Unlikely as it seems, we have The Daily Mail to thank for “Daddy’s Home,” Annie Clark’s seventh album as St. Vincent.
In 2016, Clark went from indie-rock darling to tabloid celebrity after a series of high-profile relationships, so the The Daily Mail went digging for dirt — and found that in 2010, Clark’s father was sentenced to 12 years in prison over his involvement in $43 million-worth of stock manipulations.
Now that he’s been released, Clark is reestablishing their relationship. While she never intended to detail that process so explicitly in her music, “Daddy’s Home” offers a chance to reclaim the story from the scandal.
“That story had been told, but I didn’t get to tell it,” she said. “And I wanted to tell it with humor and compassion, complexity and nuance. But I seriously doubt (I would have written about it otherwise).”
Even putting aside its personal nature, “Daddy’s Home” remains St. Vincent’s sharpest turn yet in a career of transformations.
“Where other records might’ve been like icicles coming from the speakers,” she said, laughing, “this is a lot warmer. This is like, ‘Come on in! Sit on this beat-up plaid chair and roll a cigarette.’ It’s a different palate. Different things to say, different ways to say them.”
That warmth, more than the electric sitar or Clark’s 1970s aesthetic (which nods to actress Gena Rowlands, the on-the-brink heroine of many films directed by her husband John Cassavetes), separates this album from her earlier work. After releasing two indie-folk albums in the late 2000s — which she now describes, somewhat unfairly, as her “asexual Pollyanna” period — Clark had a breakthrough with “Strange Mercy” in 2011.
Electric and eerie, “Strange Mercy” toyed with a weary “Benzo-queen” persona hinted at in her early work, matched with claustrophobic guitar solos clawing for breathing room. Next came “Love This Giant” (2012), a collaboration with David Byrne which cemented her place as a musician’s musician. And with her self-titled album in 2014, she became a white-haired, sadomasochist cult leader before doubling down as a “dominatrix at the mental institution” on Masseduction (2017), a relentless record centred on power, PVC and heartbreak.
Where to go from an album so densely layered that Clark re-released it twice — first as pared-back acoustic renditions, then as club-ready electronica, overseen by Nina Kraviz? Perfection has a price, and Clark didn’t want to keep paying. For “Daddy’s Home,” Clark and co-producer Jack Antonoff (Lorde, Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey) left behind tightly wound electro-pop in favor of a more laid-back approach and sound.
The album’s landscape of a gritty, ‘70s New York — Clark describes it as “glamour that’s been up for three days straight’’ – is a homage to both the music she grew up with, thanks to her dad, and the “trying to make the best of it” ethos of the era.
“I don’t necessarily glamorize the past,” she said. “I think people were more or less the same — just with different sets of technology and clothes and some different ideas underpinning society … It was a time when the world was bad, but music was great, which culturally is where we are now.”
Power — who grabs it and who suffers — is still on Clark’s mind, but the frustration that runs through her music yields to empathy. Mostly. Album outlier “Down” is a spite-driven track about someone who needs to be cut down to size. That one person aside (“I’m not Mother Teresa here!” she jokes), she wanted to veer away from judgement.
“In some ways, people are grasping for moral certainty, which I understand, because things are scary in the world. So much is uncertain, and there’s been a big reckoning and shake-up of institutions of power. But I think we can’t lose sight of the fact that people are complicated. People are flawed, but also are capable of change. We can’t just write somebody off. We should be figuring out a more thoughtful way to legislate thoughts and behavior,” she said.
“Daddy’s Home” is filled with tributes to the flawed and misunderstood, from her father, insufferable screenwriters and some of Clark’s own heroes. On “The Melting of the Sun,” Clark thanks Joni Mitchell, Tori Amos, Joan Didion and Nina Simone, while closer “Candy Darling” reimagines the death of the Warhol superstar as an angel catching the last uptown train to heaven.
Clark, an awe-inspiring live artist, is eager to perform again, but don’t expect the meticulously choreographed productions of previous tours. She said when she tours, it will be as if, “‘Gosh, we’ve all just emerged from under a rock.’ And I think what we’ll need is maximum human connection; things that are a bit more grounded. I don’t know if our psyche can handle pure escapism at the moment.”