Did you are available after I was dressed like a sperm?”

Despite her wry tone, Annie Clark — the artist higher referred to as St. Vincent — isn’t joking. Not fairly an hour earlier, Clark was posing for her Billboard photograph shoot in a hooded, ruffled cream mini-dress in entrance of a billowing blush-pink backdrop meant to evoke a special little bit of human anatomy. (Let’s simply say the setup was a non secular descendant of Georgia O’Keeffe’s work.)

As St. Vincent, Clark conjures an enigmatic, opaque aura. But at the moment, she’s in a frank, humorous and freewheeling temper. She jests in regards to the suggestive photos of feminine fashions plastered on the partitions round us (“Boner patrol, look out!”) and swerves simply from matters intellectual (summary Russian painter Kazimir Malevich) to low (an off-and-on gamer, she was briefly obsessive about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild). Clark selected to soundtrack her shoot with David Bowie’s coke-fueled 1976 basic, Station to Station, and as we gush over it, the singer-songwriter provides her beige Prada jacket just a little shake. “I do like to think this trench coat is giving ‘Dancing in the Street,’ ” she says, referencing the outrageously ’80s music video for Bowie and Mick Jagger’s hit cowl. “Minus the cocaine.”

Much like Clark herself, St. Vincent’s Grammy Award-winning output — which has run the gamut from twee indie to ass-­kicking art-rock to conceptual electropop — is an arresting mixture of the mind and the id. Her newest album, All Born Screaming, could be skilled as an atavistic staring contest with existence — or just as a rippin’ alt-rock file.

“It’s about life and death and love,” she explains. “And that’s it.” For the 41-year-old Clark, no less than two of these matters are intrinsically linked to her personal id as a queer artist. “Every record I’ve ever made has been so personal about what’s going on in my life at any given time. I’m queer. I know how to code-switch. The idea of identity as performance has been very clear to me since I was a child.” Even so, Clark shuts down the suggestion that she adopted a masks or performative id for the album: “I’m queer, I’m living in multitudes, but this record in particular is not about persona or deconstruction.”

Code-switching — altering one’s conduct to swimsuit an uncomfortable atmosphere — is nothing new for LGBTQ+ folks. Even within the usually progressive-minded music group, Clark says the world queer musicians presently inhabit is “very different” than when she kicked off her recording profession in 2006 with the three-song EP Paris Is Burning. “Which is one of those things which gives me a lot of hope,” she notes. “I know there are certain things in the world trending in a scary direction, but all in all, I’d rather live right now than any other time in history. We wouldn’t be having this conversation 60 years ago. I would be a nurse, I would be a secretary, or I would be a mother.”

When I counsel that 60 years in the past, I’d have been pushed right into a heterosexual union and having same-sex dalliances on the down-low, she laughs and perks up. “Exactly! You would have a beautiful wife at home and would be getting your d–k sucked at the whatever. And you’d never know if it was a cop [trying to entrap you].”

As she references the hankie code (as early because the ’70s, homosexual males used different-colored bandannas to suggest sexual preferences) and Hal Fischer’s 1977 photograph ebook, Gay Semiotics: A Photographic Study of Visual Coding Among Homosexual Men, it’s clear Clark is aware of her queer historical past. “People the world was hostile to developed these secret languages, secret codes, in order to communicate. I find that fascinating,” she says. “You’re very aware there’s a subterranean, subtext layer to everything that’s going on — and you have your antennae up at all times. That is erotic to me. But I’m glad that [I live in this era].”

As for the draw back to LGBTQ+ tradition going mainstream? “Well, if you’re safe for the TV screen, you also invite an aspect of grift [from the outside world],” she muses. “Which… I raise an eyebrow at.” To emphasize her level, she cocks her left forehead; for a second, she might cross for a hyperlogical Vulcan on Star Trek. “But there have been plenty of queer people in music. Even if the culture was saying no, there were always queer people in the arts. Please. We have built this.”

For a school dropout, Clark has achieved fairly effectively for herself. Born in Tulsa, Okla., she relocated to Texas as a toddler when her mom moved her and two older sisters to Dallas following her dad and mom’ divorce. (Clark now has 4 brothers and 4 sisters from the mixed households.) Her childhood obsession with the guitar, ignited by the 1987 Ritchie Valens biopic La Bamba starring Lou Diamond Phillips, turned severe as she entered her teen years, and a stint as a roadie for her uncle’s jazz-folk duo, Tuck & Patti, gave Clark her first style of the touring enterprise.

Clark attended Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music however left after three years (although her dad and mom didn’t discover out till a number of years later, after they learn it within the press). “Other people have real educations,” she says. “I had philosophy teachers who were like, ‘How is Kierkegaard like Bob Marley?’ ” She shakes her head, nearly tenderly. “It’s not. It’s not and that’s fine.” (When I ask how a music faculty dropout appears to have an infinite fount of cultural, historic and inventive references at her disposal, she laughs and asks, “Is that your way of saying, ‘It’s OK you never went to real college’?”)

After reducing herself free from Berklee, Clark spent 2005 and 2006 on the street with the robe-rocking, symphonic indie outfit Polyphonic Spree, becoming a member of Sufjan Stevens’ touring band for a spell shortly thereafter. Her solo debut album, Marry Me, launched in 2007 on Beggars Banquet, was a chamber-pop cauldron with notes of Stevens and Spree, however had a playful, wry humorousness that indicated it was simply the tip of the St. Vincent iceberg. (For one factor, the album takes its title from a operating joke on Arrested Development — a undeniable fact that at the moment causes Clark to relaxation her head on her fingertips in fake embarrassment earlier than concluding, “It is a great show.”)

On her subsequent launch, Actor, Clark’s music developed a jagged, sardonic chunk that introduced her to the Billboard 200 for the primary time (at No. 90). Her high 20 follow-up, the 2011 art-rock assertion Strange Mercy, was tinged with ache, fury, self-doubt and confusion — and dispelled any lingering misconceptions that she was a holdover from the demure, valuable indie pop of the ’00s. While Clark had all the time appeared like an artist with one thing to say, on Strange Mercy, she appeared like an artist who wanted to say one thing.

“In order to get good, you have to go through a series of humbling and humiliating experiences,” she displays. “On the other hand, you have to have this psychotic belief — an unreasonable belief, truly — that you are going to write songs and make music that is going to matter. And that’s a really crazy thought.” She pauses. “I have that thought — with plenty of self-loathing and self-laceration — but I also have this [feeling], ‘If I don’t do this, I’m going to die.’ ”

Among those that took discover of Clark’s creativity and drive was Talking Heads legend and fellow rock eccentric David Byrne. Their 2012 collaborative album, the funky, brass-heavy Love This Giant, netted Byrne his first high 40 entry exterior Talking Heads on the Billboard 200.

“Annie is so many things all at once,” Byrne tells Billboard. “Beautiful, inventive, inscrutable — in the best way possible. I know her as someone warm and friendly, but as anyone listening to her music can hear, she’s got a dark side that as far as I know just has an outlet in her music. Would that all of us could do that.”

After a prolonged tour with Byrne — “I love playing shows. I’m up there, and truly, something else kicks in,” Clark emphasizes — she solidified her fame as an art-rock auteur on her self-titled fourth album, the primary of three on Loma Vista, in 2014. With a chromatic purple-blue-pink palette and a grey ’do teased to the heavens, Clark delivered probably the most stylistically cohesive St. Vincent album but — and for the primary time on wax, she appeared like she was having a blast. St. Vincent received Clark a Grammy for greatest various music album, kicking off an lively streak of her gathering no less than one Grammy per correct studio launch since. In 2014, Clark additionally spoke publicly about her queerness for the primary time, telling Rolling Stone, “I believe in gender fluidity and sexual fluidity.”

With 2017’s Masseduction, Clark pivoted to electropop and paired it with neon-drenched, latex-heavy visuals, in addition to a few of her most private songs but. Co-produced by Jack Antonoff, the album (her first high 10 entry on the Billboard 200) expanded her inventive circle to incorporate a variety of musicians similar to Sounwave, Kamasi Washington, Jenny Lewis, Mike Elizondo, Pino Palladino and Cara Delevingne (the latter of whom Clark dated for a yr and a half, briefly placing her within the tabloid highlight). Masseduction singles “New York” and “Los Ageless” hit the Adult Alternative Airplay and Hot Rock & Alternative Songs charts, and the title monitor received her the Grammy for greatest rock track. Not that she’s in it for the accolades: “I’m a musician because I’m obsessed with making music,” Clark states. “If I wasn’t, God knows, I don’t think it would be pretty.”

As her profile grew, Clark earned her first GLAAD Media Award nomination for excellent music artist in 2018; that June, she unleashed “Fast Slow Disco,” a dancefloor remix of one in all Masseduction’s tracks, together with a music video the place she cavorted with a throng of leather-clad males making out with each other. “Happy Pride,” she tweeted. “It was sweet of these boys to let me crash their party.”

Fittingly, the tune’s title was impressed by a textual content message trade with Wendy Melvoin, whose romantic relationship with Lisa Coleman in Prince’s backing band The Revolution offered sorely wanted illustration within the ’80s. “Annie’s a real artist. It’s always satisfying to be friends and compatriots with people that you have respect for,” Melvoin says. “She’s extremely talented,” Coleman agrees. “[She’s] a real musician that was so influenced by what we did, and she had a reverence for us. It was easy to return that because she is so good.”

By 2021’s Daddy’s Home, Clark had nothing left to show, which could clarify why the album — partially impressed by her father’s 2019 launch from jail after he served time for a inventory manipulation scheme — was her first the place she seemed backward for inspiration. (Then once more, possibly she meant it actually when she titled her 2017-18 tour Fear the Future.) Steeped in ’70s rock, AM pop and queer camp, the album netted her one other Grammy for greatest various music album and one other GLAAD nomination for excellent music artist. As a victory lap and era-appropriate tie-in, she supplemented her personal headlining trek for the file with a stint opening for Roxy Music’s farewell tour.

Beyond Roxy Music and Byrne, Clark has amassed an enviable Rolodex of rock royalty. She carried out alongside the surviving members of Nirvana at their 2014 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony; produced Sleater-Kinney’s 2019 album, The Center Won’t Hold, and co-starred with the band’s Carrie Brownstein within the trippy 2020 mockumentary The Nowhere Inn; contributed to the 2021 remix album McCartney III Imagined (even getting a cellphone name from the Beatle himself); and feted Eurythmics on the duo’s 2022 Songwriters Hall of Fame induction, performing “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” Having labored with so lots of her personal musical heroes, she has additionally paid that ahead, contributing to tracks by next-gen followers like Willow and Olivia Rodrigo.

“I’ve been a huge St. Vincent fan since I was a teenager. I think she’s such an inspiring artist and a wonderful person. I was so excited to bring her in to work on this song,” Rodrigo tells Billboard of co-writing “Obsessed” with Clark for the deluxe model of GUTS. “She added so many unique textures and sounds that I could’ve never thought of.”

Those creative, meticulous strategies caught out to Willow when Clark guested on “Pain for Fun” from the previous’s 2024 album, empathogen. “St. Vincent’s prodigious attention to detail is something that I have admired since hearing her for the first time at 12 years old,” Willow says. “To have had the opportunity to be in the same room with her, to witness and observe her process, is something that I will always hold close to my heart and something I will always refer back to for inspiration.”

“She’s an inspiration to me, but I can see [she is] to a lot of other singers and songwriters as well,” Byrne says. “And a somewhat underrated guitar goddess.” (Clark even has her personal signature axe, a collaboration with Ernie Ball Music Man, which Jack White performed on Saturday Night Live in 2018 and Rodrigo trotted out on her tour this yr.)

Another a kind of singer-songwriters is, after all, Taylor Swift. Alongside Antonoff and Swift, Clark wrote (and performed guitar on) “Cruel Summer” from 2019’s Lover. After years of fan campaigns and three subsequent studio albums, Swift lastly launched “Cruel Summer” as a single in 2023; it topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 4 weeks and has spent extra time on the chart than any of her different hits, incomes an astounding 1 billion official on-demand U.S. streams, based on Luminate.

“I remain blown away by ‘Cruel Summer’ being the phenomenon that is it,” Clark says. “Not because it isn’t a great song. It’s indicative of the time we’re in, where a song from many albums ago, that wasn’t even a single at the time, the fans go, ‘No, this one — we pick this one.’ And then they march it up the charts. That’s completely a testament to her fan base being so powerful.”

While some critics and followers have described the rock-heavy, emotionally uncooked All Born Screaming as a return to type, the album additionally marks a couple of notable firsts for Clark. Though distributed by Virgin Music Group, it’s the inaugural launch on her personal label, Total Pleasure Records, which she calls “just a little cozy place for me.” She’s enthusiastic about loads of younger artists however shrugs off any label boss ambitions. “I never want to be the person who is like, ‘I’m so sorry, we can’t afford to pay for your video unless you shill for cat laxatives,’ ” she deadpans. “I’m not trying to be The Man to any talent that I love. It just means autonomy.”

Clark insists that “DIY till you die” is her guiding mantra on all fronts, from making music to mounting excursions on a scalable degree. “I more enjoy the creative side, but you have to be across all of it. It’s your career. You can’t just let someone tell you where you are going. And putting all those pieces together is fun for me.”

Perhaps extra considerably, All Born Screaming can also be the primary of her personal albums on which she is credited as sole producer (although she has co-produced greater than half of her discography).

“I don’t think I could have made this record any other way. I don’t think I would have written these songs or explored this stuff without the solitude,” she says. “Around 2019 [I thought], ‘OK, I eventually just want to produce my own work.’ When I was making Daddy’s Home, I started making a plan for my engineer, Cian Riordan, to make my studio proper — to get more into the engineering side, hone my chops and build a playground for myself. But if I’m honest, the seed was planted earlier, because by the time I was 14 or 15 I was recording myself in my bedroom.” (Clark’s studio is in Los Angeles; she splits her time amongst New York, L.A. and Texas.)

A 2023 examine of well-liked songs by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative discovered that simply 3.4% of hits have been produced by girls in 2022, and Clark remains to be one in all only a few feminine producers discovering success within the music enterprise — with loads extra, she notes, deserving consideration. “There are lots of women making their music DIY-style, and that is production,” she says. “My friend Cate Le Bon [who guests on All Born Screaming’s title track] is a great example of someone who produces herself and other people.” (The album additionally options drumming from Dave Grohl, Josh Freese and Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa.)

When it involves methods to extend LGBTQ+ inclusion within the trade, Clark is reluctant to offer any glib or straightforward solutions. “The answer is, ‘Of course,’ but I can’t go, ‘If we only changed this policy.’ ” The Texas-raised Clark doesn’t, nonetheless, maintain again when requested about Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who she says is waging “an absolute war on women and reproductive rights. That dude sucks. He sucks. I hate that dude.” For a quick second, she feels like an exasperated teenager ranting about her highschool principal, however quickly regains her poise. “What I love about Texas is the toughness and the grit. You can’t be too highfalutin. With love, they’ll knock you down a peg.” She appears considerate. “I did run away when I was 18, but at the same time, if you asked me to name parts of my identity, ‘Texan’ would be up there.”

As an artist who has explored each id and know-how deeply, Clark is cautiously intrigued by the musical potential of synthetic intelligence within the fingers of artists. “The tool is as interesting as its holder,” she says, then flashes a mischievous half-smile. “In some ways, I’m more concerned about artists sounding like AI than I am [about] AI sounding like artists.”

Clark is much extra troubled by a extra established know-how within the digital music period. “If you are a big pop artist, streaming is fine. But there is some music that reaches you very deeply but isn’t music that you put on every single day. I’m not going to listen to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme every day. It’s one of the most pivotal records of my life, but I’m not going to stream it over and over,” she says. “Streaming incentivizes songs to be consumable over and over again. Now, certainly there’s great music you want to consume like that — but there’s a lot of music that’s excellent and doesn’t fall into that category. And those artists, because of streaming, are wilting on the vine.” (St. Vincent’s catalog has accrued a decent 394.6 million official ­on-demand U.S. streams.)

Aside from buddies like Le Bon, there are many fashionable artists who preserve Clark jazzed about music’s future. “I love Rosalía,” she says, leaning ahead in her chair. “I saw her show last year. It was just art. It was so thoughtfully done. Post-modern choreography, ­flamenco. Just excellent.” All Born Screaming consists of “Sweetest Fruit,” a tribute to the late trans artist SOPHIE, whom Clark deeply admired (although fan response to its literal lyrics was blended). British rapper Little Simz is one other favourite, and she or he lights up when speaking about Willow. “She’s unbelievable. Her knowledge base and depth of reference is deep and varied. She’s pulling all these things together and making them her own, which is exactly what an artist should do.”

Whether talking about her fellow artists, the music trade or her queer id, Clark is animated and engaged; the one time she appears at a loss is when speaking about how she fills her time that isn’t spent making music.

“I listen to a lot of audiobooks. Which is so boring,” she murmurs. “I work out. So boring.” Does she prepare dinner for herself? “Girl, no. Even playing Zelda, I would make dubious food.” Watch TV? “I will maybe watch something to fall asleep. I rewatched 30 Rock recently. I am obsessed with Girls5eva. It’s all the sensibility of 30 Rock, but with deep musical references. It makes me so happy.” Foster any uncommon hobbies? “I walked into this bar across from Electric Lady [Studios in New York], but it was the wrong place — it was a coffee shop that turns into a knitting hour. I got the f–k out of there.”

After almost 20 years of creating music professionally, Clark doesn’t appear fatigued or disenchanted by a enterprise that usually frustrates uncompromising creatives. If something, she’s discovering it simpler to “trust in the process” with seven albums underneath her beloved trench’s belt. “There’s going to be speed bumps, and there’s going to be days when you don’t want to get out of bed. ‘Ugh, I can’t even face myself.’ And other days where you’re like, ‘Yeah, I am crushing it, wow!’ ”

Calling these polar temper swings “cancers to excise,” Clark says “it’s a miracle” she will get something achieved. “The whole thing is chasing this feeling of being lit up and confused but excited at the same time,” she says. “It’s a bunch of people blowing into the same thing to make a balloon and, eventually, it rises. I don’t know how anything happens. I really don’t. The whole thing is mysterious. But I know if I focus on this little thing that I love, it will be OK.”

This story will seem within the June 22, 2024, challenge of Billboard.