(Credits: Far Out / Alex Da Corte)
Mon 29 September 2025 0:00, UK
Life on the road is hard. While the movies glamourise it and the kids dream about it, the reality is gruelling. It’s a period of complete exhaustion, dazed burnout, separation from the real world and then suddenly, one day, it’s over and you’re back. That was the big St Vincent that always found the hardest.
St Vincent, or Annie Clark, has toured a lot. With seven albums under her belt, each has come along with a hectic schedule of dates. But even before her own records, she was already a session musician touring with other acts, or a member of other bands who kept her out on the road.
She’s lived most of her adult life that was from the moment she left college to now. And it’s not exactly like Clark’s shows are light work. As a guitarist, she shreds. She routinely sits in the top class in lists of history’s finest players, so to go to one of her shows, is to see her burning her instrument up with incredible passion and skill. Even years on from when she wrote some of those riffs, even if she’s been playing them on repeat for ages now, it still never becomes without exertion. She’s not one to half-arse it.
So that’s been her life – make an album and then hit the road, spending months on end living in a strange liminal state of tour buses, service station food, different cities, same people. She’s spent extended periods in that weird mindset of never really knowing where she is or what she’s doing but especially in 2014 and 2015, after the release of St Vincent, the schedule was intense.
“The Self-Titled tour took me around the world, like three times,” she said to Louder Sound. But alongside that, it was a period of personal tumult as she added, “so many life changes happened, and I ended that run pretty much completely out of my mind.”
Suddenly landing back home, she found she had so many feelings to deal with but in order to do that and turn it into art, she’d have to fight for it. “To make MASSEDUCTION, I kind of had to claw my way, just white knuckle this music to save myself,” she said, admitting to the intense struggle that her iconic 2017 record was to make both emotionally and even physically after such intense burn out.
The result of that though is something special. “I did a lot of the recording at my studio I built in LA, I did some things at Jack [Antonoff]’s home studio in New York, and then also at Electric Lady [in New York],” she explained as she decided to try and keep the album as close to home as possible, working in select spaces that felt right to her. All of it lended itself to an album of brutal honesty where she never hides or minces her words.
Take ‘New York’ for example as she sings plainly, “You’re the only motherfucker in the city who can handle me.” The whole album feels like that, with big emotions being thrown out exactly as they are as Clark battled through the emotional backlog caused by touring.
“I don’t remember so much of the making of that record, I just remember holding onto music for dear life, knowing that I needed to hold onto it, because it was going to pull me out of a certain madness,” she said, fully crediting that record for saving her and returning her to the real world in one piece when she was done.
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