The song St Vincent wrote as a “homage to Steely Dan”
People think they would love to live inside the minds of their favourite artists, but ultimately, the reality would be exhausting for us, mere mortals. After all, genius is taxing, and the reason we enjoy the fruits of their labour is because it’s simply something we find out of our wheelhouse. While many cookie-cutter artists who have been rolled out of a manufacturing facility buck that trend, ultimately, only the most authentic rise to the top. And there is perhaps no finer example of that sort of artist than St Vincent.
A fearless storyteller and instrumental virtuoso, she consistently creates nuanced work that makes her truly indistinguishable from her contemporaries. She’s a single-lane artist whose brilliance is built upon both an innate sense of talent and unflinching dedication to her pursuit, which brings with it countless hours of commitment.
St Vincent, whose real name is Annie Clark, has often heralded Steely Dan as an influence. A band like no other in terms of typifying a studious approach to recording music, establishing a rather unhealthy relationship within the music community for their relentless pursuit of perfection that broke even some of the biggest names in music.
Nevertheless, their influence on the world of music isn’t to be underestimated, and if nothing else, they were partly responsible for the musical education of Annie Clark. With her father being a longtime fan of the experimental duo, her tastes were moulded by the ringing of Steely Dan through the corridors of her childhood home.
But those youthful memories spent with her father seem far away for Clark, who had to endure the painful chapter of his prison sentence. In 2010, Richard Clark was convicted on one count of conspiracy, seven counts of wire fraud, five counts of securities fraud, and one count of money laundering and was subsequently sentenced to 12 years in prison, but was released in 2019, two years ahead of Clark’s album release, Daddy’s Home.
In this follow-up album to 2011’s Strange Mercy, Clark took control of a narrative that had swirled in the media, penning a track that exposed her feelings while subtly nodding to the band that soundtracked her memories with her father. “There’s a song on the record called ‘Daddy’s Home’, and it talks about going to see him and signing autographs,” Clark recalled. “It’s an homage to Steely Dan because that’s music that he introduced me to.”
While many fans would rightly associate Steely Dan with a more upbeat, jazz-infused disposition, the reality behind the song Clark carved with their influence was anything but. An emotional tale of temporary loss was poured into her piece, but the suffering didn’t end there. During the Stange Mercy tour that soon followed the arrest, it was reported that Clark flayed her own skin in a bid to externalise the pain suffered by her father’s incarceration.
But that tour marked closure on an otherwise turbulent chapter for Clark, who spent the decade her star began to rise grappling with a unique and painful personal issue. While she still looks back on it with relative confusion, the point is that it’s a chapter that is looked back on and no longer endured.
Explaining how music brought closure to the episode, Clark concluded, “I wrote another record very much about this subject when he went in, called Strange Mercy, but I didn’t talk about it. I have a massive family who I’m really close with, and we were all kind of shell-shocked trying to get through it all, but at that time, I didn’t know what to say about it because I didn’t really know where I was with it personally. But it’s been ten years, and the tables have turned. I’m ten years older. I’m daddy now.”
