Inspired by the early 1970s New York music scene and the recent release of her father from incarceration, St Vincent (Annie Clark) releases her seventh studio album, Daddy’s Home. With its rich and atmospheric instrumentation combined with Clark’s smoky, crooning vocals, the album is her way of connecting with the “elusive father figure” in her life.
“To me, it’s the music that my father introduced me to. And I would say that I mostly knew him through the music that he liked or the books that he would give us or show us. So having that music from an early age is a sort of connection I had to an elusive father figure, it kind of tied into it really nicely with making the record,” she said in a recent exclusive interview with SoundStrip.
The album also marks one of the biggest leaps Clark’s taken as an artist, stating that the type of music on the record is “much more sophisticated” compared to “straight pop” while confessing that she did not know if she was “capable of approaching it until now.”
“As a musician, it’s the kind of music that I really revere and I didn’t feel I was capable of approaching until now, with having something to say and putting my own spin on it and having to convincingly play this style,” she said.
Despite her initial doubts, the results paid off in the end. From the sassy, strutting tone of “Pay Your Way In Pain” to the somber tunes of “Melting in the Sun” to the cool defiant “My Baby Wants a Baby”, each song comes together to form an interesting cocktail of sounds. The instrumentals are slick and bombastic which pair nicely with Clark’s sassy, rock-esque vocals that can swing from confident and defiant to a crooning, modern Edith Piaf-like tone. Combined with her usual eccentric lyricism, the album manages to blend confidence, melancholy and a hint of modern blues from Jack Antonoff’s contributions to some of the tracks.
Though Clark shared that she wrote almost half the record during the pandemic, she made it a point to not actually write about it. For her, she felt that she “didn’t have much to say.”
“I felt that I don’t have anything to say about it specifically that will be useful since we all kind of had our own bouts with that kind of isolation,” she said.
She also shared that being someone who would normally choose isolation “even if the world was open,” she felt that she still got “the same amount of work done.” The only difference was that there was no “accidental inspiration” to be seen.
“You had to seek inspiration out,” she remarked about the time she spent writing the album, “[It’s] like reading a book or watching a film. Cause there’s not a whole lot of that kind of life that just happens when you’re in the city walking around and you see something unbelievable happen that sparks a train of thought. So I think that was the main difference.”
St. Vincent’s Daddy’s Home is now available on all major streaming platforms.
