There's a 1961 doo-wop classic called "Daddy's Home" by Shep and the Limelites about a man, "a thousand miles away," coming home to his lover, but it doesn't delve into specifics about where he went or why he left.
The St. Vincent song of the same name, serving as the title track of her latest album, gets right to the details — and the story is not one of romance.
"I sign autographs in the visitation room," she sings wearily over a warped beat. "Waiting for you the last time/ Inmate 502."
In this story, it is the actual daddy of art-rocker Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent) who is serving time, a decade, for his role in a multimillion-dollar stock-manipulation scheme. "You did some time/ Well, I did some time, too," she asserts, concisely expressing the effect that it had on her.
"The song came out pretty effortlessly," says Clark. "It's about the last time I went to visit my dad when he was in prison. He was in prison for 10 years for a financial crime. And it's about the last time I went to go see him and just how the tables had turned. You know, how much life had gone by, how in some ways I was embodying aspects of who he is, or who he used to be, but the kind of role reversal of how 'I'm Daddy now,' so that's where I took the title of the record — 'Daddy's Home,' but, you know, I'm Daddy."
On the sixth album from the edgy singer-songwriter-guitarist from Texas, her daddy's role extended to the sound of the record, which is awash in '70s influences, from the Bowie-style opener of "Pay Your Way in Pain" to the Steely Dan vibe of "Down and out Downtown" to the obvious Pink Floyd nod on "... Live in the Dream."
"I became enamored with that period music because that's the music that my dad would always play when I was around him," she says. "Long car trips, it was Steely Dan. And so, as a 7-, 8-year-old child, I became a massive Steely Dan fan. And I think, we as kids — especially if our parents are aloof or elusive — it's like we're always looking for clues as to who they are. We get to know them by the things that they like and try to connect with them by liking the things that they like. For me, that was kind of a natural way into exploring the stories that I wanted to tell — about grittiness, about flawed people doing their best to get by, and an imperfect but ultimately generous reality."
St. Vincent leaves much open to interpretation, but whether it's the woman wearing last night's heels on the morning train in "Down and out Downtown" or the one who wants to play guitar all day in "My Baby Wants a Baby," you can come away from "Daddy's Home" with a sense of characters struggling in the face of societal pressures.
"Absolutely," she says. "I think there's a misfit quality that I feel, but that certainly runs through every character on the record. I can write about the girl with the heels in her hand doing the walk of shame 'cause I've done it. I can write about the girl who's drunk a little too early at the party and is trying to soothe herself with things that will only hurt, ultimately. I've been there. I can picture every single block in 'Down and out Downtown. It's lived. And there's a bit of the absurdity of living, feeling like you're always out of step with the main social conventions of the time."
She has described "Daddy's Home" as "the sound of being down and out downtown in New York, 1973. Glamour that hasn't slept for three days."
How did she go about capturing that elusive sound?
"I'm not much of a planner when it comes to making music," she says. "I just kind of start throwing spaghetti at the wall. I just trust at this point that the music will tell me what it wants to be. I find that the best things happen when I get out of my own way or don't try to force them into a role or a narrative where it doesn't belong.
"And the same could be said of people. I think people are best when you allow them to be what they are and work with them in a way that is not full of shame and judgment but is in fact letting them become naturally whatever they are, even if what they are is complicated and full of contradiction. That just is; that is the nature of reality."
Prior to the pandemic shutting everything down, Clark had wrapped up touring for her previous album "Masseducation," and "The Nowhere Inn," a psychological thriller and mockumentary she made with Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney, had just recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It was about to be shown at the South by Southwest and Tribeca festivals, but both were canceled, and the timeline for the film's release was pushed to this September.
Like most people, she found herself with a lot of time on her hands.
"I will definitely say the true and obligatory thing, which is I'm very lucky that I didn't lose my job in the interim and that none of my friends or family got incredibly ill," she says. "That asterisk aside, it's really the first time in my professional life where I stopped and I wasn't on the treadmill, and none of us were. There wasn't like a horse race going on that you needed to kind of be a part of, 'cause all the horses were in the stable.
"For me, at first, I had a lot of anxiety about it because in my professional life, I've never not toured and I've never really been in one place long enough to have any kind of routine or life. So, I did that. And more than that, I got to just work in my studio all the time. I got to finish 'Daddy's Home' and spend the right amount of time with it and become a better producer and songwriter and singer through the making of that process and really get to make sure that that album was exactly what I wanted it to be."
And what did Daddy think?
"He loved it," she says. "He wants me to make a sequel. He's thrilled. I was like, 'Did you listen to the words?' He was like, 'Yeah!' It was like OK ... great!'"
