St. Vincent: Our David Bowie
Annie Clark is a guitar goddess with an uncanny knack for strange pop songs
BY ZACH BARON
Annie Clark has never quite seemed entirely of this earth. But it wasn't until last year's St. Vincent that she truly located a planet of her own—near David Bowie's, maybe, but even further out in space, where the atmosphere is cold and the rules of survival unpredictable. Her guitar-shredding odes to killer rattlesnakes, transgender princes, and violent revolutionaries are just this side of autobiography; ask her about her life and she'll tell you, helpfully, "I'm growing a tail." Clark has been on the road practically nonstop since St. Vincent came out; we talked to her one night from Luxembourg, where the tour rolled on.
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GQ: I wonder if you could describe for someone who's never done it what it's like to tour for—what are you, on your seventh month right now?
St Vincent: What's it like? It's like becoming an accidental Buddhist. You realize that time is elastic. It lurches forward, or it slows to a halt. That there's seemingly no end to the amount of cities or countries that you can be in in a twenty-four-hour period.
How do you stay human? Or do you just let go of it?
I don't know if we are human. Honestly, we're feral. Yeah, I mean, I'm growing a tail. We're totally feral.
Have you identified what kind of a tail you're growing yet?
I think it's one of those, like, when people have those exorbitantly long coccyxes, the long coccyx, where you're like, "Is that—? Wait a minute."
You're evolving in real time.
Yeah. But I'm re-evolving into, like, my lizard brain.
Is that something you mourn: the life outside of the tour, the regular visits with friends or dinner parties or whatever it might be?
Not as such. I mean, I'm not starved for social interaction, because I play music and tour with my friends. Everybody gets along really well, so I'm not starved for a dinner party, because, like, we're gonna have one tomorrow. We keep it really fun and try to keep it light. And also, I think everybody feels comfortable kind of taking their own space when they need it. There aren't a lot of full-scale breakdowns or anything. Except the one I might have in, like, five minutes if my ****ing pizza doesn't get here. I'm just kidding! I don't even like pizza.
There is a regular life that a lot of people are living, for better or for worse, that is not something you can really do when you're on tour.
I mean, it's miraculous that I've been able to survive in the adult world and sort of pass as an adult for as long as I have. Not "as long as I have"—it's not like I'm old—but because there are so many things that are just lost on me.
Such as?
Like, how to make a decent cup of coffee. Like, what? Where? How do you do laundry well? I don't know. What are the things that we just don't know how to do because we're here? I have a crew doing a lot of things that I no longer have to do for myself, so I'm probably the worst of us, in terms of, like, "How do I open this jar?" I was recently at a friend's home, and she was loading a dishwasher, and I was like, "Whoa. How do you—? Do you have to scrape the food off? What's the vibe?" I'm super curious about all these really mundane things, because I don't know how to do them—not because I am above it or anything like that, but I just don't have the time.
When you see someone loading dishes in the dishwasher, do you say, "Maybe when I'm 40, I'll look forward to my days of loading the dishwasher"?
Oh, God no! God no.
You're happy with the way it is?
Oh, I'm totally psyched. It's insane, but it totally suits me. You know? I think it's a really uniquely American thing to be thinking that there's some parallel life that you ought to be living. You're like, "Oh, one of these days, I'm just gonna go back to the life that I should be living, and live that." But actually, it robs you of the joy of what you're doing in the moment. You're kind of fixated on an alternate reality, especially a reality that's not even as fun.
Where do you live when you're not on tour?
I'm floating. I'm super liquid right now.
When you're like, "I want to go home," what do you picture?
I usually go to Dallas and hang out with my family. I'll go to New York, too, and see friends, and I'll go to L.A. to see friends and stuff. I guess I'm sorta tri-coastal. This is sounding like such an ******* interview. I'm so sorry.
Do you have a daily tour ritual at all? Do things recur, besides the shows?
I'd say I'm sort of allergic to routine. I mean, there are a number of things you can count on—like, I don't know, going with Tokes [bandmate Toko Yasuda] and finding coffee and finding an art museum. Or like, you know, we did this really awesome thing in Lausanne, Switzerland. It's called an "escape game": You get lost in this room with a bunch of clues, and the theme of the one that we did was "Soviet bunker," and you have to find all these clues and then figure out what the codes to a lot of these locks are and then also find keys. And it. Was. So. Fun. It was so ****ing exhilarating.
Did you get out?
Yeah, we did, with seven minutes to spare. We crushed that nerd adventure game! We have been bragging about it; we were so proud of each other. You would have thought we actually, like, stopped nuclear proliferation, the way we were high-fiving and chest-bumping when we won a nerd game. It was awesome.
Congratulations.
But stuff like that. At the Collection de l'Art Brut—I think the theme of that was all about people who had had really significant loss really early in their lives, and there was this one woman whose name is escaping me right now [Sir, Marguerite]. She was in a mental institution, and a number of people in her family died, and she had a tragic life, and her last bit of work in this mental institution was to build a wedding dress, because she really wanted to get married, and she essentially built it for a wedding that was never going to happen. And it's gorgeous: a gorgeous piece of work that's knitted from napkin-y fabrics. It's not like, "Oh, this is fine silk"; it's like somebody had basically zero tools at their disposal besides their imagination and just made something so epic and beautiful.
Sounds like a St. Vincent song.
Oooh, and then I made a wedding dress. I'm writing it right now. But it was so great.
Is what you're doing sustainable, do you think?
Oh God yeah. Oh God yeah.
For how long?
Well, my whole life. I don't know that I'll be touring like this forever, but—I mean, we're like little show horses or whatever. Wait, do they show horses?
But show horses retire.
Oh, I guess I meant like pro athletes. Pro athletes just play till they die on the field, right?
No, they play until they're like 35, and then they just hang out.
Yeah, they're gonna take me out back and shoot me in a couple years, like a racing pony.
and sort of revisited her prior work which i've fallen in love with too. i adore her! she's reminding me an awful lot like polly in just how she's grown and matured album to album and created quite possibly her most complete work so far. btw,she won just about every album of the year list last year and no surprise.
congrats to st. vincent / annie clark. she won the grammy for best alternative album. i'd say BEST ALBUM period. 
she's such a cutie.
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