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Published 22:44, May the 19th, 2009
What Technicolor sounds like
St. Vincent on her bright and quiet songs
MUSIC. Annie Clark is in a bad mood. Calling from a cab on its way to Manhattan, the creative force behind St. Vincent has “7 million errands” to run before she leaves for five weeks of touring the next morning. Despite the constant honks and other street noise, the 26-year-old multi-instrumentalist is unflappably articulate when describing the songwriting process for her sophomore album, “Actor.”
“I’m really obsessed with the idea of Technicolor, and I wanted to make music that sounds like the scene in the ‘Wizard of Oz’ where the munchkins do the dance and things turn to Technicolor all of a sudden,” Clark explains. “I wanted to make something that reflected the whimsy of those songs and the surrealistic quality of [the Jean-Luc Godard film] ‘Pierrot le Fou.’ Basically, I just wish I was in a Woody Allen movie all the time.”
While Clark’s music reflects as much whimsy as Allen’s paranoid neurosis — one of her newest songs is titled “Save Me From What I Want” — she says she’s selective when she’s writing song lyrics, because she’ll be singing them night after night on tour.
“I wrote all the words last,” she states. “Instead of using big metaphors or talking about big ideas, I tried to focus on the tiny details in a house or in a suburban place or in a city.”
Like the lyrics, the latest album’s orchestral arrangements are also reflective of Clark’s recent move to New York City. She’s apparently got some tough neighbors.
“I wrote [‘Actor’] on the computer,” she explains. “I couldn’t make any noise in my apartment because I had just moved to New York. I did a lot of it in headphones.”
