St. Vincent

Her guitar playing has been praised for its melodic style and use of distortion, and she has been listed among the best guitarists of the 21st century by multiple publications.

Rolling Stone named Clark the 26th-greatest guitarist of all time in 2023.

Raised in Dallas, St. Vincent began her music career as a member of the Polyphonic Spree.

Anne Erin Clark (born September 28, 1982), known professionally as St. Vincent, is an American musician and singer.

Clark was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on September 28, 1982, to Sharon Christine and Richard "Rick" Clark.

Her mother is a social worker and administrator for a nonprofit organization, and her stepfather works in corporate tax administration.

Her parents divorced when she was 3, and when she was 7, she moved with her mother and two older sisters to Dallas, Texas.

She has said that a 23andMe DNA test revealed her ancestry to be 80% Irish and 20% Ashkenazi Jewish, via one of her grandmothers.

Clark was raised Catholic and Unitarian Universalist.

Clark has four brothers and four sisters from her parents' blended families.

As a child, Clark was fond of Ritchie Valens and the movie La Bamba.

When she was five, her mother gave her a red plastic guitar from a Target store for Christmas.

She began playing her first real guitar at age 12 and worked some of her teenage years as a roadie for her aunt and uncle, the guitar-vocal jazz duo Tuck & Patti.

In 2001, she graduated from Lake Highlands High School, where she participated in theater and the school's jazz band, and was a classmate of actor Mark Salling.

She attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, studying with professor Lauren Passarelli.

She left after three years, feeling that art institutions such as Berklee were sometimes focused more on the aesthetics of art than the product.

In retrospect, she said, "I think that with music school and art school, or school in any form, there has to be some system of grading and measurement. The things they can teach you are quantifiable. While all that is good and has its place, at some point you have to learn all you can and then forget everything that you learned in order to actually start making music."

In 2003, Clark released an EP with fellow Berklee students entitled Ratsliveonnoevilstar.

She also worked with Heavy Rotation Records, where "she revealed a much more private and intimate rendering of 'Count' for Dorm Sessions Vol. 1" and studied with professor of guitar Lauren Passarelli.

Shortly after leaving Berklee, she returned home to Texas, where she joined the Polyphonic Spree just before they embarked on a European tour.

In 2004, she joined Glenn Branca's 100-guitar orchestra for the Queens performance, and she was also briefly in a noise rock band called the Skull Fuckers.

In an interview on The Colbert Report, she said that she "took [her] moniker from a line in a Nick Cave song" that referred to the hospital where Dylan Thomas died: "And Dylan Thomas died drunk in / St. Vincent's hospital" (from Cave's song "There She Goes, My Beautiful World", from the 2004 album Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus).

The name is also a reference to her great-grandmother, whose middle name was St. Vincent.

She was also a member of Sufjan Stevens' touring band before forming her own band in 2006.

Clark left the Polyphonic Spree and joined Sufjan Stevens' touring band in 2006.

During this period, she recorded and released an EP titled Paris Is Burning (2006).

In 2006, she began recording a studio album under the stage name St. Vincent.

Her debut solo album, Marry Me, was released in 2007; it was followed by Actor (2009) and Strange Mercy (2011).

Clark released her debut album, Marry Me, on July 10, 2007, on Beggars Banquet Records.

Named after a line from the television sitcom Arrested Development, it features appearances from drummer Brian Teasley (Man or Astro-man?, the Polyphonic Spree), Mike Garson (David Bowie's longtime pianist), and horn player Louis Schwadron (the Polyphonic Spree).

The album was well received by critics, who compared Clark to the likes of Kate Bush and David Bowie and lauded the album for its arrangements, themes and style.

In their review, The A.V. Club said: "There's a point where too much happiness turns into madness, and St. Vincent's multi-instrumentalist Annie Clark knows this place well".

Pitchfork said, "At every turn Marry Me takes the more challenging route of twisting already twisted structures and unusual instrumentation to make them sound perfectly natural and, most importantly, easy to listen to as she overdubs her thrillingly sui generis vision into vibrant life."

The songs on Marry Me were written largely when Clark was 18 and 19, and, she says, "represented a more idealized version of what life was or what love was or anything in the eyes of someone who hadn't really experienced anything."

The album yielded one single, "Paris Is Burning", and a music video was produced for "Jesus Saves, I Spend".

In 2012, St. Vincent released Love This Giant, an album made in collaboration with David Byrne of Talking Heads.

Her fourth studio album, St. Vincent (2014), received widespread acclaim from contemporary critics and was named album of the year by Slant Magazine, NME, The Guardian and Entertainment Weekly.

She collaborated with producer and songwriter Jack Antonoff for her albums Masseduction (2017) and Daddy's Home (2021), which received further acclaim.

She also directed a segment in the 2017 anthology horror film XX, and co-wrote and starred in the psychological thriller film The Nowhere Inn (2020).

St. Vincent produced Sleater-Kinney's 2019 album The Center Won't Hold and co-wrote Taylor Swift's Billboard Hot 100 number-one single "Cruel Summer".