Anne Erin Clark (born September 28, 1982), known professionally as St. Vincent, is an American musician and singer-songwriter. Her guitar-playing has been praised for its melodic style and use of distortion. In 2023, Rolling Stone named Clark the 26th-greatest guitarist of all time.
Raised in Dallas, St. Vincent began her music career as a member of choral rock band the Polyphonic Spree. She was also a member of Sufjan Stevens' touring band before forming her own band in 2006. Her debut solo studio album, Marry Me, was released in 2007; it was followed by Actor (2009) and Strange Mercy (2011). In 2012, St. Vincent released Love This Giant, an album made in collaboration with David Byrne of Talking Heads. Her fourth studio album, St. Vincent (2014), received widespread acclaim from critics and was named album of the year by Slant Magazine, NME, The Guardian and Entertainment Weekly. She collaborated with producer and songwriter Jack Antonoff for her albums Masseduction (2017) and Daddy's Home (2021) and self-produced her seventh studio album All Born Screaming (2024).
St. Vincent produced Sleater-Kinney's ninth studio album The Center Won't Hold (2019) and co-wrote Taylor Swift's Billboard Hot 100 number-one single "Cruel Summer". She also directed a segment in the horror anthology film XX (2017), and co-wrote and starred in the psychological thriller film The Nowhere Inn (2020). Her accolades include six Grammy Awards, three of which are for Best Alternative Music Album, tying the record for wins in that category.
Early life Clark was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on September 28, 1982, to Sharon Christine and Richard "Rick" Clark. Her mother is a social worker and administrator for a nonprofit organization, and her stepfather works in corporate tax administration. Her parents divorced when she was 3, and when she was 7, she moved with her mother and two older sisters to Dallas, Texas. She has said that a 23andMe DNA test revealed her ancestry to be 80% Irish and 20% Ashkenazi Jewish, via one of her grandmothers. Clark was raised Catholic and Unitarian Universalist.
Clark has four brothers and four sisters from her parents' blended families.
As a child, Clark was fond of Ritchie Valens and the movie La Bamba. When she was five, her mother gave her a red plastic guitar from a Target store for Christmas. She began playing her first real guitar at age 12, taking classes with Tony Hyatt, a local guitar shop employee, and worked some of her teenage years as a roadie for her aunt and uncle, the guitar-vocal jazz duo Tuck & Patti. In 2001, she graduated from Lake Highlands High School, where she participated in theater and the school's jazz band, and was a classmate of actor Mark Salling.
She attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, studying with professor Lauren Passarelli. She left after three years, feeling that art institutions such as Berklee were sometimes focused more on the aesthetics of art than the product. In retrospect, she said, "I think that with music school and art school, or school in any form, there has to be some system of grading and measurement. The things they can teach you are quantifiable. While all that is good and has its place, at some point you have to learn all you can and then forget everything that you learned in order to actually start making music."
Career 2003–2007: Career beginnings and Marry Me
In 2003, Clark released an EP with fellow Berklee students entitled Ratsliveonnoevilstar. She also worked with Heavy Rotation Records, where "she revealed a much more private and intimate rendering of 'Count' for Dorm Sessions Vol. 1" and studied with professor of guitar Lauren Passarelli. Shortly after leaving Berklee, she returned home to Texas, where she joined the Polyphonic Spree just before they embarked on a European tour. In 2004, she joined Glenn Branca's 100-guitar orchestra for the Queens performance,. Evri.com:80. Retrieved November 30, 2011. and she was also briefly in a noise rock band called the Skull Fuckers. Clark left the Polyphonic Spree and joined Sufjan Stevens' touring band in 2006. During this period, she recorded and released an EP titled Paris Is Burning (2006).
In 2006, she began recording a studio album under the stage name St. Vincent. In an interview on The Colbert Report, she said that she "took [her] moniker from a line in a Nick Cave song" that referred to the hospital where Dylan Thomas died: "And Dylan Thomas died drunk in / St. Vincent's hospital" (from Cave's song "There She Goes, My Beautiful World", from the 2004 album Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus). The name is also a reference to her great-grandmother, whose middle name was St. Vincent.Chris Barrett, , Metro Pulse, October 7, 2009. Accessed at the Internet Archive, October 2, 2015. Clark released her debut album, Marry Me, on July 10, 2007, on Beggars Banquet Records. The album was named after a line from the television sitcom Arrested Development.
The album was well received by critics, who compared Clark to the likes of Kate Bush and David Bowie and lauded the album for its arrangements, themes and style. In their review, The A.V. Club said: "There's a point where too much happiness turns into madness, and St. Vincent's multi-instrumentalist Annie Clark knows this place well". Pitchfork said, "At every turn Marry Me takes the more challenging route of twisting already twisted structures and unusual instrumentation to make them sound perfectly natural and, most importantly, easy to listen to as she overdubs her thrillingly sui generis vision into vibrant life." The songs on Marry Me were written largely when Clark was 18 and 19, and, she says, "represented a more idealized version of what life was or what love was or anything in the eyes of someone who hadn't really experienced anything". The album yielded one single, "Paris Is Burning", and a music video was produced for "Jesus Saves, I Spend".
2008–2010: Actor and soundtracks
In 2008, Clark was nominated for three PLUG Independent Music Awards: New Artist of the Year, Female Artist of the Year, and Music Video of the Year. On March 6, 2008, she won the PLUG Female Artist of the Year award. After returning to New York from a lengthy tour, Clark began working on her second album. Her inspiration reportedly came from several films, including Disney movies: "Well, the truth is that I had come back from a pretty long — you know, about a year-and-a-half of touring, and so my brain was sort of all circuit boards that were a little bit fried", Clark said. "So I started watching films as sort of a way to get back into being human. And then it started to just really inform the entire record." Clark, who did not have a studio at the time, began writing the album in her apartment on her computer using GarageBand and MIDI, because she had gotten noise complaints from neighbors. The songs were inspired largely by scenes from various children's films. Clark said she imagined soundtracks for certain scenes in films when writing the music and lyrics, including scenes in Snow White (1937) and The Wizard of Oz (1939).
Her second album, Actor, was released by 4AD Records on May 5, 2009. It was also well received and gained more commercial attention than its predecessor. Spin gave the album eight out of ten stars, noting its "[juxtaposition of] the cruel and the kind, and here, the baroque arrangements are even more complex and her voice even prettier, with both only underlining the dark currents running through her songs". Entertainment Weekly said the album "plays up the contrasts, [with Clark] letting her church-choir voice linger on lyrics that hint darkly at themes of violence, sex, and general chaos", and branded it "a uniquely potent cocktail of sounds and moods". Actor charted well for an independent release, peaking at No. 9 on Billboards Independent Albums chart, No. 5 on the Tastemaker Albums chart, and No. 90 on the Billboard 200. Although it spawned no singles (except in the UK, where "Actor Out of Work" was issued as a 7" vinyl single), music videos for "Marrow" and "Actor Out of Work" were released, and aired on several music channels. A promotional music video for "Laughing with a Mouth of Blood", featuring Portlandias Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein (then of ThunderAnt), was also filmed.
Two soundtracks for The Twilight Saga have featured Clark's songs. "Rosyln", in collaboration with indie folk band Bon Iver, appeared on the 2009 soundtrack of New Moon; and "The Antidote" was written for and appeared on 2012's Breaking Dawn – Part 2. In November 2010, Clark appeared with American rappers Kid Cudi and Cage on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. They performed "Maniac" from Cudi's Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager, which prominently samples "The Strangers", the opening song on Actor.
2011–2012: Strange Mercy and collaborations
Clark spent much of her time in Seattle writing her third album, Strange Mercy, in October 2010. In an interview with Julie Klausner for Spin magazine, she recalled: "[Death Cab for Cutie drummer] Jason McGerr had an office that was closing. He offered me the space for a month, for all of October. I was alone. I stayed at the Ace Hotel downtown, in one of the rooms with a shared bathroom. I would just get up in the morning and caffeinate, and run, and go to the studio for 12 hours, come back, eat dinner alone with a book, have a glass of wine, and go to bed. And do it all over again." On January 12, 2011, Clark announced via Twitter that she was working on Strange Mercy, a follow-up to Actor. In early March 2011, producer John Congleton, who also worked with Clark on Actor, said that he and Clark were nearly a third of the way through recording it.
On July 4, Clark stated via Twitter that if enough followers tweeted the hashtag "#strangemercy", she would release a track from the album. On July 22, after the threshold was met, she released "Surgeon" for download and streaming on her official website. In August 2011, Clark was interviewed and featured on the cover of Spin magazine. On August 24, 2011, a music video was released for the song "Cruel", and on September 5, the entire album was put up for streaming on NPR Music. On August 25, 2011, she debuted Strange Mercy in the Temple of Dendur room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, introducing Toko Yasuda (ex-Enon), Matt Johnson, and Daniel Mintseris as members of her live band. The album was released September 13, 2011.
Strange Mercy received widespread acclaim from music critics. It achieved an overall rating of 8.1/10 at AnyDecentMusic? based on 36 reviews. It was St. Vincent's highest-charting album yet, peaking at No. 19 on the US Billboard 200.[ Strange Mercy – St. Vincent]. Billboard.com. Retrieved September 22, 2011 Clark stated, "I don't think it's the best record I'll ever make, but I think it's a good record." She began touring the US and Europe in support of the record in the fall of 2011 and continued a worldwide tour throughout 2012.