St. Vincent on new album 'Daddy's Home,' 'Nowhere Inn' and being at the 'free appetizer-level of fame'

To make one of the year's best albums, St. Vincent looked to the artists that shaped her.

Growing up, "I was probably the world's youngest massive Steely Dan fan. That was my first concert ever," says the art-rock singer/guitarist, whose real name is Annie Clark.

Steely Dan – along with Stevie Wonder, David Bowie and Lou Reed – were chief influences on her sixth solo album "Daddy's Home" (out now), a silky, sleazy ode to 1970s New York and the woozy funk-rock of that era. The record's sepia-toned aesthetic is best described as "glamor in the gutter, last night's outfit on the morning train," she says. But the songs go beyond mere nostalgia trip, as Clark untangles her complex relationship with her father, a former stockbroker who was sentenced to prison for a white-collar crime and released in late 2019.

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Clark, 38, talks to USA TODAY about "Daddy's Home" and her meta new movie "The Nowhere Inn" (in theaters this fall), a surreal send-up of rock-star documentaries that she wrote with co-star Carrie Brownstein ("Portlandia") and premiered at last year's Sundance Film Festival.

Question: You have such distinct personas with every album. Does it always start with the music, and the aesthetics grow from there, or vice versa?

Annie Clark: It's usually music first and then the music tells me what the picture looks like. I just try to continue telling the story with how I look and everything from the color palette of the album to how the paper feels on the vinyl. Just tell the story, continue the world.

Q: What was it about Steely Dan that you connected with at such a young age?

Clark: It was definitely my dad's favorite music, so that was just played a lot. There's a lot of sophistication in Steely Dan, but it's so musical that you can enjoy it on all kinds of different levels. It's really harmonically sophisticated, and there's, like, jazz solos in rock music. So it was really good ear training for a tiny child.

Q: You've said you were always the kid at sleepovers who wanted to play Steely Dan.

Clark: Yeah, it definitely didn't make me that popular, but I also didn't go to that many sleepovers anyway. (Laughs.)

Q: You’ve described “The Melting of the Sun” as a love letter to all these women who came before you, like Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone and Marilyn Monroe. What resonates most with you about their stories?

Clark: To be honest with you, their art resonates more to me than their stories. But their art was was made in a time when the world was even more hostile to female artists or female genius. So it's just me saying thank you to these women and saying, "Thank you for making my life easier. I hope I make life easier for the next generation in a similar way that you did for me."

Q: Did you go into this album knowing you wanted to write about your dad and his incarceration?

Clark: It happened more organically in the process of writing. The song "Daddy's Home" was honestly just so fun to write, and then as I finished the album, I was like, "In a way, the title 'Daddy's Home' really says everything." It's literal, but it's also cringey and funny and pervy. It was a perfect way of saying, "The roles have changed and daddy's home. And I'm daddy."

Q: You sing about “signing autographs in the visitation room.” That must have been a little surreal.

Clark: Look, none of it's pleasant. But just the absurdity of the two worlds colliding in that place and signing autographs in the visitation room of a prison was just too funny and absurd not to chronicle.

Q: So people would recognize you when you visited?

Clark: It was more inmates in there had some kids who were fans, so I sent an autographed poster here and there.

Q: What does your dad think of the album?

Clark: Well, in a funny way, it's a lot of musical references he loves. "Ooh, Steely Dan!" He loves it.

Q: I'm also excited for more people to see "The Nowhere Inn." What was the genesis of that project?

Clark: It was a few things. I wanted to capture the shows I was doing (on tour), like, "I really want these well-documented for posterity." Then I talked to Carrie (Brownstein) about it and was like, "I don't want to do just a straight-ahead concert film. There has to be some kind of narrative." So I started going back and watching films on bands and concert docs, and what I realized is those things are usually paid for by the artist, the narrative is commissioned by the artist and then the artist has final cut. I was like, "That's kind of the definition of propaganda."

If I'm going to be creating a narrative anyway, I'd rather explore these themes in a (unique) way. So Carrie and I wrote something completely scripted and just made a really bonkers art film. Just really weird, psychedelic, turns into psycho-horror – I don't know what it is. (Laughs.) But to me, it felt like a more honest way of exploring the subject.

Q: There's a moment in the film when a journalist asks you to record a message for her girlfriend so she doesn't break up with her. What's the weirdest fan request you've gotten in real life?

Clark: Honestly, my interactions with fans are pretty lovely. I mean, I'm at the occasional free appetizer-level of fame, not the severed dog head on the doorstep.

Q: Do you enjoy a good radish as much as your character in the movie?

Clark: I do like a salad undressed. There, I said it! But no, there were definitely aspects of me being "boring" that were played up for the camera. I'm not a "tea and Scrabble after the show" person, I'm more like "champagne and 'Law & Order: SVU.' "

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: St. Vincent on album 'Daddy's Home,' 'bonkers' horror of 'Nowhere Inn'