St Vincent plays UK shows this week, including SWX in Bristol (May 31) and London’s Royal Albert Hall (June 1).
It follows the Top 5 success for critically acclaimed new album All Born Screaming (Total Pleasure/Virgin Music).
St Vincent (real name Anne Clark) is also known for her artist collaborations, including co-writing Taylor Swift’s 2019 track Cruel Summer (along with Swift and Jack Antonoff). It became a hit thanks to its inclusion in the Eras tour and peaked at No.2 in the UK, where it has 1,676,215 sales to date (Official Charts Company).
Here, in an extract from our Aftershow interview with St Vincent, she shares insights on some key collaborations throughout her career…
Dave Grohl played drums on new album tracks Flea and Broken Man…
“We didn’t talk music before recording, it was, ‘Let’s chat, let’s shoot the shit.’ The first thing Dave does is smoke Parliaments and drink a bunch of coffee and have a good chat. We’d tell stories, have a laugh, and then all of a sudden he’s just ready to go – he does it and he knows exactly what he’s doing. After he did his take, I walked into the live room and said, ‘Fuck yeah, fucking fuck yeah!’I didn’t have words, I was just a complete psychopath because it’s really something to hear Dave Grohl play on a song where you’ve been like, ‘The only person in the world who should play drums on this song is Dave Grohl,’ and then he does it. That’s something, that’s not nothing!”
St Vincent co-wrote the 2019 album track Cruel Summer with Taylor Swift, which has since become a viral smash…
“With the Taylor Swift Cruel Summer moment, that was a testament to the incredible force of her amazing fans. They took a song that was from many records ago, which was not a single at the time, and just said, ‘No, we love this song, this song is a hit,’ and then they marched it up the charts. It was so cool to see and I’d certainly never been a part of anything like that. But also, I haven’t really witnessed that in culture – you could maybe say Running Up That Hill with Kate Bush took fire and new fans were exposed to it but that’s not really the same thing. The Cruel Summer thing was sheer force and lightning in a bottle from her fans who just loved something into existence.”
St Vincent sang Lithium with Nirvana for their Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame induction…
“That’s the thing, Kurt should be alive and he’s not. That performance is one of those occasions where I don’t even know how to think about that. I remember I was in LA playing a show and I got a call from my then-manager – he was a very dry guy – saying, ‘I’ve got a weird one for you!’ which is not how I would necessarily have said that! It was an incredibly humbling, wild and exciting thing. Afterwards I felt really shaken up – there was so much adrenaline, so much, ‘What just happened?!’”
David Byrne recorded the Love This Giant album with St Vincent, which they toured together…
“I’d just come off Strange Mercy, which was a heavy album. By the end of that tour, I was a total husk and the shows had been getting increasingly violent. I would hurl myself into the crowd, I was really cruising for a bruising. I finished that tour and the next day, I started rehearsals for Love This Giant and it’s one of those times where music saved me. I started doing rehearsals with David and met [American choreographer] Annie-B Parson and they were really joyful. I needed that so desperately at the time. I don’t live in regret and ‘What ifs?’ in any way, but that’s the only show that I wish I could go back and do again because it was that much of an epiphany for me. My favourite moment was getting to play This Must Be The Place – I made my guitar sound like a synthesizer and played that part.”
PHOTO: Alex De Corte
