Why isn’t she a superstar? St Vincent is still St Vincent, and she has made her masterpiece: Daddy’s Home delivers one highlight after another
St Vincent Daddy’s Home Out Friday
There is a mystery about Annie Clark, the 38-year-old Texan whose stage name is St Vincent. Why isn’t she a superstar?
She can sing, powerfully. She can play the guitar, pyrotechnically. She can write songs, either with a collaborator or alone, which is rare these days. She’s a gay icon with enough charisma to light up a festival field.
She has been compared to David Bowie and Prince – the highest of praise.
There is a mystery about Annie Clark (above), the 38-year-old Texan whose stage name is St Vincent. Why isn’t she a superstar?
Yet her six albums have spent only one week in the UK top 20 between them. Maybe she’s too edgy, or she just lacks that one killer tune. Her best-loved songs are probably New York and Los Ageless (from her last album, Masseduction), and neither has been helped by its title – the one too familiar, the other too peculiar.
All this could change with her new album, Daddy’s Home. St Vincent has lost some of her edge, in a good way. Her sound is warmer, softer, more soulful: the lyrics, while still sharp, now come in a swirl of Wurlitzers.
Her father plays two very different roles. The music draws on his record collection, which seems to have been bought entirely in 1972-1974. A Spotify playlist Clark made, called Daddy’s Home Inspiration, includes Bowie, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone, Lou Reed, Dolly Parton and Pink Floyd.
So Daddy had good taste – but he also spent nine years in jail for fraud. The title track addresses this in a mini-memoir, mixing lush white funk with vivid snapshots (‘I signed autographs in the visitation room’) and nuanced emotions.
‘Hell, where can you run,’ Clark wonders, ‘when the outlaw’s inside you?’
Apart from three brief interludes, the album delivers one highlight after another. Pay Your Way In Pain is a synth-driven howl about the cruelties of the human condition. Somebody Like Me is a dreamy ballad, almost country.
There’s even some twisted pop, as Sheena Easton’s hymn to housewifery (‘My baby takes the morning train’) turns into a lesbian love song (My Baby Wants A Baby). St Vincent is still St Vincent, and she has made her masterpiece.