Leave it to St. Vincent to release an album that smells like a perfume strip and sounds like a bellbottom fever dream from a city on fire. Daddy’s Home is the name, a title that hits harder once you know it’s both literal (her father had just finished a 10-year prison sentence for white-collar crime) and winkingly perverse (she cackles: “It’s so pervy it makes me laugh”).
The sound is 1970s New York: seedy, jazzy, sweaty. “It’s music I’ve listened to more than anything,” Annie Clark admits. “But I’d never approached it per se. That music has a lot to teach me.”
It also has a lot to say about right now. “Post-idealism. Pre-nihilism. That space in between where you’re trying to figure out what binds us together—again. It felt oddly aligned,” she says, noting the cultural chaos and economic anxiety that mirror today. “It’s much more truthful.”
If the lush grit of the record feels like a mirror to the city, then it’s one seen through the lens of post-Dazed-and-Confused hangover. “We both lived through the 70s nostalgia of the 90s,” she says. “That was all rose-colored. This is not that.” For the record: yes, she shopped at thrift stores, yes, she had bellbottoms, and yes, she saw Dazed and Confused and decided she loved Foghat.
And if you think there’s no room for Tool in this bellbottom funk haze, think again. “Before I landed on this sound, I was thinking of a Tool-inspired record,” she reveals. “More in the Ænima world.” That mental whiplash you’re experiencing? That’s the whole point.
Songs like “Melting of the Sun” and “Live in the Dream” embody that tonal duality: part AM gold, part Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness. “I wanted to write about flawed people,” she says. “Obviously myself included. With humor and pathos.”
Nowhere is that more clear than “My Baby Wants a Baby” and “The Holiday Party,” which cloak anxiety and dysfunction in deceptively warm grooves. “I’ve been the girl on the morning train in last night’s clothes,” she confesses. “So I can talk about it.”
The album was also her first time publicly addressing her father’s incarceration—on her own terms. “I wasn’t established enough to let that kind of autobiographical detail lead the story before,” she says. “Now I can tell it with nuance, not a tabloid headline.” Her father, for the record, kept up while inside. “Some inmates’ kids were fans,” she says. “They’d leave press clippings on his bed.”
But don’t mistake that for a grab at gravitas. “I’m not talking about it to ask for sympathy,” she clarifies. “I’m fine.”
Clark has always walked the line between myth and memoir, control and chaos. “Am I the daddy now?” she asks on the last page of the Daddy’s Home promo comic, a question both absurd and telling. “I’ve transformed into Daddy,” she laughs. “Who are we kidding?”
The decades may shift, but her obsession with performance mythology and rock alchemy stays put. You get the feeling that for St. Vincent, the good stuff always comes from discomfort. Art as creative torture machine. Persona as armor. Trauma, refracted through glam.
She laughs, not unsympathetically, when asked whether the character of St. Vincent has fully eaten Annie Clark alive. “Annie Clark is sweating in a winter coat I wish I hadn’t worn,” she answers.
But the myth? The myth never breaks a sweat.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
