Description
Annie Clark (ST. VINCENT) brings the glammy sounds of the ’70s to an album about mothers and daughters, fathers and prison. It’s an audacious and deeply personal record.
An immense talent with an impeccable track record, her meticulous craft is matched by a Bowiesque gift for shapeshifting. Every world-building detail on Daddy’s Home, her album-length tribute to ’70s rock’n’roll, is executed with chameleonic precision; not a note or a hair on her Candy Darling wig is out of place. It is her most personal record to date, telling the story of her father’s incarceration (where he served 12 years for his involvement in a multi-million-dollar stock manipulation scheme) and her own fear of parenthood.
The best and truest moments on Daddy’s Home are when Clark refuses to play wife or mother. “I went to the park just to watch the little children,” she sings, on “Pay Your Way in Pain.” “The mothers saw my heels and they said I wasn’t welcome.”
In 2011, long before it broke in tabloids and became public knowledge, St. Vincent wrote “Strange Mercy,” a plaintive song about her father’s incarceration. The imagery of the song is simple, evocative. “Our father in exile,” she sings. “When you see him, wave through double pane.” It’s hard to forget, once you’ve heard it, her delivery of the song’s bridge, through gritted teeth. She is alone at the microphone. She sounds like nobody but herself.
