St. Vincent would rather be in Dallas

Annie Clark — aka singer-guitarist St. Vincent — has lived in L.A. and New York City for most of her adult life. But she still loves to wax nostalgic about growing up as a music nerd in Lake Highlands, going to rock shows in Deep Ellum and haunting records stores all around Dallas.

“I spent all my allowance at CD World on Greenville, that’s for sure,” she says with a laugh. “I’m in Los Angeles right now, but I wish I were in Dallas is the truth of it.”

Clark’s been coast-hopping lately while “doing press for this bad boy,” as she calls All Born Screaming, her seventh solo album since she debuted in 2007. The album is out Friday.

One listen and you’ll hear why she yearns for the comfort of her extended Dallas family. All Born Screaming is the sound of an artist teetering on the edge of chaos as she thinks about life, death and a dozen shades of terror in between. In Clark’s typically witty fashion, she’s dubbed it “post-plague pop.”

It’s her darkest album yet, but also one of her best, defined as always by her uniquely St. Vincent blend of styles. She’s an old-school torch singer with an avant-garde heart and a music historian’s brain, inspired by everyone from Billie Holiday to Jimi Hendrix to Nirvana (whose drummer, Dave Grohl, guest-stars on “Broken Man” and “Flea”).

Clearly, she didn’t spend all that time at CD World just sifting through the Backstreet Boys bin.

When Clark was 13, the jazz duo Tuck & Patti, who happen to be her uncle and aunt, sat her down and asked her to listen to John Coltrane’s masterpiece A Love Supreme.

“I started crying,” she told me in ‘07. “Hearing something like that, at that age, was mind-blowing.”

Today, her jazz-minded songs are probably too off-kilter for most Taylor Swift fans. But against all odds, Clark racked up her first No. 1 pop hit as a songwriter last fall when Swift’s “Cruel Summer” spent a month atop the Billboard charts, four years after Swift first released it. Clark co-wrote the tune with Swift and their mutual producer Jack Antonoff.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Clark, 41, says. “It’s a testament to how dedicated Taylor’s fans are. They took a song from a few records back that wasn’t even a single at the time and said ‘No, we love this song. This is the hit.’ And they marched it up the charts by just sheer enthusiasm.”

My conversation with Clark has been edited for clarity:

All your albums have been different, both musically and lyrically. What were you aiming for on All Born Screaming?

I wanted to make something that felt as raw and human as possible. It’s a record that goes from “Life is impossible … ” and then the second half is “but we get to live it and it’s really short, so buckle up and let’s go. We don’t have any time to waste.”

This is the first album you’ve produced totally alone. What were the pros and cons of that?

The pros are that it’s really an exact rendering of the sounds in my head. This is my singular vision. The cons are that it takes a lot longer. It’s a more painful process because it requires a long look in the mirror, which is not always the most comfortable thing to do. There’s nobody else in the room who’s gonna pat you on the head and say, “Great job, let’s move on.” It requires a reckoning with yourself.

There are lots of great retro-sounding synthesizers on the album, played by you and others. What drew you to these old synths?

Analog synthesizers have such a soul to them. You’re moving electricity through unique circuitry, and I know that doesn’t sound necessarily like the sexiest, most human thing, but you’re like a god of lightning. These analog synths are inherently chaotic. It’s like, “I’m gonna take these beasts and find the parts that are the most alive, and manipulate some of that chaos into music.” When you get something that’s really exciting, it’s more of a victory.

Several tunes have an industrial rock feel and recall Nine Inch Nails. I noticed the word “nail” in the lyrics of multiple songs. Have I found your Easter eggs? Or am I reading too much into that?

No! Read however you want to read it. I love Nine Inch Nails. You can put The Downward Spiral next to anything out there today and it will hold up as relevant and exciting. That’s the kind of record I’m ultimately trying to make, stuff you’ll wanna listen to in 30 years and go, “Oh yeah … this is good. It has a level of excellence and craft and refinement and obsessive attention to detail.”

“Violent Times” has a memorable phrase that, in a sense, sums up the whole album for me: “The ashes of Pompeii lovers, discovered in an embrace for all eternity.” When did you first see that image from Pompeii?

I was in New Zealand and had a day off and that exhibit was going around, so I walked over to the exhibit and was just struck by that image. “OK, doom is imminent. You can flee, or you can just hold one another one last time.” And I just thought it was so deeply romantic. So much of modern existence, and certainly existence on the internet, is designed to commodify our brain space and pit neighbor against neighbor, and it’s just, well, frankly, it’s a drag. Love is all we have, and I don’t mean that in a “Kumbaya” corny way. I mean, life will bring you to your knees, no matter who you are. And the only thing we really have is the people we love.

A lot of songs on the new album — and throughout your career — have a scary, almost cinematic quality to them. Did you grow up loving horror films or scary books?

No. Not at all. I detest horror and violence and gore. I can’t watch it. But as far as going to musically dark places, I think that’s the miraculous thing about music. To misquote Brian Eno, “Art is the car you can crash over and over again and then walk away safely.” [Music] is the place I get to go to explore my internal violence and my everything — ego, desire, all of it. I’m a child of the ‘90s, in the sense that the anthems of my heroes were “I’m a creep/I’m a loser.” They were exploring the baseness and basement of their psyches, and that’s always resonated with me.

“Big Time Nothing” sounds like a companion piece to 2020′s The Nowhere Inn, your mockumentary-thriller about fame and how it affects an artist’s sanity.

[Songwriting for me] is always like, “OK, tune into the depression and anxiety frequencies in your head, write down those thoughts, and what do they tell you?” I’ve had to learn how to manage and quiet [those frequencies] as I’ve grown. All the songs on this album are very lived experiences, dealing with life and death and love. In records past, I certainly was dealing with the idea of persona and deconstructing persona. And you know, that makes a lot of sense in that I’m queer. I’ve been aware that gender was a performance since I was a child. So of course, playing with characters is … it’s all just, you know, ripe for exploration. On this record, however, I’m just not dealing with character or transformation in the same way. I’ve heard people say, “OK, so Broken Man is your take on toxic masculinity.” I’m like, “No. That’s just how I feel.” Sometimes, it’s not external cultural commentary. It’s, like, life.

Congratulations on your first No. 1 single for co-writing Taylor Swift’s “Cruel Summer.” Hypothetically, how would you handle performing for 60,000 people in football stadiums every night like Swift does?

My brain immediately went to “Oh. I’d really need to spend a lot of money on production.” But that’s the very pragmatic part of me. Um, that would be amazing. I don’t see that necessarily happening and I feel really OK with that. I like to say I have the “free appetizer level” of fame, you know, where occasionally you [meet a restaurant worker] who’s a big fan and you get that shrimp cocktail. But I don’t have an unmanageable level of fame. I can walk down the street anywhere and be fine and not need security. I can just exist in the world in a relatively normal way. The way I got to my level of success was a sort of slow and steady climb up the mountain, without big peaks and valleys.

When we spoke at the start of your career, you said that joining the Polyphonic Spree after struggling to launch your career was “literally redemption in a robe.” What did you learn in your two years with the Spree in the mid-2000s?

I loved it. I had the time of my life. Some of my fondest memories of touring were those early, early days of just not knowing what in the world I was doing, getting up on stage every night and putting on this wild manic show with these exuberant songs. I [learned how to be] a Texas freak, right? And I say “freak” with all the love and admiration in the world. If you’re a Texas freak, you had to earn it. You had to walk through fire. There’s some real grit to the Texas freaks. Like, those are my people, you know?

A few years ago, the news site Central Track posted a bunch of yearbook photos of you from Lake Highlands High School, where you were super active in performing groups. Did you already know back then you wanted a career onstage?

I was very obsessed with theater. I’d go see a lot of local productions at Kitchen Dog Theater and I was a stage manager over at Kitchen Dog. I loved it, but I was really scared to get up onstage with my high school band, or be in a play. But I also knew I had to do it. Even though that performative tension was very, very nerve-wracking, I was compelled to do it. Dallas public education really just lit a fire and a love for theater, you know?

You’ve acted in Portlandia and other places, and you co-wrote The Nowhere Inn. Would you like to do more acting and filmmaking?

I would drop everything if a director I really adored, like Pedro Almodovar, said, “I’m dying to have you in my next film.” I would happily act or be a performer in someone else’s work, depending on the project, because you go in, you do your work and you walk away. A director of a film, like, that’s three years of your life on one thing. I just don’t have the bandwidth to direct a film. But what I do as a musician, for this record, let’s just say, is akin to writing, starring in and directing your own film. Directing? I already do that in music. Directing a film would take me away from things I’m actually good at.

You started playing guitar at 12, before the internet became huge. Do you think the internet and YouTube opened the doors for more diversity among guitarists? Are there more female lead guitarists today than when you began?

There totally are. I see so many young women playing guitar and it’s not treated as some sort of novelty. It’s like, “Yeah, duh! Of course I play guitar.” It’s so cool to see the shift. I mean, I had Riot Grrrl. But for the most part, there weren’t that many female guitar players in the mass culture.

I’m a measured optimist. I don’t believe that everything is getting worse. Certain things in life are definitely worse than they were a hundred years ago, and a lot of things are a whole lot better. We wouldn’t be having this conversation 80 years ago about me having a career as an artist like this. Women didn’t get to do things like this. So I think it’s only getting better in terms of more women playing, more women just feeling empowered and saying, “I’m gonna pick up whatever [instrument] I want to and play.” There’s way less stigma and eyebrow-raising than there was when I started, you know? That’s great. I think that is genuine progress.