Annie Get Your Strum
As the divine St. Vincent, Annie Clark performs ethereal orchestral pop. Still even a dulcet indie waif has to cope with a killer hangover every now and then.
Ed Power, 02 Dec 2011
Ghostly pale, her doe eyes rimmed with fatigue, Annie Clark descends into the murky bowels of a Dublin music venue. “Follow me, turning left at the sex dungeon,” she quips, swerving suddenly and opening the door to her dressing-room. Inside, her drummer is spread on the floor, grunting. “Oh my,” says Clark, a little embarrassed. “Maybe we should get out of here.”
Twisting on her heels, Clark – who records esoteric orchestral pop as St. Vincent – bounds back up the steps, the fashion victim-y wide brim hat she donned for a surprise television interview earlier in the afternoon wobbling precariously.
“I just want to get some fucking fresh air,” she says. “I’ve got the world’s worst hangover right now.”
Leaving the drummer to his yoga session, Hot Press follows, eventually joining the singer on the stoop across the street from the venue. Her take-out coffee set on the pavement between us, we shoot the breeze about St. Vincent’s critics slaying new LP Strange Mercy, the peculiar circumstances in which it was written (she went cold turkey on her BlackBerry and holed up in a dingy Seattle hotel) and her blossoming creative relationship with ex-Talking Head David Byrne. Mostly, though, Clark is trying to glean some local advice re: good jogging spots in Dublin.
“Which way is the river?,” she asks, shielding her eyes from the uncharacteristically intense November. Hot Press points in the correct direction, before feeling it necessary to add that maybe a patch of the capital healthily populated with junkies and aggressive beggars is perhaps not the best spot for a lycra-ed indie chanteuse to get her exercise zen on. Instead we recommend a walk up Grafton Street to Stephen’s Green. Granted, it’s not quite Central Park but she would dramatically reduce her chances of returning smelling of Dutch Gold and urine.
She jogs every day on tour. It’s one of the ways she stays sane when she starts to forget what continent she’s on.
“I’m not a great runner or anything,” Clark offers. “I’ve never done a marathon, for instance. It keeps my brain from eating itself. It gets my blood going. I’m not as good as my drummer. He’s doing yoga and the rest of us are hungover as fuck.”
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