Annie Clark wrote a song called “All Born Screaming” in her early 20s. It wasn’t any good. But Clark liked the title and wanted to use it someday.
“I knew I needed to live more life to be worthy of this title,” she told the Herald ahead of her Thursday show at MGM Music Hall.
Two decades later, Clark — who records and performs as St. Vincent — named her new album “All Born Screaming.” St. Vincent’s seventh LP dives fast and hard into the deep end with songs about overwhelming grief, existential woe, the chaos and glory of life. It’s worthy of the title.
Each St. Vincent album has been honest, often brutally so (see 2021 LP “Daddy’s Home” about her father’s release from prison after a 12-year sentence for fraud). But “All Born Screaming” is brutally honest and ragefully raw and triumphant and a 40-minute catharsis.
“Life gives you the themes because I write about exactly what I’m going through,” Clark said of her inspiration for the album. “Life brought me to my knees so one way or the other I’m going to try to make sense of it through music. And I believe to keep things fresh you have to start things with beginner mind, beginner mind is really helpful in blasting out the cobwebs or baggage of former records.”
To get at songs about loss and life, Clark learned how to build a studio from the ground up. She brought in stacks of modular synths and decades-old drum machines. Then she started making noise and let the experiments carry her along.
“All of that was so so fun to do because I could just jam by myself for hours and hours and hours,” she said. “Of course a jam is one thing but a song with a heart and a soul and a spine is another… I combed through these epic, wandering, industrial jams and then found the moments that felt to me like, ‘Ooh, I can’t live without this, there’s a soul here that I can build an entire song around.”
The songs feel informed by this process. Often they eschew traditional structures. A prime example is “Reckless.” For nearly two and a half minutes, “Reckless” is a minimalist piano ballad. Then during the last third of the track it crescendos with this big, mean, ugly cacophony. Hidden in the mess, she sings over and over, in an almost angelic voice: “Calling for me/Calling for me.”
“Reckless” mirrors the frenetic, emotional lability of grief.
Now that her music and their ideas and emotions are out in the world, St. Vincent has to travel with them from city to city. When a musician makes a profound piece of art like “All Born Screaming,” they have to live in it, often for years, on tour.
“If it’s an intense emotional song, it’s going to be an intense emotional performance,” Clark said. “I don’t see a benefit to making myself calloused to the emotion. That would sort of stunt the communication to the audience.”
“Your job (as a live artist) is to shock and console, shock and console, shock and console,” she added. “And then everybody dreams the same dream for an hour and a half and we all go to heaven.”
Seems St. Vincent’s live show follows the same template as her new record. After all, it opens with the song “Hell is Near” and closes with the title track, shocking and comforting and climbing up to artistic heaven along the way.
For tickets and details, visit ilovestvincent.com