St. Vincent’s St. Vincent

NPR has the first listen of St. Vincent’s fourth album, St. Vincent; if you combine this with Katy B’s new Little Red then that is probably all the new music you’ll need to survive Tuesday. I also really enjoyed this Pitchfork profile of St. Vincent, a.k.a. 31-year-old Annie Clark, who, while walking naked and alone in the West Texas country last year (!), encountered a rattlesnake, ran home, took a shot of tequila, and then wrote a song called “Rattlesnake.” (It kicks off the album, in fact.) Other biographical details might be hard to come by. From Ryan Dombal’s piece:

Naturally, the biggest enemy of disbelief-suspending at modern concerts is the smartphone, and on new single “Digital Witness”, Clark takes on the voice of information-age propaganda — “I want all of your mind” — as strutting horns fight back amidst a gloriously human groove. “We have this feeling that we’re being watched, and our psychic response is to make ourselves transparent,” Clark muses. “The real currency in the future will be privacy.” If she’s right — if our worth will result from how much we can keep hidden from prying eyes and bright screens — Clark may become a secret billionaire. Because even with all of her striking visuals, she still doesn’t like her picture being taken. Though her songs are ripped from her heart, she prefers not to talk about the personal events that led to their being.

“There have been things in my life that were super heartbreaking, and I could’ve made that fodder, but I don’t want to do that,” she says. “It just makes me feel weird, and it doesn’t really help anybody else. I mean, I don’t take selfies. It makes me feel empty inside to take a picture of myself at an event, like, ‘Isn’t my life cool?’”

Where do we find her altar? “Rattlensake” and others streamable here. [NPR, Pitchfork]