Throughout her career, Annie Clark, known by most as the Grammy-winning, guitar-shredding, experimental rock genius behind St. Vincent, has examined humanity and her place in the world through her groundbreaking, bold, and emotionally complex brand of art-rock. In every St. Vincent project, Clark often includes a distinctly crafted artistic persona through which she tells her stories. In her latest album, All Born Screaming, Clark peels off all façade and examines the temporal state of life and the relentless determination required to make the most of our time in the face of tragedy. But in typical St. Vincent fashion, she takes her journey one step further and, for the first time, explores these themes through her first Spanish-language album, Todos Nacen Gritando.
A Spanish-language album was not part of the original blueprint when Clark began working on All Born Screaming. “I never know what I’m going to do until I’m drawn to do it,” Clark tells Remezcla. “But I also had so many wonderful experiences touring through Latin America where I noticed people singing my songs word for word in their second, third, or fourth language that I just wanted to do something for them to say, ‘Thanks for coming to me all these years, let me see if I can come to you.’” While the idea was sparked from the desire to create something special for her fans, the process of making it pushed Clark in new, creative ways.
Though the Dallas, TX, native learned to speak Spanish in middle and high school, she by no means considered herself fluent, so she tapped her lifelong friend Alan del Río Ortiz to help with translation, context, and dialect. “I feel a little self-conscious about it because most people just made fun of me,” Clark laughs coyly. “But it’s okay because I know my heart was pure in making it.” Throughout the process, she found her lack of discernment to be a blessing and a curse. The absence of fluency provided her with freedom from overthinking the mechanics and structure of the lyrics. “Personally, if I love everything about a song but there’s one word that I find corny, the song is ruined,” she explains. “With singing in Spanish, I wasn’t worried about that baggage. I could just react emotionally to the sound.”
All Born Screaming and its subsequent Spanish-language version marks Clark’s first fully self-produced project. The artist tackled the task of creating Todos Nacen Gritando with the excitement and curiosity of a beginner’s mind and was able to work through language barriers by using her soul as a compass for expression. “I would examine through the lens of, ‘It’s a yes or no question; Does this move me emotionally? Does this feel like something when I sing it? Does it sound beautiful in a way I don’t know how to explain?’ If the answer is ‘Yes,’ then you’re good.”
All of the instrumental elements of the album, which she created with collaborators like Dave Grohl and Josh Freese on drums and her close friend Cate Le Bon on bass and vocals, remain the same. However, halfway into working on Todos Nacen Gritando, Clarke realized the process wasn’t as simple as she thought it would be. “I didn’t think about the fact that if I’m re-recording the song in Spanish, then I have to re-record all the vocal stacks. I got halfway through, and I was like, ‘Oh good god, I might have bitten off more than I could chew.’ But I was between two shores and had to swim one way or the other, so I chose to move forward.”
I also had so many wonderful experiences touring through Latin America where I noticed people singing my songs word for word in their second, third, or fourth language that I just wanted to do something for them to say, ‘Thanks for coming to me all these years, let me see if I can come to you.’
Throughout the album, Clark reflects on her experiences and her place as a queer woman in the world, and “life, death, and love.” In the record, she bounces between the introspective psych-rock ballad about lost love in “Hell Is Near” to the art-pop synth-heavy “Broken Man,” which transitions to a haunting grunge reflection about humanity, to jazz-inspired, apocalyptic avant-garde track “Violent Times,” and everything in-between. “This album cuts close to the bone… I found there was a level of acidity or cynicism that was lifted from the record [when translated into Spanish] because I couldn’t find all the words. It felt almost like a secret garden in a project that has barbs,” she explains.
A perfect example of this phenomenon is experienced immediately at the end of opening track “Hell Is Near.” The song ends with the echoing and floating verses ‘Give it all away / you give it all away / cause the whole world’s watching you.’ In the Spanish version, the singer translated the end of the verse to ‘give it all away to the whole world,’ and explains that the reason for the change was “It just didn’t sing well and the end of the song isn’t the moment to create a new melody…So I changed it [to ‘give it all away to the whole world,’] and that to me is a generous and beautiful sentiment. But I would not allow myself to sing that in English. It wouldn’t have occurred to me.”
Still, Todos Nacen Gritando captures the graphic, heartbreaking, and sometimes violent metaphors Clark intended to evoke in the original version. Partially inspired by a trip to the Fransico Goya exhibit at the Museo Nacional Del Prado in Madrid, Spain, with longtime collaborator and conceptual artist Alex Da Corte, Clarke decided she wanted the album’s visuals to convey similar eerie darkness and madness through the use of chiaroscuro lighting effects and jet-black set design. In pondereing the longevity of Goya’s work, the singer ends the conversation with a reflection about the project and any artistic creation in general with, “You gotta be trying to create for eternity, not for three months in 2024.”
Todos Nacen Gritando is out now.
