The 40-year-old Tulsa, Oklahoma-born rocker Annie Clark, also known as St. Vincent, is one of the biggest names in music today. She has garnered three Grammy Awards, written music for Taylor Swift, and produced an album for Sleater-Kinney. Indeed, what can’t she do?
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But with all that talent and experience, one might wonder what Clark has to say about the world around her, about life and love, her craft, and more. Below are the 20 best quotes from St. Vincent.
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1. “Life can be challenging and sad… but music is the easy part.”
2. “Generally my day-to-day is pretty much the same. Just busy and working and on tour. And trying to put on the best show possible every night.”
3. “I’ve been recording myself on a computer since I was about 13 or 14. So it’s completely entwined with my creative process. Essentially, it allows you to make music that’s better and smarter than you are, by using your ears to lead the way.”
4. “I remember looking at the sky and thinking that the universe is so big and it’s all chaos. I call it ‘the dark fear.’ At any moment, the dark fear could come in.”
5. “I’m supportive of women, absolutely, and it’s so gratifying to have girls come up and say, ‘I’m really inspired by your guitar playing.’ I mean no disrespect to the sisterhood, but musically I feel more drawn to things like Dirty Projectors, the National, and Grizzly Bear.”
6. “I grew up around a lot of various religions, so it’s a part of my consciousness in a way. Everything from heavy Catholicism to followers of Indian spiritual masters to Unitarian universalists—all in one family. Though the family aspect was stronger than any particular dogma.”
7. “I’ve always wanted to make music like people write plays, so I was inspired by writers as much as musicians.”
8. “Guitar is just something I can do. So much of it now is muscle memory, just instinct.”
9. “I think a lot of people who want to be musicians terrify their parents because they don’t have a living example of it in their families, and I did. So I always knew that it was possible.”
10. “One of my favourite things about country music is that, at least until recently, you could always count on a solid story, a punchline, and a pun. I think it has that in common with hip hop, where they’re not afraid of wordplay and I really appreciate that.”
11. “I only listen to my own music when I’m playing an hour-and-half set each night. I don’t put it on recreationally.”
12. “All you can do is make something that you like and feel proud of and then just hope for the best and try to get out of its way.”
13. “I’ve always been pretty ravenous about pop culture, highbrow and lowbrow.”
14. “I think human beings have a really broad spectrum of traits, and I almost feel implicated when we say, ‘Men are like this, women are like this.’ Nobody was telling me, ‘Don’t get dirty, don’t play in the mud, girls don’t do that.'”
15. “I think in some ways, it can do a listener a disservice to explain a song. I think I’d rather leave a little room for people to put themselves in it.”
16. “I’m unqualified to do anything other than music.”
17. “A song has a life of its own. It’s an autonomous thing, separate from your own experience, almost. And the mere repetition of it means it’s subject to change; it means approaching it differently, expressing different emotional aspects of it. It doesn’t feel like wallowing.”
18. “And if I’m honest about it, I was obsessed with Nirvana and Pearl Jam. This is like ’92, right in the throes of Soundgarden and Pearl Jam and Nirvana. I think I probably wanted to be Kurt Cobain.”
19. “To be honest, because there’s loud music in my ears probably three hours a day, between sound check and the show, I listen to podcasts more than I listen to music on the road.”
20. “I have a great band. Oh, man. I’m so happy about them.”
(Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images for The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame )
