The album that made a teenage St. Vincent fall in love with “weird music”
The acceptance, the proliferation, and even the definition of “weird” music have dramatically evolved across the evolution of popular music. Gone are the days when you could stumble on Captain Beefheart‘s Trout Mask Replica in a record store or feel like you were in a secret club because only you and Kurt Cobain knew about The Shaggs. Blame it on the internet all you want, the truth is that more than 70 years of information and knowledge have led to all music getting weird in one way or another.
But when Annie Clark was a kid, there was still some room to manoeuvre. The artist, later known to millions as St. Vincent, grew up around Dallas, Texas, an area that was metropolitan enough to encourage the arts but southern enough to have a stronghold in traditional mindsets. For a young child of divorce looking for a place to belong, music quickly became an important escape for Clark.
Like most teenagers of the 1990s, Clark was brought into the rock world through grunge. When asked by The Guardian to list some of the most essential albums of her childhood, Clark had to split her teenage pick into two different albums. One was a grunge-soaked step forward as a younger kid, and the other was a confirmation of Clark’s alternative bona fides.
“This one has to be divided into two parts. From the age of 10 to 13, the record that went everywhere with me – I guess I should say the tape and Walkman – was Pearl Jam’s Ten, which came out when I was almost 10 myself,” Clark explained. “My stepmother got word there were F-bombs on it, so she tried to take it away, but I found it in her drawer.”
“Then at high school, I got really into this Solex record called Pick Up,” she added. “It was right around the time I started really doing theatre and hanging out with the weirdos, and this record just reaffirmed my place in the world to myself, ‘Oh, I like weird music.'”
But Clark’s acceptance of so-called “weird” music actually came while she was still a small child. Before her teenage years, car road trips with her family exposed Clark to some of her father’s most beloved albums. A mix between classic and progressive rock was what Mr. Clark was into, and it was a particular Steely Dan song that had a lasting effect on turning Annie Clark into St. Vincent.
“I grew up in Texas, and we used to go to Padre Island, eight hours in the car down to the beach,” she claimed. “The resort was built up in the 1960s and ’70s, but my family were going there in the 1980s and 1990s, so it was a little run-down and not very fancy. My dad used to love Steely Dan, the Stones, Jethro Tull and all that. There was always Steely Dan going in my dad’s car, but I remember The Royal Scam in particular because it has ‘Kid Charlemagne’ on it. There’s that weird, deconstructed Larry Carlton guitar solo, which I finally learned in the last couple of years – it’s just a fantastic guitar solo, probably the only one I know.”
Check out ‘Kid Charlemagne’ down below.
