The main guitarist of the planet

Who is ST. Vincent and why it is included in the list of the most important musicians of our time

On October 13, 2017, the American Annie Clark released the fifth - and the most unusual - the album of her already avant -garde project St. Vincent; It is called "MasSeduction" . A talented guitarist in ten years of career has gone from a promising star of an alternative scene to an artist working with the main American pop-producer. "Medusa" tells who ST is Vincent and why it should be included in the list of the most important musicians of our time.

In 2004, Annie Clark was a little more than twenty; The girl who grew up in Texas tried to conquer New York. She had ten years behind the guitar and the unfinished college of Berkeley, where she tried to master the craft of a professional musician. In New York, the money quickly ended, and the success did not come-and Clark returned to Dallas, not having the slightest idea of ​​what to do next.

Annie knew several participants of the extravagant and quite popular The Polyphonic Spree group at that time. The team, in which a dozen people plays, constantly searched for musicians. Clark went to listen - picked up the necessary tracks, did not forget the guitar pedals suitable for music, and at the meeting, she was asked if the girl was ready to go to a European tour. She, of course, was ready.

Annie said that Berkeley’s music college, one of the most famous in the world, did not really teach her anything-unless the teachers showed her how one and the same chord could play in five or six different options. It seems that she is cunning, because it is in such colleges that they teach how to behave at the right time, how to work in a team and be a successful session musician. “It's good when it is dealing. If you are a musician, it is better to work constantly, ”she said in an interview about session work. This hard work allowed her to succeed - and survive the test of glory.

In The Polyphonic Spree (in addition to this group, she also played by Sufyan Stevens) Clark, according to her, she learned to experiment with sound and got used to life in an endless round, and also began to speak under the pseudonym St. Vincent. She borrowed this name from Nick Kave, in which he sang about St. Vincent's Hospital - and Clark called her debut album, and completely called a joke from the series “Arrested Development”. She wrote songs all her life: when Annie for the first time at the age of five took in her hands in a guitar, she immediately began to compose a composition. For the first albums ST Vincent Clark used the achievements in adolescence.

According to Annie, at first she simultaneously performed both solo, and in The Polyphonic Spree, and once, due to such a combination, she played nine concerts at the SXSW festival in two days. The entire debut album Clark is written from the guitar: this instrument determines the sound of “Marry Me”, the guitar parties Clark are based on melodies here - and even the voice sounds like a plump loss. Any vocal melody looks logical, being played on the guitar - probably this is how Clark came up with them.

Unlike most musicians who have passed the school of session work, Clark has formed a unique and extremely interesting style of play. Annie calls himself a guitar hym, and this is noticeable: her sound is designed from noisy guitar effects in unusual combinations - and thanks to this, nothing is like. About Clark and its technique, the game is often written in magazines for guitarists; Moreover, it has its own guitar model that is produced by Music Man, which is now completely atypical for the musician who finds himself in the first lines of the hit parades-and Clark developed the instrument herself. For the first time she played the new guitar when she performed with Taylor Swift, which is sarcastically called the “main guitarist of the planet”, crushing about the falling popularity of guitars.

Clark songs are also far from the formula traditional for pop music with alternation of verses and refinements. In the main hit from her second album “Actor out of work”, no chorus, for example, is not a constantly repeating verse about infidelity and lies, complemented by a prickly guitar loss at the end.

The first two albums brought Clark the status of a new star of indie music. She was praised for a non -standard approach to writing songs and a fresh sound, for the love of Bowie - but to say that Clark has become famous overnight. She still played in small clubs (although she made her debut with the single “Marrow” in 2009 on American television in David Letterman’s show), and the drafts for the second album wrote in the headphones because the neighbors complained about the noise-Clark did not have their own studio.

The third album "Strange Mercy" was released in 2011 and at first glance was the same avant-garde rock. However, Clark appeared on this album a truly large hit, playing the composition of Cruel with a dance bat and an adhesive melody.

In the music of Clark, something paradoxical is happening every second: either a completely dance riff ends with atonal experiments, then a strange, irrelevant song (for example, “Chloe in the Afternoon” ) not only turns out to be an opening composition of the album, but unexpectedly reveals in a singing chorus to end in the midst.

A year after Strange Mercy, Clark released a joint album with David Burne “Love this Giant”, and it is difficult to come up with a more successful duet. Clark and founder of the Talking Heads group complemented each other in stage and musical eccentricity, and they took wind instruments as the basis of the overall music; As a result, one of the best records with the participation of Burn in recent years was obtained (while the arrangements show that Clark played the first violin). The cover of Clark and Burn are depicted with deformed faces; The album came the same - strange, angular, but attractive.

No matter how good these records are, real success to Clark came only in 2014, and it is primarily associated with the breakthrough fourth album St. Vincent - although not only with it. For the album, which Clark called the same way as her project, she had to demonstrate the miracles of the transformation. Firstly, the sound was new, much more dance and artificial-Clark began to play the guitar as if it were a synthesizer.

Secondly, Annie had enough time to work on “St. Vincent ”, and here each nuance is brought to perfection. Not a single song without Hook, or even three-which made it much closer to pop music than before. Finally, Clark, who always cared about the visual side of her work, reached a new level of living performances, turning them into theatrical productions with choreography and the dramatic performance of the ballad lying on stage. The album was sold better than the previous plates of Clark, unexpectedly confidently showed himself in the charts (12th place in the American Billboard), earned recognition as one of the best works of the year and even received Grammy.

In the mid-2000s, the Polyphonic Spree Clark played on the guitar of the cover on the hit Nirvana "Lithium". In 2014, she sang the same song, and the musicians of Nirvana Daiv Grol, Chris Novoselich and Pat Smir played with her at the group of inclusion of the group in the Hall of Glory Rock-n Roll.

Clark also became the heroine of the secular chronicle. She never advertised her personal life, but it was impossible to hide the relationship with the actress and model Kara Delevingne - their joint photos from parties began to appear in the tabloids. Despite the deafening for St. Vincent Success, Clark recalls the time as extremely difficult: endless concerts and shooting, running around and not a minute of free time. Clark had not climbed out of the tours before, but admitted that she had not encountered anything like that: "I just tried not to go crazy." Antidepressants helped her to cope with this, the singer admits, she devoted to them the song “Pills” from the new album. And also - endless hard work. Having finished the tour, Clark began to work on the next entry without stopping, she calls this period “monastic fantastic” and claims that she refused everything in life, except for work.

“Masseducation” (2017) is another step by Annie towards pop music. To work on the recording, she hired Jack Antonoff, one of the most popular American producers. Antonoff turned out to be an ideal co-author: he achieved success in indie music as the leader of The Bleachers, and in pop-world, producing the work of Taylor Swift, Lorde and other stars. Clark was ready for experiments; On the album you can hear Urban-Bit ( Los Ageless ), and modular synthesizers, and songs without guitars.

One of the best tracks from the new album - “New York”, at first glance this song can be mistaken for a piercing ballad of parting, especially since in preparation for the recording of the album, it parted with Kara Delevingne (punishes in some songs on “Masseduction”). However, the singer herself in the podcast “Song Exploder” said that this is more of a dedication to one of her favorite cities where she lived for quite some time, and the words in the chorus “I lost a hero / I lost a friend” - and the reaction to the death of David Bowie and Prince, musical idols Clark. The song was invented on the guitar, but with the help of Jack Antonoff turned into a piano pop ballad, completely for St. Vincent is atypical.

This composition convexly illustrates the work of Clark, in which everything is not as straightforward as it seems first. Pop-ballad-but with the word Motherfucker in the refrain, a song about parting-but in fact about everything in the world.

Masseducation is the most affordable album St. Vincent, but not having lost a gram of her oddity. This is an art project, whose meat is not only a musical record and concerts, but also the Instagram of the singer (where it gives crazy interviews to herself) and another version of the record that should be released in the near future, with the same songs, but played exclusively on the piano. Clark is often compared with Bowie, who was one of the first to understand the value of the stage image and changed it from the album to the album, coordinating with musical metamorphoses; A similar trajectory is moving Clark. Her growing from the album to the album, success says that we still have new heroes to replace the departed.

Pavel Borisov