St. Vincent: The 10 songs that changed my life

With a career that spans everything from electropop to art rock to psychedelia, St. Vincent's record collection is as deep as it is far-reaching. Having grown up on a heady mix of King Of Pop and ’70s jazz-rock, Annie Clark was perfectly poised to break boundaries and defy genres with her own music, and knew from a very young age that this is where she was destined to be.

Following a recent, sensational headline show at London's Royal Albert Hall, she returns to the UK and Europe this October for a handful of gigs – no doubt featuring her favourite "unhinged" song to perform live. Why is it so mad? We'll let Annie explain…

“I had the cassette tape in a little tiny boombox and I would just put that on and just dance to it as a little tiny kid. I mean, Quincy Jones – forget about it! It’s perfectly made music.”

“That reminds me of being in high school, going to see Sonic Youth and Stereolab opening for them, which was an epic show. It was so crowded that my friend passed out because we were so squeezed together at a club in Dallas. And Kim Gordon’s new record [The Collective] is so good, too!”

“It’s just a perfect love song. I’m drawn to various periods of Nick Cave. I wrote to him because his new song Frogs was just gutting me, it moves me so deeply. But just that line [from Into My Arms], ‘I don't believe in an interventionist God / But I know, darling, that you do,’ I think was from a period of time he was with PJ Harvey, and it just moves me.”

“I go to music for so many things and I’m down all the time (laughs), but I do love the Pointers Sisters and the song Automatic, that one gets me going. But sometimes when you’re down you just want to exist in the feeling and go deeper into it, and explore it and listen to even heavier things. The idea of, ‘I feel bad, I’m going to listen to music to make me feel better,’ is not my interaction usually.”

“I was listening to Jimi Hendrix when I was eight or nine, and I had a CD but it skipped so it kept going like, ‘You jump in front of my car- You jump in front of my car- You jump in front of my car…’ His guitar playing is just fire, it’s like lightning. Recording technology hadn’t come that far at that point and obviously he died so young, so the sounds of the records are kind of bad, right? But you could record it in a tin can and still feel the power of his guitar playing. As a guitarist, my favourite Jimi Hendrix guitar parts are his parts, I’m less of a solo gal, but the parts are so good. The sound is just pummelling coming out of the speakers, it’s absolutely undeniable.”

“I go back to being on long car trips and listening to Steely Dan on repeat. I know that I always wanted to be a musician and I can’t pinpoint an exact moment, but it was probably that. I wanted to be inside the speaker and know about this mystical thing that can say all of the things that I feel, all the things I didn’t know I could feel, and all the things I haven’t felt yet. I didn’t have a Plan B, I was obsessed with becoming a musician. And that's the great paradox of being a musician – it’s an impossible dream in some ways. You have to have immense belief that you are going to make something that people will want to hear and that’s a crazy thing to think, to be honest. It’s not even about other people hearing it, but you’re just so compelled to make this thing that you’ll die if you don’t. And they’re the only people who should really be in the game.”

“It’s really fun and has gotten even more unhinged. There’s this line that my sick sense of humour finds so funny: ‘I went to the park just to watch the little children,’ is so creepy but it makes me laugh every time. And then screaming ‘I wanna be loved’ is true and also so ugly. But the idea of going to the park like, ‘I’m just gonna watch!’ is so creepy to me that it makes me laugh. [The song has] gotten increasingly unhinged. That current of energy and madness and excitement I can tap into quite easily.”

“I had to do something as a songwriter that was sort of not as natural, which is to just simply describe without putting myself in it. It wasn’t, ‘I saw this and I felt this way,’ it was just describing a scene. What are the remnants of a life? What’s in the room? Without trying to connect the dots for the listener. That took a long time. The approach of the song vocally and the singing of it had to be almost like a monk – you’re just singing it, not putting anything extra on it, no ego, just sing it and let people into this room without telling them what to do, think, feel or where to look. Simply let them through the door. And that took a while.”

“It’s just so hideously sexist but it pretends to be a love song, but it’s really, really retrograde and really sexist. And I hate it… It’s so deeply misogynistic, which would be fine if you owned that, but it pretends like it’s sweet.”

“Just so they can remember the easy, breezy person I was (laughs). So they can think of me with the wind in my hair on the beach… I’m just kidding, I’d be under an umbrella in the shade. I’d be dragged to a beach kicking and screaming. But I just love that song! It's so beautiful and there’s no words, so people can feel whatever they’re feeling without words telling them too much. What gets me is when people pick a song like My Way. All those people who love you are gathered here and you’re just going to take one last opportunity to stick it to them. It’s so crazy to me.”

Read this next:

• Mothica: “When you’ve been through so much and gone through so many rock bottoms, you start to think, ‘Nothing can hurt me now’”
• Maynard James Keenan: “If you’re not putting yourself in the space where the breakthrough can happen, you’re not going to have one”
  
• “We’re pissing off the right people”: Sleater-Kinney, Lambrini Girls and the eternal power of riot grrrl