Guitar Heroes: St. Vincent’s ‘Birth In Reverse’.

Leave it to Annie Clark aka St. Vincent to inspire my return to this series after a long hiatus. Clark in a career spanning six studio albums (so far), not including her collaboration with David Byrne, has electrified and reinvented what it is to be a musician and modern guitar virtuoso. Clark once said the song that first inspired her to play guitar was either Jimi Hendrix’s Manic Depression or his version of All Along the Watchtower. On the latter, a friend of her father’s showed her a couple of riffs from the song on his Fender Stratocaster and she was totally hooked. Interestingly after begging her parents for an electric guitar, one of the first songs she wanted to learn to play wasn’t a Hendrix classic but Jethro Tull’s Aqualung. Also high on her list of riffs to learn to play was Nirvana’s Smell Like Teen Spirit. Why? Because Kurt Cobain was an early hero of the Texan in her formative years. He was an outsider, something that Clark (a self-described weirdo) has often felt like herself.

While Nirvana is often credited as reinventing rock in the early 90s, Clark has done the same for a new generation of inspiring musician with her eclectic taste and her skill for self-reinvention. In recent years Clark has said she hoped that she has made it easier for the next generation “to be whoever they are and say whatever they want to say.”

This statement is arguably one of the reasons what I love about Clark. Take for instants how she writes for music. She is always pushing herself, making observations and often using evocative lyrics to make a point. This is maybe no more so than in the introduction on her lead single Birth In Reverse from her 2014 self-titled album. “Oh, what an ordinary day / Take out the garbage, mastubate.”

These opening lyrics set the tone on themes Clark explores in the song all one way or another related to identity, individuality and societal expectation. One can also interpret the song being about an outsider looking in on a dsyfuntional world. Death also comes to mind. (“I wanted to make a party record you could play at a funeral,” Clark said in a press release in 2014 about the songs on her self titled album.) But what really drives the song though is Clark’s distinctive use of her jarring electric guitar. I’ve read somewhere once the guitar (on the song) described the way an anxiety attack or mental breakdown might sound. In truth it feels completely schizophrenic and I love how Clark incorporates the mood she is aiming for. Beginning with the intro, then the verse, chorus, two solos and the mind blowing outdo, Clark shows off her enigmatic technique. While the studio version sounds polished (and is very good), Clark when in a theatrical mood, especially live, excels often expanding upon her performance to great effect. This is why Clark is a modern guitar hero.

Photo Credit: The header image is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.