St. Vincent (musician)

• 1. Introduction

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  St. Vincent, born Anne Erin Clark on the 28th of September, 1982, is the kind of musician who plays guitar in a way that makes critics run out of comparisons. Rolling Stone named her the 26th-greatest guitarist of all time in 2023, a list that spans a century of players. She has won six Grammy Awards, three of them for Best Alternative Music Album, a record in that category. She co-wrote Taylor Swift's number-one single "Cruel Summer". She directed a horror film segment, starred in a psychological thriller she co-wrote, and self-produced her seventh studio album. None of those facts quite capture the strangeness of how she got there. A red plastic guitar from a Target store. A 23andMe test. A Nick Cave lyric about a dead poet. The name St. Vincent began as a hospital in a song, and became one of the most distinctive identities in American music. What drives someone to accumulate that range of work? And how does a person raised Catholic and Unitarian Universalist in Dallas, Texas end up performing at the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall? The answers start, as they often do, with where someone learns to listen.

• 2. Texas, Berklee, and the Road

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  Clark's mother gave her a red plastic guitar from a Target store when she was five. That gift preceded a real guitar by seven years. She picked up her first actual instrument at age 12, taking lessons from Tony Hyatt, an employee at a local guitar shop. Her teenage years included roadie work for her aunt and uncle, the jazz guitar-vocal duo Tuck and Patti, which gave her a working education in live music that no classroom provides. She graduated from Lake Highlands High School in Dallas in 2001, where she played in the school jazz band and participated in theater.

  At the Berklee College of Music in Boston, she studied with professor Lauren Passarelli. She left after three years, not out of failure but philosophy. She said later that music schools teach what is quantifiable, and at some point a musician has to forget everything they learned in order to start making real music. That tension between structured training and instinctive art would run through her career.

  Back in Texas, she joined the Polyphonic Spree just before the choral rock band left for a European tour. In 2004, she played in Glenn Branca's 100-guitar orchestra at a Queens performance. She joined Sufjan Stevens' touring band in 2006, and during that period released an EP titled Paris Is Burning. By the time she was ready to record under her own name, she had been a roadie, a choir member, a touring musician, and an orchestral guitarist. That breadth would show up in everything she made next.

• 3. The Name and the Debut

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  On The Colbert Report, Clark explained that she took her stage name from a line in a Nick Cave song. Cave's track "There She Goes, My Beautiful World", from his 2004 album Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus, includes the lyric: "And Dylan Thomas died drunk in / St. Vincent's hospital". The hospital where the poet died gave Clark her professional identity. The name also carried a private meaning: her great-grandmother's middle name was St. Vincent.

  Marry Me, her debut album, was released on the 10th of July, 2007, on Beggars Banquet Records. The title came from a line in the television sitcom Arrested Development. Clark had written most of the songs at 18 and 19, and she described them as representing an idealized picture of life and love "in the eyes of someone who hadn't really experienced anything". Critics compared her to Kate Bush and David Bowie and praised the arrangements. Pitchfork described her approach as "twisting already twisted structures and unusual instrumentation to make them sound perfectly natural".

  The album yielded one single, "Paris Is Burning", and a music video for "Jesus Saves, I Spend". In 2008, Clark won the PLUG Female Artist of the Year award, announced on the 6th of March. She had also been nominated for New Artist of the Year and Music Video of the Year at the same ceremony. The recognition was modest but pointed: something genuinely new had arrived.

• 4. Actor and the Film Mind

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  After a year and a half of touring behind Marry Me, Clark returned to New York and started writing her second album on a computer in her apartment, using GarageBand and MIDI software, because neighbors had complained about the noise. The films she watched to recover from tour fatigue became the album's architecture. She imagined soundtracks for specific scenes, including moments from Snow White, which was made in 1937, and The Wizard of Oz from 1939.

  Actor was released by 4AD Records on the 5th of May, 2009. Spin gave it eight out of ten stars and noted its juxtaposition of the cruel and the kind. Entertainment Weekly called it a "uniquely potent cocktail of sounds and moods". The album peaked at No. 9 on Billboard's Independent Albums chart and No. 90 on the Billboard 200, strong numbers for an independent release with no conventional singles push in the United States. A 7" vinyl single of "Actor Out of Work" was issued in the UK. A promotional video for "Laughing with a Mouth of Blood" featured Portlandia's Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein.

  Two Twilight Saga soundtracks also featured her work during this period. "Roslyn", made with Bon Iver, appeared on the 2009 soundtrack for New Moon. "The Antidote" was written for Breaking Dawn - Part 2 in 2012. In November 2010, Clark appeared on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon alongside Kid Cudi and rapper Cage to perform "Maniac", a track that prominently samples "The Strangers", the opening song on Actor. The film-brain approach to songwriting had made its way into the mainstream by accident.

• 5. Strange Mercy and David Byrne

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  Clark spent October 2010 writing her third album alone in Seattle, in an office vacated by Death Cab for Cutie drummer Jason McGerr. She stayed at the Ace Hotel downtown in a room with a shared bathroom, waking each morning to run, spending twelve hours in the studio, eating dinner alone with a book, and repeating. She announced via Twitter on the 12th of January, 2011, that the album was in progress. Producer John Congleton, who had also worked on Actor, said by early March that they were nearly a third through recording.

  On the 4th of July, Clark posted that she would release a track if enough followers tweeted the hashtag "#strangemercy". After the threshold was reached on the 22nd of July, she released "Surgeon" for download and streaming. Strange Mercy was debuted live on the 25th of August, 2011, in the Temple of Dendur room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The album was released on the 13th of September, 2011, and peaked at No. 19 on the Billboard 200, her highest chart position to that point.

  On the 14th of June, 2012, the first single from her collaboration with David Byrne of Talking Heads appeared. Love This Giant was released on the 11th of September, 2012. Byrne later observed, in a remark notable for its candor, that despite touring together for almost a year, he did not feel he knew Clark much better on a personal level, and added that mystery was not a bad thing for a talented young person to embrace. The collaboration also took Clark into new institutional territory: in September 2012, she participated in the "30 Songs / 30 Days" campaign to support Half the Sky, a multiplatform project drawn from Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's book.

• 6. The Self-Titled Breakthrough

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  In November 2013, Clark received the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for Performing Arts and signed to Loma Vista Recordings. The label released "Birth in Reverse" that December as the first single from her fourth album. The self-titled St. Vincent followed in February 2014 and became the most critically decorated record of her career to that point. The Guardian, Entertainment Weekly, NME, Gigwise, and MusicOMH all ranked it the number-one album of 2014. Time placed it at No. 2 and Rolling Stone at No. 4.

  On the 10th of April, 2014, Clark joined Nirvana on stage to sing lead vocals on "Lithium" at the 29th Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. She also filled in for Fred Armisen as band leader for the 8G Band on Late Night with Seth Meyers on the 12th and the 13th of August, 2014, while Armisen was away filming the fifth season of Portlandia. Clark toured the United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia throughout 2014, closing the year as the supporting act for the Black Keys.

  In February 2015, St. Vincent won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album, her first Grammy. On the 17th of May, 2015, she performed with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra for the inaugural Soluna: International Music and Arts Festival, a homecoming to the city where she had learned guitar and graduated high school. A demo of "Teenage Talk", a track left off the self-titled album, aired on the HBO series Girls on the 10th of March, 2015, and was released as a single on the 6th of April.

• 7. Masseduction and Collaboration

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  Masseduction, Clark's fifth studio album, was released in October 2017 through Loma Vista Recordings, made with producer and songwriter Jack Antonoff. It debuted at No. 10 on the Billboard 200, selling 29,000 units in its first week, the first time a St. Vincent album had cracked the top ten of that chart. Metacritic logged an average score of 88, indicating near-universal praise. Clark was also Record Store Day's ambassador for 2017, the first woman to hold that role.

  A performance of "Slow Disco" during her 2018 I Am a Lot Like You! Tour led to a new rendition of the song titled "Fast Slow Disco", released in June of that year. She also released MassEducation, an acoustic version of the album, which Metacritic scored at 80 and which Entertainment Weekly praised for her vocal range and lyrical flexibility.

  At the 61st Annual Grammy Awards in 2019, Clark joined Dua Lipa for a medley covering her own "Masseduction", Aretha Franklin's "Respect", and Lipa's Calvin Harris collaboration "One Kiss". That night, "Masseduction" won the Grammy for Best Rock Song. That summer, she was credited as a co-writer on Taylor Swift's "Cruel Summer", which appeared on Swift's seventh studio album Lover and later reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. In December 2019, she released Masseduction Rewired, a remix collection curated by Russian techno DJ Nina Kraviz. The same year, she produced Sleater-Kinney's ninth studio album The Center Won't Hold, an extension of a creative relationship that had also quietly become a personal one: a 2020 Los Angeles Times article noted that Clark and Sleater-Kinney's Carrie Brownstein had dated years earlier.

• 8. All Born Screaming and the Orchestra

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  All Born Screaming, Clark's seventh studio album, was self-produced and released on the 26th of April, 2024. Its lead single, "Broken Man", came out on the 29th of February, 2024. A second single, "Flea", followed on the 28th of March, the same day the All Born Screaming Tour was officially announced. The album aggregated a weighted average score of 89 on Metacritic. A New York Times profile quoted Clark on what she wanted from music at that moment: "I would like a pummeling. I want something to feel dangerous."

  On the 15th of November, 2024, Clark released Todos Nacen Gritando, a Spanish-language version of the album. She described recording it as "a beautiful exercise and an attempt to offer a little thanks to Spanish-language fans who have met me in my native tongue for seven records".

  At the 67th Annual Grammy Awards on the 2nd of February, 2025, Clark won Best Rock Song, Best Alternative Music Performance, and Best Alternative Music Album for All Born Screaming. The third win in that final category extended her record as the female soloist with the most wins there. During her acceptance speech, she revealed she has a wife named Leah and a daughter.

  On the 3rd of September, 2025, Clark performed at the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall alongside conductor Jules Buckley and his orchestra, the final date of the All Born Screaming Tour. That concert was released as Live in London!, her first live album, on the 20th of March, 2026. Inspired by the experience, she announced Live with Orchestra, a 2026 North American concert series with Buckley and his ensemble, a traveling collaboration that began with a single sold-out night in London and now spans a continent.