St Vincent’s artistry has been rooted in pushing boundaries since the beginning. Annie Clark’s genre-bent songs combine sculptural vocals, intense guitars and surrealistic witticisms with an intensely personal point of view, resulting in funhouse-mirror pop that gives the sensation of delighting the artist as much as it does her audience. While David Bowie and Kate Bush are obvious influences, she’s also been upfront about the way the orchestrations from early Disney films made an impression on her: “All that stuff, it’s your first introduction to magic,” she told the podcast This Song in 2019.
Last year, she made her BBC Proms debut with a set featuring orchestral reworkings of her catalog, with the Jules Buckley Orchestra and a rock combo tearing through new arrangements of discographical chestnuts like the exuberantly loopy Digital Witness as well as cuts from her most recent album, 2024’s All Born Screaming. The experiment was successful enough to spawn the live album Live in London! and, now, a road show where Clark and the conductor Buckley, as well as a touring band (keyboardist Rachel Eckroth, guitarist Robert Ellis, bassist Allee Futterer and drummer John Hadfield), pull up to perform with local orchestras.
