St Vincent on her favourite Nina Simone song: “A ghost on her shoulder”
When we look back on 2020, our minds are often filled with negativity, and rightly so. The pandemic took away our ability to be social; regardless of whether we’re introverted or extroverted, having the option is important. We were left to sit in our homes for days on end, introspective. However, if we search for any positives from this period, we find that musicians had a lot to write about and plenty of time to do so. As a result, the records that came out in 2020 and 2021 were of a remarkably high standard.
One of those albums was St Vincent’s Daddy’s Home. Granted, she wasn’t looking to make an album reflective of the pandemic, but the excellent instrumentation and human approach towards lyrics and performance resonated to the point that people everywhere became obsessed with listening to it.
“I wanted to make sure I didn’t really write about the pandemic,” Annie Clark [St Vincent] said in an interview with Double J. “I have this feeling that, once it’s over, we’re all gonna have like cultural amnesia and never want to speak of it again.” Her go-to world was one drenched in escapism, and as a result, “My refuge was definitely imagining this completely other world.”
While she might have been trying to remove herself from the state the world was in at that moment, Daddy’s Home isn’t an album that comes across as so escapist that it seems fictional. Every song is incredibly human, dynamic, and laced with an emotion that is easy for people to connect to.
Clark admitted that when she was looking for inspiration for the album, she turned towards some of the older albums that she used to listen to when she was younger, which meant records from downtown New York in the ‘70s. “This little period of time… where I felt like people were just like singing from the burned-out building,” she said.
This meant drawing from people such as Stevie Wonder, Sly & the Family Stone, and one of the most emotive singers the world has ever had: Nina Simone. Simone conveyed her feelings within her words so effortlessly that anybody looking to give off any emotion in a track could do well to learn from her. That’s what Clark did, reflecting on one of her favourite Simone tracks, ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’, when discussing how she influenced the album.
“I feel like Nina always has a very haunting quality to her voice, even on the kind of upbeat tunes,” said Clark, “It’s like there’s a ghost on her shoulder. I love this song and I love Nina.”
Simone remains one of the greatest vocalists the world has ever had, and it’s amazing to see her influence still present in modern music.
