St. Vincent's My World Interview

A chameleonic performer whose work goes from art-pop conceptualism to rock guitar pyrotechnics, Annie Clarke, better known by her moniker St. Vincent, has never been afraid of experimenting or new experiences. In fact, most of her albums have involved some kind of persona, with several online listicles dedicated to the unpacking of them all. Among other flights of wonder, she’s delved into a 90s grunge aesthetic on Actor (2009), swayed to a brass band with David Byrne on Love This Giant (2012) and donned the garb and iconography of a cult leader on the rock-focused Masseduction (2017). This November saw her exploring in a different direction as she released Todos Nacen Gritando, the Spanish translation of her hugely successful 2024 album All Born Screaming.

Touring Latin America and Spain over the last few years, Clarke found that audiences knew all her songs in English, word perfect. The surprise and confusion are still in her voice when she remembers it. “I was shocked! I had no idea [of the extent of my South American following]. And so, the first time I played Mexico City, I crowd surfed, and I had to wrestle the crowd for my shoes. And, no one was trying to steal my shoes… It was almost religious… It was like, ‘We want a piece of the body. We need some of the body.’ And the fervour and the romance of it, it was unlike anything I’d ever experienced.” After Primavera Sound 2023 in Spain, Clarke says, “I asked myself, ‘If [these fans are] able to sing in a second or third language, why can’t I do the same thing?’”

Though these performances were the ultimate catalyst for Clarke’s translation project, the beginnings of it go back further than that. She grew up in Texas, which meant exposure to a lot of Tejano music. Plus, she studied Spanish in junior high and high school, falling in love with the sounds of Latin America, Portugal and Spain from a young age. “Since I was a kid, I’ve been obsessed with Caetano Veloso, all the Gilbertos, Os Mutantes, Selena, the list goes on,” she recalls. “Brazilian music I got very into as a teenager… I had my aunt and uncle who gave me the Getz/Gilberto record. That’s a very easy entry into bossa nova.”

Travel and a successful music career have only strengthened these bonds, which go beyond the music and into one’s experience of it. “The thing I love so much about Latin America and Mexico is that, kind of everywhere you go, there’s music playing. There’s cumbia, there’s dance music. I have a very vivid memory of spending New Year’s Eve in Mérida [Mexico] and just dancing all night to the local band… Culturally, it just feels like every time I’ve played a show there in Mexico or South America or Spain, music is so a part of life. It’s not commodified or stratified. It’s like, ‘Of course we eat, of course we listen to music, of course we have sex, of course we do it.’ It was just, ‘Obviously, this is a natural extension of living.’”

Once decided on, the translation of All Born Screaming was undertaken with Clarke’s best friend and sometime collaborator, the filmmaker and director Alan del Río Ortiz. “It’s not a literal translation because you know how languages go,” Clarke explains. “There are just things that are expressions in one language that are really not in another and vice versa. And English is such a polyglot that there end up just being a lot more words in English as a language. It’s obviously [done with] creative license. I luckily was not writing an instruction manual on how to disassemble an atomic bomb. I was retranslating my own songs. Who says song lyrics have to make any sense?” Losing the need to stick strongly to meaning was liberating. “There was almost a freedom to be more in the moment without overthinking things because I was simply reacting to sound: what is the sound of it, and does that make me feel emotional or not feel emotional? And if the answer was, ‘it makes me not feel emotional,’ then we’d go back and change the word or work on it.”

Many reviewers have remarked that All Born Screaming is a presentation of St. Vincent as near to who she is, as far away from personas or characters, as we’ve yet seen from her. Though it could be argued that by donning a new language, Clarke is returning to the world of masks, it seems that, on the contrary, the new language allowed room for rawer emotions to come to the fore. “There are things that I sing in Spanish that maybe I would feel self-conscious singing in English because they feel so sincere,” she explains in her press release. She elaborates on this: “It was interesting creatively. When there wasn’t an expression in Spanish that said the same thing [I would ask Ortiz,] ‘How do I get there? What’s another way to kind of express this thing?’ And it made me make new choices about the meaning of songs. And in some cases, I feel like I allowed myself certain floweriness or hope in the Spanish versions that I wouldn’t have allowed myself in English.”

For all the difficulties of translation, there are moments during Todos Nacen Gritando when the Spanish arguably scans and melds into the rhythm even more effectively than the original English. Listen to the grungy, riff-heavy ‘Broken Man’ and ‘Hombre Roto’ for a good indication of the different bite that Spanish brings to these songs. Clarke has thought about how Latin American audiences, already so au fait with the English versions, will receive these translations from her. “I’m by no means fluent in Spanish… there’s a kind of a naiveté to my pronunciation,” she explains. “My best-case scenario for my own pronunciation was like ‘99 Luftballons’. Like, maybe there’s some intrigue and some charm to this because I’m not going to sound as if Spanish is my first language, because it’s not.

Her ultimate goal is to become fluent, with Todos Nacen Gritando a part of that learning process. Hopefully, this means some more Latin American projects in the future. “I’d definitely work with Latin artists, I think, if I get super fluent. I will think poetically in Spanish,” she muses. But these things come in stages. “At this point,” she concludes, “I’m more making sure I know the word for toaster.”

+ Todos Nacen Gritando is out now on Total Pleasure Records