The St Vincent song that took 100 takes
It’s quite nice being afforded the luxury of having the time to rethink and reconsider your work over and over until it is, by your own definition, perfect. When an artist has painstakingly worked on a song in order to get it to sound exactly how they envisaged it, it often shows, and the fruits of their labour can be heard in just how refined and polished it has ended up being. If, like Annie Clark, aka St Vincent, you’re an artist expected to keep improving on previous efforts with each release, you’ve got to take the time to realise every song and have it sound exactly as it should.
There are also those annoying bastards who seem to be able to get everything right on the first take, and even though it’s probably a good idea to keep attempting something just in case the second, third, or seventh attempt ends up being even better, you can’t help but walk away from that first try feeling a little bit smug with yourself. It happens, and when it happens to you, it’s incredible.
That said, when things aren’t quite right, and when you know something needs to be smoothed out just that little extra amount, you might agonise over the finest little details and possibly even do so to an unnecessary extreme. While Clark is an incredibly proficient musician and songwriter who has written some exceptional songs in her career, there’s a real element of precision to her work that makes you wonder just how much blood, sweat and tears have gone into the recordings we hear on her albums.
On her latest release, 2024’s All Born Screaming, there was one particular track that she found excruciating to get right in the studio, and took her over a century of attempts to get the vocal track sounding just as she believed it should.
Speaking to Paper about her seventh studio album, Clark said that ‘Hell Is Near’ is the one song that caused her so much grief that she “wrote and rewrote the lyrics” several times before settling on the iteration heard on the album. While it isn’t full of many of her signature marks of songwriting such as frenzied guitar playing or grand arrangements, the minimalism of the track is what made it so difficult to pull off.
“That was a song that if I didn’t bow before it, it just wouldn’t happen,” the singer admitted. “I sang it 100 times. The chorus is bare … and I have to actually be there to sing it and for it to be real and not throw a bunch of ego or bullshit.” While the final take that is heard on the song is just as exquisite as much of her other work, it’s understandable that on a song where the vocals are front and centre of attention, she wanted to ensure it would be nothing short of her usual standards.
“You’ve got to keep those things in check,” she concluded. “Not every song needs guitar. And the part of me that’s like, ‘Well, I’m a guitar player always in my head, you would not do the best thing for the song.’ You got to do the best thing for the song.” Listening to it, she certainly did do the best thing for the song, and the soaring vocals on it, along with the gentle production touches, are proof of that.
