Grammy award-winning American musician Annie Clark, better known as St Vincent, has just released her 6th studio album Daddy's Home.
St Vincent. Photo: YouTube screengrab
The album's title, as well as a number of tracks, were inspired by the fact that her father was recently released from prison after serving 10 years for multi-million dollar financial fraud.
She joined Charlotte Ryan on Music 101 to talk about the album, white collar crime and sexism in music journalism.
Click here to buy/stream Daddys Home
As you can imagine, Daddy's Home explores some very personal material, but St Vincent says her work has always come from her own experiences.
"So much of my work is autobiographical, in this way I feel like in my music I tell people more than I would tell my best friend," she says. "I'm sharing my fears and joys and anxieties and everything, and I put it in the work.
"But also, I'm a storyteller ... and I want to be the kind of storyteller that can tell stories in many different mediums and can extend the story past the album and that's why I choose the colour schemes I do and that's why I choose to style myself the way I do, it's to continue to tell the story, make the visual representation of the world of the album."
However, she says the label of "confessional music" is usually applied to women.
"Women are assumed to be more confessional, because of subconscious or conscious sexism where they think that women can't also have the imagination to tell stories that are not just something that happened to them."
This was something she came to realise while promoting the album.
"I'm realising in doing press for this cycle, how much people hate women - like I forgot."
"I completely understand, especially in America, the wealth inequality is crazy here, there are a lot of reasons for that. My father went away for white collar crime - that's not a particularly sympathetic quote unquote crime and I think the assumption was that I was like a rich girl or something, or that my success was not born of effort or something."
Daddy's Home covers some of St Vincent's experiences with the US prison system and having an incarcerated father - and how her life as a musician seeped into that world.
"My experience with the American system was not because of race, my father is white and went to prison for white collar crime," she says. "So it's a big conversation, but where I'm coming at it is a small personal story, make something beautiful out of something that was painful and also talk about it with humour.
"I mean the last time I went to go see him in prison, like signing autographs, it's so funny, it's so bleak… what a confluence of worlds."
Despite the projections and assumptions about her background, St Vincent says the music is the most important thing to her.
"I think once you get past a certain point you become just something for people to project on to. And I think a lot of those projections say a lot about them than they do about you, because at the end of the day, I was just trying to make beautiful music.
"It is as simple and as complicated as that. I love music and I was trying to make a really beautiful album and I laid my soul bare and that's kind of the long and short of it."
