Annie Clark, the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist known as St. Vincent, has an apartment in the East Village. She’s rented it since 2009. But last winter and spring, while she was in town recording a new album, she didn’t stay there. If she wanted something, she sent someone to get it. “I need to not have to worry about the plumbing and the vermin,” she said. “Also, the trinkets and indicators of my actual life.” She was immersed instead in the filtration of that actual life into song. She was in a hermetic phase: celibate, solitary, sober. “My monastic fantastic,” she called it. A stomach bug in March left her unable to stand even the smell of alcohol, and, anyway, there were so many things she wanted to get done that she didn’t have the time to be hungover. She abstained from listening to music, except her own, in order to keep her ears clear.
She was staying at the Marlton Hotel, in Greenwich Village, a block away from Electric Lady Studios, one of the places where she was making the record. Most days, she got up at sunrise, took a Pilates class, and then headed to Electric Lady, to work past sundown. She had dinner in the studio, or else alone at a nearby restaurant, or in her room. A book or an episode of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and then early to bed. Not exactly “Hammer of the Gods.”
It had been more than three years since the release of her last album, which she’d named “St. Vincent,” as though it were her first under that name, rather than her fourth—or fifth, if you include one she made with David Byrne, in 2012. All these were well regarded, and with each her reputation and following grew. The music was singular, dense, modern, yet catchy and at times soulful, in an odd kind of way.
Still, the self-titled album was widely considered to be a breakthrough, a consummation of sensibility and talent, a fulfillment of the St. Vincent conceit—this somewhat severe performer who was both her and not her. The act was a blend of rock-goddess bloodletting and arch performance art, self-expression and concealment. (She says that she got the name from a reference, in a Nick Cave song, to the Greenwich Village hospital where Dylan Thomas died.) The ensuing tour was called “Digital Witness,” named for a creepy/peppy song on the album about our culture of surveillance and oversharing. Her life was a whirlwind. There was a Grammy, some best-album acclaim and time on the charts, and a binge of attention from the music and fashion press, and, eventually, from the gossip industrial complex, too, when she began a relationship with the British actress and supermodel Cara Delevingne. The Daily Mail, struggling to take the measure of this American shape-shifting indie rocker, called Clark “the female Bowie.” (The paper’s stringers doorstepped Clark’s family.) When that romance came to an end, after more than a year, she began to be photographed with Kristen Stewart, another object of fan and media obsession, and so the St. Vincent project took on a new dimension: clickbait, gossip fodder. This bifurcation, as Clark called the split between her public life as an artist and the new one as a tabloid cartoon, was disorienting to her, and even sad. But there was a way to put it all to work: write more songs. Clark, quoting her friend and collaborator Annie-B Parson, the choreographer, told me one day, “The best performers are those who have a secret.”
For the new album—it comes out this fall, although Clark has not yet publicly revealed its name—she hooked up with the producer Jack Antonoff, who, in addition to performing his own music, under the name Bleachers, has co-written and produced records for Taylor Swift and Lorde. This has led people to suppose that Clark is plotting a grab for pop success. In June, she released a single called “New York,” and on the evidence the supposition seems fair. It is—by her standards, anyway—a fairly straight-ahead piano ballad, lamenting lost love, or absence of a kind. “You’re the only motherfucker in the city who can handle me,” she sings. Fans immediately began speculating that it was about Delevingne, or, if you thought about it differently, David Bowie, who died last year. “It’s a composite,” Clark told me, though of whom she wouldn’t say. She objects to the idea that songs should automatically be interpreted as diaristic, especially when the songwriter is a woman. “That’s just a sexist thing,” she said. “ ‘Women do emotions but are incapable of rational thought.’ ”
A few weeks before the release she told me, “It’s rare that you get to say ‘This song could be someone’s favorite.’ But this might be the one. Twenty years of writing songs, and I’ve never had that feeling.” It was May, at Electric Lady. She was in the studio with Antonoff. “We’re doing the flavor-crystally bits,” Clark said. This essentially meant adding or removing pieces of sound to or from the sonic stew they’d spent months concocting. “There’s a lot of information on this album,” she said.
Clark, who is thirty-four, was sitting cross-legged on a couch. She had on studded leather loafers, a suit jacket, and black leggings with bones printed on them, in the manner of a Halloween skeleton costume. Her hair was black and cut in a bob. (In the past, she has dyed it blond, lavender, or gray, and has been in and out of curls, its natural state.) She wasn’t wearing much makeup. When she performs, she puts on the war paint, and usually goes in for fanciful costumes and serious heels. For the “Digital Witness” tour, she wore a tight, perforated fake-leather jumpsuit with a plunging neckline, and smeared lipstick. Last year, she did a show while attired in a purple foam toilet. Parson, who is responsible for the rigid postmodern dance moves that Clark has embraced in recent years, referred to her aspect as “wintry,” which doesn’t quite encompass her tendency to throw herself around the stage or dive off it to surf the crowd.
Now she seemed slight, fine-boned, almost translucent—it was hard to imagine her surviving a sea of forearms, iPhones, and gropey hands. She has a sharp jawline, a few freckles, and great big green eyes, which can project a range of seasons. She thinks before she speaks, asks a lot of questions, and has a burly laugh.
On a coffee table in front of her were a Chanel purse and containers of goji berries, trail mix, and raw-almond macaroons. She stood occasionally, to play slashing, tinny lines on an unamplified electric guitar of her own design—a red Ernie Ball Music Man, from her signature line, that retails for upward of fifteen hundred dollars—which, on playback, sounded thick and throbby.
She shreds on electric guitar, but not in a wanky way. It often doesn’t sound like a guitar at all. Her widely cited forebears are Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew, of King Crimson. “I don’t love it when the guitar sounds like a guitar,” she said. “The problem is, people want to recognize that it’s a guitar. I have facility, and so I feel like I should use it more. I don’t have any other ‘should’ in my music.” (It can be funny, if dispiriting, to read, in the comments sections of her performances on YouTube, the arguments that guitar nerds get into about her chops.)
When she listens to a playback, she often buries her head in her arms, as though she can hardly bear to hear herself, but, really, it’s just her way of listening hard. Once, during a mixing session, while she was at the board and I was behind her on a couch, surreptitiously reading a text message, she picked up her head, turned around, and said, “Did I lose you there, Nick? I can feel when attention is wandering.” Her cheery use of the name of the person she is addressing can seem to contain a faint note of mockery. There’d be times, in the following months, when I’d walk away from a conversation with Clark feeling like a character in a kung-fu movie who emerges from a sword skirmish apparently unscathed yet a moment later starts gushing blood or dropping limbs.
Part of this is a function of Clark’s solicitousness, her courteous manner. “She’s created a vernacular of kindness in her public life,” her close friend the writer and indie musician Carrie Brownstein told me. “But the niceness comes through a glass case.” Clark has observed, of the music industry in this era, that good manners are good business.
Clark and Antonoff had met casually around New York but hardly knew each other until they somehow wound up having what he described as an emotionally intense dinner together at the Sunset Tower in Los Angeles. “She was very open about the things in her life,” Antonoff said. “That’s what I was interested in. Continuing to reveal more and more. I said, ‘Let’s go for the lyrics that people will tattoo on their arms.’ ”
Clark has eight siblings, some half, some step. She’s the youngest of her mother’s three girls. Clark’s parents divorced when she was three. This was in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her father, from a Catholic family with eleven kids, was a stockbroker and a prodigious reader who could recite passages from “Ulysses”; for a while, he had the girls convinced that he was a Joycean scholar. When Clark was ten, he gave her “Lucky Jim” for Christmas. At thirteen, she got “Vile Bodies.” She acquired a knack for punching up: in junior high, she toted around the Bertrand Russell pamphlet “Why I Am Not a Christian.”
By then, Clark’s mother, a social worker, had remarried and moved to the suburbs of Dallas. Clark was reared mostly by her mother and stepfather, and considers herself a Texan. Her father remarried and had four kids, with whom Clark is close. In 2010, he was convicted of defrauding investors in a penny-stock scheme, and was sentenced to twelve years in prison. She has never publicly talked about this, although she told me, “I wrote a whole album about it,” by which she meant “Strange Mercy” (2011), her third. When I asked her if she felt any shame about his crimes, she said, “Shame? Not at all. I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not my shame.”
As a child, Clark was shy, quiet, studious. She played soccer. (There’s a charming video from a few years ago of her demonstrating the mechanics of the rainbow kick, while keeping her hands in the pockets of her overcoat.) Her nickname was M.I.A., because she was so often holed up in her bedroom, listening to music. She was a classic-rock kid—Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Jethro Tull—but the real gateway was Nirvana. “Nevermind” hit when she was nine, and she was precocious enough to notice. Like a lot of kids, she found a mentor behind the counter of the local record store, who turned her on to stuff like Stereolab, PJ Harvey, and Nick Cave. Also like a lot of kids, she started playing guitar when she was twelve. Her first live performance was at age fifteen, at a club in Dallas’s Deep Ellum neighborhood—she sat in with her guitar teacher on “The Wind Cries Mary.” She played bass in a heavy-metal band and guitar in a hardcore outfit called the Skull Fuckers: riot grrrl, queercore, Big Black.
Clark’s uncle—her mother’s brother—is Tuck Andress, a jazz-guitar virtuoso who, since 1978, has performed with his wife, the singer Patti Cathcart, as the duo Tuck & Patti. When Clark was a teen-ager, she spent summers as their roadie on tours of Asia and the United States. After graduating from high school, she worked as their tour manager in Europe. It was a lean outfit, so she handled pretty much everything, from settling with the clubs to fetching towels and water—an aspiring rock star’s mail room. The greatest lesson, though, may have been witnessing the power that music could have over strangers. “I’d watch Tuck & Patti bring people to tears,” she said.
“We knew she was serious about this music thing,” Cathcart told me.
“You couldn’t keep her from it,” Andress said. “But, until you hit the road, you have no idea. Of course, now she travels in a dramatically more luxurious way than we do.”
Clark went to Berklee College of Music, in Boston, but dropped out after two and a half years, itchy to write and record her own music rather than train to be a crack session hire, which is how she saw the program there. The best thing she got from it, she says, is a love of Stravinsky. She still can’t read music. She moved to New York, but after three months ran out of money and retreated to Texas, where a friend who played theremin with the Polyphonic Spree, a big choral-rock band out of Dallas, encouraged her to audition. She toured with them as a singer and a guitar player for a while.
Later, she hired on with Sufjan Stevens, the orchestral-folk artist. He first saw her at the Bowery Ballroom, where she was performing solo as the warmup act for a band she also played in, the Castanets. “She was up there with a guitar, standing on a piece of plywood for a kick drum, two microphones, one of them distorted, and two amps,” Stevens told me. “Obviously, she had talent.” Off she went with another giant band. “At that time, there were a dozen musicians touring in my band, and there was always a moment in the set where people could ‘take a solo,’ ” Stevens went on. “All the men usually just played a lot of notes really fast. But, when Annie’s turn came, she refused to do the obvious white-male masturbatory thing on the guitar. Instead, she played her effects pedals. She made such weird sounds. It was like the Loch Ness monster giving birth inside a silo.”
At the time, Clark had her first album, “Marry Me,” in the can, and sometimes she performed solo before her sets with Stevens. “I didn’t have that performance character she has,” he said. “I kind of wish I had. It’s both personal and protective. To get attention as a woman, in a heteronormative context where sex appeal sells, and to sell yourself instead by emphasizing your skill, ingenuity, and work ethic is an incredible feat.”
The first song on “Marry Me,” “Now, Now,” had her singing, “I’m not any, any, any, any, any, any, any, anything,” which, intentionally or not, sounds like “I’m not Annie, Annie. . . .” You might say that it was the opening salvo in St. Vincent’s still unfolding act of concealment and disclosure.
“This scaffolding that she has been so deliberate in constructing has allowed her to take more risks,” Brownstein said. “She presents this narrow strand of visibility. She can mess around with the whole thing of her being called doe-eyed or a gamine. There’s a classic kind of professionalism in the act, sort of like the old country stars—Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash. They let you know when you have access to their world. It’s a contrivance.”
The new album, by Clark’s own reckoning, is the gloomiest one she’s made: “It’s all about sex and drugs and sadness.” It ends with a song about suicide, which she sings in a husky voice that is downright frightening. (“Like any red-blooded American, I’ve considered suicide,” she told Marc Maron, on his “WTF” podcast.) She says that she wrote it on a tour bus en route from Lithuania to Latvia. Sure, sometimes the Baltics can bring you down, but, beyond that, there’s clearly some serious heartbreak and darkness underlying this new project.
Around the release of the “St. Vincent” album, Clark had been on tour more or less perpetually for ten years. “I was running hard. There were family things, illness,” she said. “I’m a little like a greyhound. Get me running in a direction, and I’ll run myself into the ground.” Among other things, her mother had a health crisis, which Clark doesn’t like to talk about.
“I was hurling myself into crowds, climbing the rafters,” she said. “I felt like, if I’m not bruised and bloody when I come offstage, I haven’t done it right.”
There’s a song on the new album called “Pills.” “Pills to grow, pills to shrink, pills, pills, pills and a good stiff drink / pills to fuck, pills to eat, pills, pills, pills down the kitchen sink.” (As it happens, those lines are sung by Delevingne, who will be credited, for the benefit of the British gossip press, as an underground sensation named Kid Monkey.) “I was trying to hold on,” Clark recalled. “I didn’t have coping mechanisms for tremendous anxiety and depression. I was trying to get through pharmaceutically.”
Clark may resent the assumption that everything she writes about is personal, that the protagonist is always her. “You couldn’t fact-check it,” she said. To questions about sexuality, she insists on fluidity. “I’m queer,” she said. But “the goal is to be free of heteronormativity. I’m queer, but queer more as an outlook.”
Yet there is just one narrator on this album. “The emotional tones are all true,” she said. “The songs are the most coherent expression of them. Songs are like prophecies. They can be stronger than you are.”
One day, during a mixing session at Electric Lady, Clark told me that her favorite lyric on the album was “Teen-age Christian virgins holding out their tongues / Paranoid secretions falling on basement rugs.” Later, she texted me to say that her favorite was actually “ ‘Remember one Christmas I gave you Jim Carroll / intended it as a cautionary tale / you said you saw yourself inside there / dog-eared it like a how-to manual.’ Cause Christmas—carol—Emanuel.” That’s from a song about a hard-luck old friend or lover named Johnny, who hits the singer up for money or support. “You saw me on movies and TV,” she sings. “Annie, how could you do this to me?” I asked her one day who Johnny was.
“Johnny’s just Johnny,” she said. “Doesn’t everyone know a Johnny?”
As Clark neared the end of recording, she turned some attention to the next phases—packaging, publicity, performance. She has observed that, when she makes the rounds to local media outlets or on cattle-call press junkets, she is repeatedly asked the same questions, many of them dumb ones. “You become a factory worker,” she said. “When you have to say something over and over, there’s a festering self-loathing. No better way to feel like a fraud.”
She’d made what she was calling an interview kit, a highly stylized short film, which consists of her answering typical questions. She sits in a chair with her legs crossed, in a short pink skirt and a semitransparent latex top before a Day-Glo green backdrop, with a camera and a sound crew of three female models in heels, dog collars, dominatrix hoods, and assless/chestless minidresses. A screen reads, “Insert light banter,” and then Clark reappears, saying, with a strained smile, “It’s good to see you again. Of course I remember you. Yah, good to see you. How’s—how’s your kid?”
There follows a series of questions and answers, with the former presented as text onscreen—generic placeholders:
Q. Insert question about the inspiration for this record.
A. I saw a woman alone in her car singing along to “Great Balls of Fire,” and I wanted to make a record that would prevent that from ever happening again.
Q. Insert question about how much of her work is autobiographical.
A. All of my work is autobiographical, both the factual elements of my life and the fictional ones.
Q. Insert question about being a woman in music.
A. What’s it like being a woman in music? . . . Very good question.
The camera cuts to her interlaced fingers. She wears paste-on fingernails, each with a letter. They spell out “F-U-C-K-O-F-F.”
There are more—What’s it like to play a show in heels? What are you reading? What album would you want on a desert island?—and her answers are mostly but not always sardonic. They were written by Brownstein. Clark shot another film, a kind of surreal press conference, with a similar deadpan gestalt and Day-Glo color scheme and trio of kinky models. In this version, in reply to the woman-in-music question, she performs a “Basic Instinct” uncrossing of her legs, as the camera zooms in on her crotch, accompanied by the echo of a drop of water in a cave.
These videos don’t quite serve the utilitarian function that Clark had put forth—that of saving her time and energy by furnishing her interrogators with workable answers—but they do convey a sensibility that suits the brand: cheeky, sexy, a little Dada. (They’re more on message, perhaps, than her recently announced role as a star of the new ad campaign for Tiffany.) She’d prefer to embody certain ideas than to have to verbalize them, when the context comprises dubious, inherited, unexamined assumptions about gender, sexuality, songwriting, and celebrity. She prefers gestures to words. She sent me a photo of herself from a video shoot and wrote, “Me performing gender.”
Meanwhile, she was having a costume made for her solo performance: a “skin suit” that would give her the appearance of being naked onstage. One morning, I met her in downtown Los Angeles, at the L.A. Theatre, an old movie palace. She arrived alone in a black BMW M-series coupe. The costume’s designer, Desmond Evan Smith, met her outside, to take advantage of the sun. He had swatches of latex, to compare with her skin. One was too pink, another too yellow.
“This is me with a slight tan,” Clark said. “I’m pretty pale.” She had on cutoff jean shorts, a Western-style shirt knotted above her navel, and the studded loafers. Smith led her to a gilded hallway on the second floor to size her up with a tape measure.
“What do you need me to do?” Clark asked.
“I just need you to stand there and look pretty,” Smith said.
“Done and done.”
He read out her neck, waist, and bust numbers.
“Hear that?” Clark said. “Perfect babe measurements.”
He peeled down her shorts to measure her hips. “Cheetahkini,” she said. “Is that a portmanteau?”
“Spread for me,” Smith said. “Your legs.”
“Comedy gold, Nick,” she said.
Later, when she’d started calling me Uncle Nick or Nicky boy, I’d find myself wondering if this skin-suit episode hadn’t been an elaborate setup, a provocation or even a trap laid by someone known to be in command of her presentation in the world. Or maybe it was just show biz, the same old meat market now refracted through self-aware layers of intention and irony.
“Should we get someone to volunteer to be my body?” Clark asked. “To add a little pizzazz? I could choose my own adventure here. I could get a custom crotch.” She began referring to this as her “perfect pussy.” “I’ll scroll through Pornhub and find one.”
After the skin-suit sizing, Clark drove across town, to a coffee shop off Melrose called Croft Alley, to have lunch with her creative director, Willo Perron. Perron, who is from Montreal, does visual and brand work for a variety of pop stars—Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Rihanna. He helps them conceptualize music videos, album covers, and stage shows.
Perron, who is forty-three, wore white jeans and a light-gray T-shirt and black-and-white leopard-print skater shoes from Yves Saint Laurent. (“They may be a bit too rad dad,” he said.) He had a droll, weary air; his expertise was assured but lightly worn. He drives a Tesla. His girlfriend was the waitress at Croft Alley.
He wanted to discuss the album cover. There’d been a shoot in Los Angeles, on the same set they used to film the satirical interview kit. “Did you look at the photos?” he asked Clark. “Can we just do it? It’s good. It’s bold, too. It’s the one that stood out.” He was talking about a photograph I’d first seen on the home screen of Clark’s cell phone: an image of her research assistant, a photographer and model named Carlotta Kohl, with her head stuck through a pinkish-red scrim. Really, it was a picture of Kohl’s legs and rear end, in hot-pink tights and a leopard thong bodysuit. “This is not my ass,” Clark had said. “This is my friend Carlotta’s ass. Isn’t it a nice ass?”
Perron explained to me, “It all started, well— There hasn’t been a female lead who’s been able to be both absurdist and sexual. Sultriness but in a New Wave character. The energy of ‘Pee-wee’s Playhouse,’ ‘Beetlejuice,’ the Cramps, the B-52s, with some chips of Blondie. Think of Poison Ivy, from the Cramps: absurd but hot.”
“Manically happy to the point of being scary,” Clark said.
“We built these Day-Glo canvases and had people sticking limbs and heads through the canvases. Then we found that the most entertaining thing was the back of the canvas: Carlotta ostriched into the wall, just her ass.”
“Can we do it?” Clark said.
“It says everything that we want to say,” Perron said.
“But will people assume that it’s my ass? I’m doing all these body-double things.” She went on, “I was thinking a photo of my face that encapsulates the entire record—but maybe that’s a bit of a fool’s errand.” She mentioned an image from the shoot of herself with some stylists around her.
“It’s too ‘1989,’ ” Perron said.
“Too on the nose?” Clark said.
“It’s a single cover, not an album cover.”
Clark and Perron hooked up four years ago, when she was working on the “St. Vincent” album. “That thing was near-future cult leader,” he said. “We were talking about media and paranoia and blah, blah. Annie referenced ‘Black Mirror.’ It had only been on the BBC. And the films of Jodorowsky. We were working with a 1970 psychedelic aesthetic, plus postmodernist Italian, but in Memphis style.” The cover showed Clark sitting on a pink throne, with her gray hair in a kind of modified Bride of Frankenstein.
“One of the early conversations we had was about how indie rock always does the unintentional thing, so that it doesn’t have an opportunity to fail,” Perron said. By this, he meant, say, a band in T-shirts, looking tough, standing in the back of a warehouse—authenticity as a euphemism for the absence of an idea. “But we wanted pop-level intention.”
“The best ideas are the ones that might turn out to be terrible ideas,” Clark said.
They got into Perron’s Tesla and headed to his office, on the second floor of a house on a residential street nearby. A few assistants worked quietly at laptops. There was a rack of file boxes, with the names of clients: Drake, the xx, Bruno Mars, Coldplay, Marilyn Manson, Lady Gaga.
They watched a rough cut of the interview-kit press conference. “There are moments where you seem really pretentious,” Perron said. “But then, the brand should be ‘absurdist.’ ”
Clark said, “Yes, there are moments where people will be, like, ‘Is she just a pretentious dickhead?’ ”
They discussed possible music-video directors and brought examples of their work up onscreen. (One was a duo called We Are from L.A., who are from France.) Then they talked about the solo show, with the skin suit.
“Remember when I said the only ideas worth doing might be terrible ideas?” Clark said. “This might be one. Me solo with the guitar, and other characters who are shambolically me. It’s high-tech Tracy & the Plastics. I want Carrie to write the dialogue.”
“There’s dialogue?” Perron said, wearily.
“Yes, I’m putting aside postmodern choreography for this round. But I like for there to be some physical obstacle to overcome, to help me focus. It’s about manufacturing your strength. You’re wondering why I came to you. It’s because you worked with David Blaine.” Perron said nothing. “It should feel bananas, not pretentious,” Clark went on.
Then Perron said, “Do we want to make a decision on this cover art?”
“Let me look again,” Clark said. “Option one: Carlotta’s ass. Two, one of my selects. A head shot.”
“That gives me the last two or three records,” Perron said. “I want this one to be more aggressive. Let’s move away from that thing.”
“You mean that kooky thing?”
“That sedated thing.”
Clark said, “Let’s do Carlotta’s ass.”
“The label will give us some pushback,” Perron said. “But, honestly, I think it’s great.”
After a few moments, Clark said cheerily, “Fun fact: Carlotta has scoliosis.”
“It’s been a generative time, creatively, and I would like for it to set the stage for a broader vision,” Clark told me one day, with uncharacteristic career-oriented self-seriousness. Talk like this, out of rock-and-roll people, usually means projects, sidelines, interdisciplinary schemes. For example, Clark had an idea to take old Mussolini speeches and make Mad Libs out of them. She’d have her nieces and nephews fill in the missing words and phrases; then, in an art gallery in Italy, Isabella Rossellini would sit and recite the Mad Libs (the script delivered to her by Clark via an earpiece, to add a layer of awkwardness) to a soundtrack of chopped-up, sort-of-recognizable Verdi and a monitor playing clips of Mussolini himself.
Or motion pictures. Last year, Clark co-wrote and directed a short film called “The Birthday Party,” for “XX,” an anthology of horror films directed by women. In it, a suburban mother hides her dead husband’s body inside a large panda suit at her young daughter’s birthday, and it keels over into the cake, providing the film’s subtitle: “The Memory Lucy Suppressed from Her Seventh Birthday That Wasn’t Really Her Mom’s Fault (Even Though Her Therapist Says It’s Probably Why She Fears Intimacy).” At one point, Clark had a development deal to write and direct another film, called “Young Lover,” which is also the name of a song on the new album. A writer in her twenties has a sadomasochistic affair with an older married woman—“ ‘Swimming Pool’ meets ‘Bitter Moon’ meets ‘Blue Velvet’ ” is how Clark pitched it. Recently, Lionsgate, mining properties out of copyright, approached Clark with the idea of directing a film based on “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” with a female protagonist. The writer is David Birke, who wrote the screenplay for “Elle,” with Isabelle Huppert, which had become an obsession of Clark’s. (In the film, Huppert’s character’s father is in prison.) Birke, it turned out, had taken his daughter to see a show during the “Marry Me” tour, ten years ago. So, here was mutual admiration, a chance to play together in the sandbox of success.
The “Dorian Gray” treatment called for six historical settings. “It would be an expensive film to make,” Clark said. She reckoned twenty-five million dollars. “The likelihood of making this film is, like, two per cent. But I don’t care, because it’s fun. Worst-case scenario is I get seen as a hardworking person with ideas in a medium I’m interested in. I sort of subscribe to the idea of the busier you are, the busier you are.”
The day after her session with Perron, we drove up to Laurel Canyon, to Compound Fracture, which is what she calls the house that serves as her studio and working space. Technically, it is not a residence. There is a live room in the den (good for recording drums), a studio in the garage, and, just inside the front door, a white grand piano, with a book on the music rack of the complete Led Zeppelin (tablature for intermediate guitar), and, next to it, some lyrics scribbled on stationery from the Freehand hotel in Chicago: “Doing battle in the shadows / Baby you ain’t rambo (rimbaud).” She keeps a neat, sparse house. She’s a born de-clutterer. The art work is eclectic: a Russ Meyer nude, paintings made by people in extreme mental distress, and a photo mural of the high sage desert of West Texas. There’s a downstairs sitting room—“If musicians want to take a break,” Clark emphasized—with a stocked bar, William Scott busts of Janet Jackson and CeCe Winans, and some show-and-tellable mementos. She took one down: “I was on an ill-fated surfing trip to Barbados, in my 90 S.P.F., and I looked down and there was this cock and balls made of coral.” This had survived the purges. So had a brass heart sent by the surviving members of Nirvana. In 2014, when the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Clark played Kurt Cobain’s part in a live performance of “Lithium.” There was a plaque in recognition of her inclusion, in 2014, on Vanity Fair’s international best-dressed list. “I’ve been wearing athleisure ever since,” she said.
For a while, her friend Jenny Lewis, the singer-songwriter, had slept on the couch down here. “She’s like a tree,” Clark said. “I would take shade in her. She made me eat food, because I forgot.”
Lewis told me, “I would go upstairs, make a quesadilla, cut it in half, and leave a half there. Maybe the little mouse would come. I’d come up later, see the half gone, and think, My work is done here.”
“As an adult, I haven’t cohabitated with another human,” Clark said. “Jenny and I have been on tour so long, we know the ways to not annoy people.”
When they first got to be friends, years ago, “we Freaky Fridayed,” Lewis said. Clark, eager to get away from New York, moved to Los Angeles, and Lewis, escaping some personal rubble in California, moved into Clark’s East Village apartment.
“We shared so much,” Lewis said. “The sacrifices you make for your music, not having a family. Some things unique to being a woman on the road, silly stuff like removing your makeup in filthy sinks around the world. Just being a woman out there trying to keep it together. Also, being a woman in charge, and the nuances of that.”
They also both had fathers who had been incarcerated. Lewis’s had been in prison for two years—“Everyone in my family goes to jail or prison,” she said—and then was diagnosed with colon cancer and died soon after.
Clark wanted to go for a hike in the midday heat. Every day, she tries to put herself in what she calls a stress position—some kind of physical difficulty, to force herself to persevere. We made the short drive from her house to a ridgeline with a view in the direction of Burbank, and began descending a trail through scrub and poison oak. She had on some flats that she called tennis shoes. The dryness made the steeper pitches slick, and she approached them with great care. At one point, a hum of bees caused her to shriek and run. I was reminded of her song “Rattlesnake,” which is about an encounter with a rattler while she was hiking naked in the Texas desert. “I’m afraid of everything,” she said. “I’m almost inured to it. Same with shame. I figured out years ago that, if everything is absurd, then there is nothing to be afraid or ashamed of.”
Despite her stress-position talk, Clark is a creature of habit, a curator of routine. Brownstein recalled insisting that they go on a different hike from this one, a couple of miles away. “She asked that I never drag her anywhere unfamiliar again,” Brownstein told me.
An hour later, we were back at the house. A mixing engineer named Catherine Marks arrived, to listen to some of the mixes on the new album. Clark wanted a fresh set of ears. (The principal mixer, back at Electric Lady, was Tom Elmhirst, an eminence who has worked with Adele, Lorde, Bowie, and Beck.) Marks, a tall Australian, was wearing a tank top that read “La La La.” Clark had showered and changed into a Pink Floyd “The Wall” T-shirt.
They talked about the low end on one of the songs. “I want to give it more balls,” Marks said, which had a good ring to it, in the Aussie accent. “Tom is a genius, obviously.”
“Best idea wins,” Clark said. They talked for a bit about how unprepared each of them had been for how hot Elmhirst is. They went out to the garage studio, which was full of wonderful toys—racks of guitars, various mikes, and an array of vintage synthesizers. Check it out, an E-mu Emulator II.
Marks sat down at the console. “Smells nice in here. It doesn’t smell like dudes.”
“It’s this Japanese incense.”
A Pro Tools session in the dying light of a Laurel Canyon afternoon. Marks got to work checking out the mixes. It was easy to imagine Clark in here alone for hours, days, weeks, thickening and pruning the sound as it scrolled by onscreen. Outside, you could hear a neighbor playing drums and the occasional honk of a lost Uber. Inside, Marks was listening to a track that Clark wanted to reimagine. “The vocoder’s not working for me,” Clark said. “I like the guitar better. If you need to sleaze it up, add Gary Glitter tuning. Just add glam guitar.”
“I can’t turn off what turns me on,” Clark’s voice was singing, while Clark herself stood behind Marks, checking her phone.
“Oh, my God,” she said, eyes suddenly wide. “This is so stupid. Oh, my God.” She typed a response, put her phone down on a preamp, and began pacing in anticipation of a reply. “It’s so convoluted.” She scooped up the phone and read a new text. Typing a reply, she was shaking her head. “What?” Marks asked.
“It’s a cuckold situation,” Clark said. “I can’t talk about it.” This was more than just hot goss. It was the most excited I’d ever seen her. Another exchange of texts, more pacing, head-shaking, the burly laugh. “It’s the first time I’ve felt glee all day.”
Last month, Clark went into a studio, in midtown Manhattan, with her friend the producer, composer, and pianist Thomas Bartlett, to record an alternative version of the new album: just her voice and his piano, a chance to hear, and to preserve, the songs stripped down to their bones. She had signed off on the final masters of the record the day before they started. “I took a whole night off,” she said. She was wearing a leopard-print bodysuit. “Now I’m done with my emotional anorexia, my monastic fantastic. It’s so good to just play music.”
It went like this: An engineer, Patrick Dillett, played a track from the record, then Bartlett spent a few minutes learning it and vamping on an electric piano, and then they went into the recording studio and laid down a few takes, him on a grand piano and her cross-legged on a couch, singing into a mike. After the first take, Dillett said, “It sounds pretty. Is it supposed to?”
“Will I be ashamed of myself?” she asked him.
“I hope so. Isn’t that the point?”
They recorded in sequence and got through several songs a day.
Later that week, she and Bartlett invited a dozen or so friends to hear her perform the album. Among them were David Byrne, Sufjan Stevens, and the singer Joan As Police Woman, who was celebrating her birthday at the studio afterward. They sat in folding chairs. Clark was on the couch, made up and dressed fashionably in a long jacket and pants.
“Now I can feel the feelings,” she said. She made a show of unbuttoning her pants in order to sing.
“The acceptance of beautiful melody is sometimes difficult for a downtown New York musician,” Byrne had told me earlier in the day. But here was Clark, without all the sonic tricks—the jagged guitar and the scavenged beats—accepting her melodies, feeling the feelings. She told me later, “I didn’t realize the depth of the sorrow on the album until I performed it that night.” The next day, she was shelled and had to cancel appointments. “It turns out that that was crucial to my being done with the experience of making it. Now I need to do what I need to do as a performer: I need to be able to disassociate.”
The final song on the album, the one about suicide, concludes with her repeating “It’s not the end,” in a voice that makes you want to bring her hot soup. On the night of the studio performance, she finished singing and sheepishly accepted the applause of her friends. Then she buttoned up her pants and said, “Party time, everyone.” ♦
