It’s a different world these days,” she says. “Most musicians aren’t choosing between rich and richer, they’re choosing between failure and getting to make another record, getting to tour, maybe buying a house. My friends who are musicians in successful bands here in New York are on the cover of magazines, but it’s not like the ’80s, nobody’s Mötley Crüe. “What makes me happy is making music that is personally a challenge, that isn’t necessarily motivated by outside factors like record sales. The goal was never to be on a billboard. I’m just really lucky that I get to keep making music.” That said, Clark’s recent performance on The Late Show With David Letterman was the kind of achievement she could only fantasize about back when hearing a few seconds of her music on CSI was a huge deal. “It was a surreal little dream come true.” WITH JF ROBITAILLE AT LA SALA |
