Hey, look who it is on the cover of Spin this month! Dallas native Annie Clark, the indie guitar heroine straight outta Dallas better known as St. Vincent. Yup, the former Polyphonic Spree player (forever ago, really) graces the cover "The Style Issue" from the mag -- looking fairly stylish, and definitely striking.
It's perfect timing -- as gracing the cover of a magazine tends to be -- given that Clark's got a new, produced-right-here-in-Dallas-by-John-Congleton album on the way: Strange Mercy, the follow-up to her 2009 Actor breakthrough, is due out in less than a month, earning its 4AD release on September 13. About a month later -- on Sunday, October 23 -- she'll be back here in her hometown for a gig at Oak Cliff's Kessler Theatre.
But on to the bigger question: When was the last time a Dallas product got on the cover of a major music magazine? (Spare us the lecture on the death of print media and/or whether Spin is a major music magazine, please.)
No, seriously. Can't remember. Edie Brickell? That's Wilonsky's guess. Anyone else got an idea?
I digress: In addition to the cover, there's six pages dedicated to Miss Clark. Our favorite part's right up at the front, though -- when Clark explains how heading out to Arlington to catch a Texas Rangers game helped formulate her songwriting future. The piece doesn't appear to be online just yet, so take a quick look at a tiny excerpt from the Julie Klausner-penned piece after the jump.
[Clark] was at a Texas Rangers game, not far from where she grew up. Around the second inning, she caught a glimpse of the sky where it met the end of the stadium bleachers, like a horizon line.Freaky.
"I remember looking at the sky and thinking that the universe is so big and it's all chaos," she tells me 18 years later on a hot July afternoon in downtown Manhattan. "I call it 'the dark fear.' At any moment, the dark fear could come in."
