005. "Strange Mercy", St. Vincent (2011)
This is the first part of a three-essay exploration of the work of St. Vincent.
In the world of St. Vincent, nothing exists in a vacuum. She writes of a “Champagne Year” and the “Year of the Tiger”; she calls out to Johnny, Chloe, and Elijah; she adopts a line from Marilyn Monroe’s diary. Even her pseudonym is derived from a 2004 Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds song: “And Dylan Thomas died drunk in St. Vincent’s hospital”.
“It’s the place where poetry comes to die”, she once joked, “that’s me”.
It is exactly these references, miniscule fragments of the world surrounding Annie Clark, that provide so much texture and color in the artist’s body of work — paired finely, of course, with decades of guitar virtuosity siphoned into fanciful, sometimes coarse and biting riffs. For Clark, each record is an extension of her own narrative, what I like to call the St. Vincent Extended Universe, where she commands the glow of the spotlight.
But before the rise of St. Vincent, Annie Clark earned her stripes as an ensemble instrumentalist. After dropping out of the Berklee College of Music, Clark returned home to Texas, where she made her way into the psychedelic symphony The Polyphonic Spree for eighteen months, playing electric guitar with upwards of twenty other musicians at any given time; she later joined Sufjan Stevens’ touring band and participated in composer Glenn Branca’s hundred-guitar symphony.
Clark’s preliminary solo records, Marry Me (2007) and Actor (2009), solidified St. Vincent as a formidable name in the world of early twenty-first century indie rock. Clark was lauded by critics as an adept multi-instrumentalist — on Marry Me, she’s credited on a slew of instruments, everything from the dulcimer to the Moog synthesizer — and celebrated for her dynamic compositional abilities. And where Marry Me is delightfully damp and naive, soft and sweet-sounding when compared to the rest of the artist’s work, Clark proved an essential ability to hone her already-unique sonic footprint with Actor, wherein she incorporated deeper and more abrasive sounds paired with deeper and more abrasive subject matter.
But the dawn of Clark’s third LP, Strange Mercy, born unto the world in 2011, demonstrated a critical juncture in the artist’s time-honored career. Here, Clark seems to find her footing as a solo artist, cementing herself into a new avenue of sound and song, one that welcomes her with open arms. The record is innately raw and perverse in subject matter, a refreshing thematic maturation that commingles beautifully with the natural advancement of her skills as a composer. Strange Mercy is rich and labyrinthine; it’s the first of St. Vincent’s solo endeavors to truly fulfill the artist’s evidenced proclivity for world-building, for inviting the audience into the St. Vincent Extended Universe. Every track is rife with motion, sometimes even a sense of agitation, curating a colorful and storied listening experience, an abstraction that Clark would come to refine in later works through her development as an artist.
Strange Mercy possesses a delicate ingenuity, leaving an impression of interpersonality in a way that Clark had yet to navigate before. The record was composed entirely in isolation — in that sense, she was truly ahead of her time — an affair Clark later described as “a loneliness experiment”. She unplugged herself from the noise of Brooklyn and fled to Seattle, where she holed up at the Ace Hotel and worked out of Death Cab for Cutie drummer Jason McGerr’s studio for the month of October 2010. “It was not natural to me”, she explained to Pitchfork, “but it forced me to place value on different things: ‘How good is this melody or these words? Do they fit together in a way that is evocative?’ As opposed to, ‘There are sixteen layers happening, and maybe somewhere within them is a cohesive emotional song’.”
Part of what makes Strange Mercy so valuable is Clark’s willingness to peel back the curtain just so to reveal splinters of herself for the very first time. The record’s opening track, “Chloe in the Afternoon”, which borrows the name of a 1972 Éric Rohmer film, explores a deeply personal fear of genuine intimacy, as illustrated through an encounter with a dominatrix in a hotel room: “Who will hear / hear your word / ring, ring phone / send you home / find my heels / heal my hurt / white, white shirt / back to work”.
But, in the typical fashion of St. Vincent, Clark knows how to leave her audience hanging. Where she touches on the personal, the parts of her she hadn’t revealed before, only ever intimating a work’s emotional foreground — the record’s closing track, “Year of the Tiger”, she dances around depression, ever-so-slightly detailing the state of melancholia she experienced in 2010. “Living in fear of the year of the tiger”, she croons again and again over a thumping bass drum, “Oh America, can I owe you one?”
Strange Mercy, in all of its tenderness, marks Clark’s disposition for the cryptic. She gives, but the giving is just barely perceptible, leaving footprints in the sand of her stories. The record’s title track, at the time of the record’s release, stood as a prime example: “Our father in exile / for God only knows how many years / but when you see him, wave / through double pane”. Taken out of context, Clark’s lyrics could easily be mistaken for fiction, the outpouring of complicated emotion into story: the story of a family separated from their father behind prison bars.
It would be years until the true impetus behind “Strange Mercy” came to light — but not by the hand of Clark herself. After establishing a name as the indie-rock darling du jour, Clark became a tabloid mainstay following the revelation of her relationship with supermodel Cara Delevingne, the highest of high-profile relationships. For years, the couple was trailed by paparazzi, commemorated in camera flash along New York city streets and red carpets, a level of copious surveillance entirely unfamiliar in Clark’s life as a public figure thus far. In July 2016, the Daily Mail exposed a truth that Clark had kept shrouded for years: in 2010, the year in which Strange Mercy was crafted, her father was sentenced to twelve years in prison for his involvement in a $43 million stock market manipulation scam.
The media’s divulgence would serve as stark inspiration for Clark’s later works — namely, Masseduction (2017) and Daddy’s Home (2021) — but for a five-year period, the story of “Strange Mercy” was left ambiguous. In interviews, the artist customarily evades gratuitous justification for her stories, instead urging journalists and readers to embrace their own interpretation of her words. Of course, it’s obvious now: “If I ever meet the dirty policeman who roughed you up / No I, I don’t know what” has evident density as a listener in the years after the tabloid revelation, but at the time of release, the words were as light as a feather. As far as her listeners were concerned, the man behind double pane could have been another character, just as real as Johnny or Chloe or Elijah.
Here’s the thing: I can’t quite crack St. Vincent. I’ve enjoyed her work for years, explored every crevice of her discography from “Now, Now” to “Candy Darling”, and still, I feel a barrier. Her career trajectory is unlike any other I’ve seen before, not only in terms of how she developed her trademark sound, but in how she allows herself to be viewed by the public. She rebels at times, engaging in skirmishes with cavalier journalists and dissing the media for their portrayal of her; other times, she plays along, quelling herself into geniality, armed with a battalion of thank yous for whomever is interrogating her. She falls in and out of different personas with ease, redefining her aesthetic at the drop of a hat, never waiting for anybody to catch up.
I am by no means a public figure in the way that St. Vincent is, but I’m a public figure in the sense that, frankly, we all are. We’re humans: we need kinship, we need connection, and when the world around us becomes digital, so do our lives. My version of this is somewhat unremarkable: I write about the thing I love most, I connect it to my life, and I publish it online. In the grand scope of the information age, I am one of millions performing the same act, creating and broadcasting and praying to God that anybody enjoys the work I put out.
I write about my life here because it feels indivisible from the works I write about. In the cheesiest manner possible, I owe my life to music. These records are a part of me; they have made a home in my body and mind, arrested and inhabited my being, navigated me through conditions I didn’t believe I could withstand. Music has taught me how to feel, how to live, who to be. The artists I write about create for the same reasons. Creation is survival; creation begets inspiration.
The gift of language is not one that I assume lightly, nor should anyone else. Language is power, language is liberation and agency. The language of others — and myself — has caused me the greatest bliss, the deepest betrayals, and everything in between. It is inexpressibly empowering to have the opportunity to narrate my own life in such a way, to make proverbial lemons out of lemonade. I’ve been a writer for as long as I’ve been a person, and I plan on riding that wave to the end.
I began working on this project because I needed something tangible. I needed to grab something by the reins, to prove to myself that I can do something, maybe even something good. Frankly, I don’t even know if I’m accomplishing that, but it feels cathartic to show up and do the work, to put my name on it and give it to the world.
I first fell in love with St. Vincent in high school, as one does, when I stumbled across “Cruel”. It remains, to this day, one of my favorite songs (and music videos) of all time — its message is distinct and potent, and the great guitar solo doesn’t hurt.
But as I started researching this article, I realized I hadn’t indulged in the song for quite some time, at least a few years. “Cruel” made sense when I was seventeen, of course; cruelty itself felt much more surrounding then, before the inevitable weathering of time and circumstance that would engross the inception of my adult life. In short, I have gotten better at accepting the unacceptable; I can withstand malice and betrayal in a way I could not fathom experiencing when I was younger. I would love to write this impulse off as a kind of courage, a strengthening of self, but in reality, I know it is foremost a product of apathy. It takes a lot to get to me, but perhaps that’s because enough has already gotten to me quite successfully.
Months ago, I was wounded in a way I still struggle to numerate; I’ll take a cue from Annie Clark here and spare the details, but frankly, I was marred by someone I had once trusted and cared for completely. It was a deeply agonizing and belittling experience - due not to the magnitude of the circumstance itself, but instead to what the circumstance signified in my life. I’ve bemoaned particular remnants of the situation in past work, alluded to a life shrouded in the veil of delusion and an inveterate search for belonging, but maybe none of that is important here. What matters is that I was hurt in a way I did not recognize and could not compute for quite some time.
I spent so long masquerading in my own body, pretending to be impervious to the world around me. I felt emotionally impenetrable; I evaded feeling like you avoid someone with a petition on the street (look down, walk quickly, feel kind of weird about it). This sort of aloofness is far from healthy, but in hindsight, I know it was preservation. The wall broke down in its own time, and I reconciled with feeling again. In a roundabout way, I’ve gotten better at feeling uncomfortable in all of its manifestations — anger, sadness, unfamiliarity — because I let myself feel them. I let discomfort run its course through me, I get to know it, and in due time, I let it go.
They could take or leave you, so they took you, and they left you. Sometimes indignation is necessary; “Cruel” is a story of indignation, of accepting what happened and allowing yourself to feel the ire. It doesn’t go away unless you feel it.
Annie Clark is no stranger to the power of language, and she wields it masterfully. Every word she pens is purposeful, every rhyme deliberate and reasoned. She says what she wants to say and leaves it at that; she gives it to the world however she pleases, plain and simple or veiled in verse.
Thanks for your patience while I took a little break from writing! Now that my semester has started again, I’ll be publishing every Friday. Don’t forget to check out the master playlist here.