In her younger years, Annie Clark, the forty-three-year-old singer-songwriter who performs as St. Vincent, was twice mistaken for a prostitute at the Carlyle hotel. The first instance was an outgrowth of her sketchy sublet arrangement. While she lived in a rent-controlled apartment in the East Village, the man who actually held the lease led an itinerant life of luxury, staying at the Carlyle when he was in town.
This meant that, periodically, Clark showed up at the Upper East Side hotel to collect blank personal checks from the man, which she would then fill out and mail to his none-the-wiser landlord. (She paid the leaseholder the rent amount plus a little extra.) One summer day, Clark recalled recently, “it was very hot, and I walked in wearing a crop top and shorts and said, ‘Excuse me, I believe someone left something here for me.’ The gentleman at the front desk gave me a withering stare and handed me an envelope.”
The second instance found Clark waiting for friends at Bemelmans Bar, dolled up for a party in an Alexander McQueen dress. As she sat alone, an older man chatted her up, asking Clark what she did for a living. “I said I was a performer,” she recalled. “It made him feel he had the green light to say, ‘O.K., you could perform for me.’ ”
It is with no small measure of satisfaction that Clark is now preparing for a three-night engagement, beginning on October 28th, at Café Carlyle, the hotel’s storied cabaret, where Bobby Short, Eartha Kitt, and Barbara Cook defined uptown elegance in the second half of the twentieth century. “There’s a part of me that, for a long time, has lived in fear of the jazz police,” she said, “and I think this is something that will liberate me from that fear.”
Clark spoke while basking in the glow of a different sort of crossover triumph: playing twenty of her songs with a full orchestra at London’s Royal Albert Hall, as part of the BBC Proms classical-music series. She had only just returned from England and was drinking an iced coffee at a café on the Lower East Side.
The talk turned to her Café Carlyle set list, which she hadn’t started thinking about yet. The Royal Albert Hall show capped a nearly two-year stretch of touring her most recent album, “All Born Screaming,” one of her strangest and heaviest. She’d toured with a four-piece rock band. At Café Carlyle, she will be accompanied only by her keyboardist, Rachel Eckroth, and her own guitar—“probably a sensible-tone electric,” she said.
The intimate setting will demand quieter arrangements than that of, say, “Broken Man,” the lead single off “All Born Screaming,” whose conclusion, on tour, found Clark literally screaming, “What’re you looking at?” She assessed her song catalogue and considered the possibilities.
One shoo-in, she decided, is her torchy 2017 song “New York,” which is easing its way into becoming a standard. Another likely pick: “Candy Darling,” her melancholy tribute to the late Warhol superstar. Clark observed that the latter song’s parent album, “Daddy’s Home,” from 2021, is a font of saloon- friendly songs, constructed as it is around a persona she’d adopted at the time: a blowsy, blond-bobbed barfly seemingly beamed in from Maxwell’s Plum circa the Carter Administration.
“ ‘Down and Out Downtown’—that plays,” Clark said. “And ‘Candy Darling’—when I sing about her wig ‘waving from the latest uptown train,’ going off to Heaven—I think about the Tom Waits song ‘Downtown Train.’ That might be a good cover to do.”
It was suggested to Clark that her 2009 song “Laughing with a Mouth of Blood” would work well, given its ear-pleasing tumble of softly sung words. (“Holed up at the Motel Ritz / With a televangelist.”)
“That’s a good idea!” she said. “I think the title was something I originally heard Sarah Silverman say. There will definitely be some comedy, some crowd work. Going to see Justin Vivian Bond at Joe’s Pub for many years was a formative experience. And this is such a name drop, but I texted Cole Escola to come to one of the Carlyle shows and said, ‘Don’t come unless you want to see me doing a ripoff of you and Vivian Bond.’ ”
Clark was by now caffeinated and confident; the set was taking shape. There remained one element that had yet to be discussed: her look. For every album since her eponymous one, in 2014, she has changed up her hair and wardrobe à la nineteen-seventies David Bowie. The “All Born Screaming” look, inspired by the paintings of Balthus and the contorted poses of Robert Longo’s “Men in the Cities” photos, has been retired. So what might be St. Vincent’s Café Carlyle look?
“Well, it’s a classy joint,” Clark said. “Maybe I’ll dust off that Alexander McQueen.” ♦
