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is very green. Thegnomes red hat is very red. The hair atop Annies head

is very dark against her very white dress. She is peek-

ing through green shrubbery into this garden from a

neighbors yard. The day is as crisp and clear and colorful as a

childrens picture book page. Our hero is happy.

I once played in a noise band called the Skull Fuckers.

Annie Clark, who calls herself St. Vincent for no clear reason, is

soft-spoken and pale and shakes hands like an apologetic gazelle.

When she says the word skull followed by the word fuckers,

its a bit like when her feathery fingers make death rattles leap

from her guitar like ghouls from a cellar.

At a recent show in Texas, during a solo rendition of Human

Racing, there was the curious approach of an almost full room

drifting toward the stage in a sort of cloud pattern. Until, likelightning, some metallic bark is conjured from a muffled scrape of

the strings and everyones head snaps back in unison. A momen-

tary pause, the song retreats back into melody, the gazes get wider

and the onlookers drift closer. Maybe thats the point. Call yourself

a saint when youre really a sinner. Get them a bit closer and reach

into their soft little souls.

Yes, love is war, she says, chuckling a bit, considering

whether her songs pit romance against death. These songs were

written while we are in a climate of war. Whether you realize it

or not, you internalize that kind of violence. I do. If you were

closer to it or really, really thought about it, you could just cry

forever and ever.

When she sings a pair of lines like, Im crawling through

landmines/Just to know where you are/Theres smoke in my

eyes/Because youre burning the ground, the whole thing feels

very French. Or like a city that emerged from the wreckage of a

World War, cleaned up the cobblestones and made space along

the river for couples to swoon in existential embrace. Much of

her debut,Marry Me , sounds so distant from her actual biography,and much more ancient than her years would allow. A Texan by

way of Oklahoma, the middle child of nine brothers and sisters,

and a lapsed Catholic, Annie Clark, at age 24, shouldnt make

you think of Edith Piaf.

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Or, Portishead.

Or, Billie Holiday, Jesus Christ and European military history.

It was borne out of the desire not to be in Texas, or not to

be in Oklahoma. I like my family a lot. Theyre smart people and

musicians, but outside of that, its a pretty sterile white-bread

community where I grew up. So, through escapism and reading

books and getting to travel to far off lands when I was about 15, I

had a sense that the world was very big.

She is a collection of opposites; an argument that youthful

innocence is a contradictory term. She presents herself with a

certain delicacy that youd be foolish to think you could fracture.

You get the sense that it was a firm and earthly decision to be so

ethereal and otherworldly. A child in the middle of nowhere who

learned about everywhere. Marry Me also has that far away near-

ness, like youre listening to intimate history.Im all for a search for the grand mysteries of existence, she

says. But I like science, too.

It all makes perfect sense.

Still in her same bright white dress, its night. Annie is working

her way through a small set of songs at Largo in Los Angeles.

The early and local crowd is stabbing at salads. Shes quiet and

appreciative, just a woman with a guitar, alone in a club thats seen

this sort of thing before.

Along comes that collective recognition, the snapping of necks

that awakened the Texans, but this time its a bit slower, more

gradual. It happens during the second or third song. The forks

go down and stay down. The restless look-about for a waitress is

abandoned or forgotten. It doesnt take very long, actually, but

everyones finally here, in the present. Then that history creeps

back in.

Annie is singing her last song. Its a cover of Nicos These

Days. Most in this room have never seen or heard this woman

before. Yet, theres nostalgia now. These days I seem to think a

lot/About the things that I forgot to do/And all the times I had thechance to. What is she remembering? Its a curious choice for

someone so new in front of so many strangers.

The room is held now, in that small moment before a memory.

If love is war, the woman in the white dress is winning. F