At Home With St. Vincent, A Conversation About One Record
Annie Clark, of St. Vincent, discovered Os Mutantes’ self-titled 1968 album in the most magical way one can find music: just thumbing through the bins of a record store, looking for her next great listen.
“I had a general interest in Brazilian music, from bossa nova and Tropicália on, and so I was like, OK, I’m curious about this record. I just picked it up, and then it became one of my favorite records.”
Annie Clark
Os Mutantes’ self-titled 1968 album cover
That was “a lot of years ago,” says Clark, who in April released her seventh studio album, the beautiful and urgent All Born Screaming, as St. Vincent. She was living in New York’s East Village at the time, and she “had a good record collection, but a shitty record player, and I just put it on in my tiny little apartment.” In the album—a Brazilian psych pop classic of voluminous harmonies, puckish humor, cheeky field sounds, and a distinguished crackly guitar sound—Clark discovered “Western pop influences like the Beatles, psychedelic stuff that was happening at the time, but through the lens of this amazing richness of rhythm and Brazilian folk traditions,” she says. The album is “everything you want in music—its melody, its rhythm. It’s out-there, it’s loose, it’s precise… it’s just everything you want.”
St. Vincent plays Os Mutantes’ self-titled 1968 album on the Wrensilva M1 console in Walnut.
“In my experience touring Brazil… you go there, and music isn’t other, it’s all part of the same thing. The love of music there is just like, the love of life.”
Clark’s love for Os Mutantes is well documented—a quick dive through her social media archives unleashes more than one “I love Os Mutantes” tweets—and her experience connecting to that record helped her to appreciate the broader culture of music in Brazil. “In my experience touring Brazil… you go there, and music isn’t other,” she says appreciatively. “It’s not separate, like you don’t separate the mind and the body and the soul; it’s all part of the same thing. The love of music there is just like, the love of life.” She remembers one show in particular that encapsulated her experience with the way music in Brazil is “just as ingrained as eating.” She was promoting MassEducation, her 2018 album, in Rio; the entire audience, around a thousand people, knew every single word to every single song. “They were singing so loud, and it was so joyous. That kind of unbridled enthusiasm, that un-self-conscious love, was so amazing. It actually made me emotional… the lengths they had to go to, to find my work, and it’s not even in their first language.”
And serendipitously, a few years after ingesting the kaleidoscopic splendor of Os Mutantes, she actually found herself playing with them. In 2009, her friend Beck launched a project called Record Club, in which he gathered his musician pals to record covers of classic albums; when she arrived at the studio, there was Os Mutantes’ vocalist and guitarist Sérgio Dias, ready to delve with her into an ad hoc cover band. (They performed the entirety of INXS’s Kick “in one go.”) “It was amazing,” Clark effuses, and Dias “showed me his special modded guitar that has distortion built-in… Pret-ty cooool.”
Though Clark is no longer in the cramped apartment with the crappy turntable, her reverent method of listening to albums hasn’t changed. “Just the act of, ‘I’m done for the day,’ dark out, light a candle, and you don’t do anything else but listen to the record. You sit there, you have a sip of whatever—in my case it’s usually bubbles, I like an effervescence—and just like, listen. Just listen. It’s so the best thing in the world.”
To honor the experience of enjoying music without distraction, Clark has arranged a special area in her Los Angeles home that she calls the “library-slash-listening room,” where she keeps her Wrensilva. “There’s built-in seating. A record player. Bookshelves for art books and special memorabilia… it’s a little intentional listening space. It takes me back to being a kid in my room, cause it’s a very solitary, special, nocturnal ritual, I guess, that’s really ingesting a record—really letting it take you wherever it’s gonna take you.” And she notes sheepishly that her first listen on her Wrensilva was the test pressing for All Born Screaming—her record collection was boxed up for a time, and she “didn’t have any records at my disposal but my own!” But when she’s home from touring, she’s been listening to vinyl from Moondog, the Pointer Sisters, and Miles Davis, among others. Also, she says, “sometimes a lady wants to listen to Sarah Vaughan!”
St. Vincent listens intently to one of her favorite albums in her “library-slash-listening room” at home.
“I think the value of music is a lot of things, and it’s not always about the things that you listen to over and over and over again. There is some music that’s just like, the depth of the experience is vital and necessary, but that doesn’t mean it’s a record you listen to every single day. It is a record you go to when you need to be taken to the river, as it were.”
Clark speaks of music-listening with thoughtfulness and passion, emphasizing the spiritual and sanguine aspect of experiencing a piece of art. She says she cannot listen to music passively, and if music is playing in the background in a public place, she has to actively tune it out to focus on her conversation at hand. “I think the value of music is a lot of things, and it’s not always about the things that you listen to over and over and over again. There is some music that’s just like, the depth of the experience is vital and necessary, but that doesn’t mean it’s a record you listen to every single day. It is a record you go to when you need to be taken to the river, as it were,” she says. “But we have a gamified streaming system that incentivizes people to make things that are the most easily consumable, and in some ways the most easily ignorable..And if we want great art, that is hostile… but I don’t think we want that. I think we want beauty and depth and complexity. We want to be absolved, we want to be free. We want a place to lay our burden down. I want that. And that’s why I go and listen to Sarah Vaughan. Or that’s why I go and listen to Throbbing Gristle. That doesn’t mean I listen to it every day, but we need to have art where the depth of experience is immense. And I think listening to records on vinyl helps us get there.”
At home St. Vincent listens to a Wrensilva M1 Record Console in Natural Walnut.
