St. Vincent Says Her Spanish Album Was an ‘Escape Hatch to More Joy’

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St. Vincent. - Credit: David William Baum*

Music is an art form — and so is translation. Annie Clark, who’s better known as the boundary-pushing art-rock firebrand St. Vincent, recently learned this firsthand as she pored over every lyric of her seventh album, All Born Screaming, alchemically transforming each word into Spanish.

Clark, 41, grew up in Texas and had studied the language in junior high and high school, so she already had a basic handle on Spanish. Since becoming an internationally touring artist, she has felt a deeper affinity for the language and Latin culture when she has performed in Spain and Latin America. After hearing fans in those countries sing her lyrics back to her in English, she decided to meet them in the middle by immersing herself in their language by completely rebuilding All Born Screaming.

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The result was Todos Nacen Gritando, which will come out Nov. 15. A first taste of the album, “Hombre Rote” (originally “Broken Man”), came out last week. But Clark tells Rolling Stone that remaking all 10 of the album’s songs wasn’t an easy task.

One obstacle, for instance, was “Reckless,” the record’s keening second track. “The word for ‘reckless,’ it just wasn’t singing right,” she says, likely referring to the multisyllabic temerario. “So we changed it to salvaje, which means savage. And that hit, that emotionally hit in a way that changed the meaning of the song, but in a way that felt like a ton of bricks.”

With a little help from her friend, filmmaker Alan Del Rio Ortiz, she found the right words for every song. When she was finished, she told Rolling Stone over Zoom on Tuesday, she’d reached a new and better understanding of her own art.

Why did you want to re-record All Born Screaming in Spanish? I have had some of my favorite shows of my life in Spanish-speaking countries, and I’m always kind of blown away by the fact that people will sing along with my songs in perfect English, and that it could be their second or third or fourth language. I’ve always loved Spanish and wanted to be better at it, frankly. So this was a double whammy where I could get better at the language that I love and also meet people halfway.

Did you find the process challenging? It was very challenging and really interesting and informative. I was rethinking [the album] and also redoing all of the vocal production, because I sang all the vocals on All Born Screaming, with the exception of having my friend, Cate Le Bon, sing [on the title track]. There’s, like, stacks of vocals. I got about halfway through the record and was like, “What have I done? What have I undertaken?” But I was already halfway at sea, so there was no turning back.

What is your connection with your fans in Spanish-speaking countries and Latin America like? In Mexico and Latin America, people love music and they’re not afraid to show it. I had experiences in Mexico, crowd-surfing, where I had to wrestle somebody for my shoes. They weren’t trying to steal my shoes; they just wanted a part of it.… It was, like, religious, like they wanted a piece of my body, and I had to fight over my shoe because I only had one pair of show shoes.

Another time, I was playing this solo show in Brazil for a thousand people, and I could barely hear myself because every single person in that room knew every word to every single song. And it stopped me in my tracks; it made me tear up. These people halfway across the world, this is probably their third language, and they know all of it because music is life. I’ve had similar experiences in Colombia and Argentina. I just love it. So this is just a humble offering to those fans.

How fluent are you now? I’m getting better. [Pauses.] I would say I’m at an eighth-grade level.

That sounds great to me. I don’t know. I still get very confused by the tenses. I’m not sure how to say many things in the future or the past tense. I could speak like a robot who only talks about things that are currently happening.

And then there’s the subjunctive case, would that it were so simple. Yeah, that stuff. And verbs like, me encanta: “It pleases me.” But I’m getting better. Two of my sisters are fluent, so I’m hopeful.

How did translating your lyrics give you a better understanding of English? One thing I learned from this was that I have even more respect for people who learn English, because English doesn’t make any goddamn sense. There’s so many words for the same thing. There are no rules because it’s such a kind of a mutt of a language. I mean, all languages are polyglots, but English is particularly crazy because of all of the influences on the language and the history of the language.

So on this album, things like at the end of “Hell Is Near,” the English translation was like, “You give it all away/You give it all away because the whole world’s watching you.” To sing it in Spanish, there were too many syllables. So I just kept it as, “Regalalo todo, regalalo todo por el mundo entero,“ like, “You just give it all away to the whole world.” So the meaning went away from a sort of leering cynicism of, “You give it all away because the whole world’s watching you” to like, “You give it all away to the entire world.” It became kind of really generous instead of any hint of menacing, and that felt great. I thought, “I wouldn’t have allowed myself that in English, but in Spanish, it feels right to sing.” So there were a lot of things where I was just trusting sound and trusting that something feels very emotional.

You just feel the words differently in Spanish? I have a harder time getting there with some songs when I’m singing in English because I know what I’m saying. And I have the same experience listening to music where a song grooves so hard, it sounds so good, it feels so cool, but there’s one lyric that’s corny to me, and it ruins the whole song. And I can’t suspend my disbelief; I can’t go there. Whereas if I’m listening to music in Portuguese or Spanish, if it sounds good and feels good, I’m not tripping on the words. I’m not going, “Ah, that’s a little trite.” So it’s actually an escape hatch to more joy and meaning in ways that I have my guard up in English.

How was it for you re-singing everything and mustering the same emotion you had on All Born Screaming? It was a tall order. I don’t think I thought about how much work it really was going to be when I was like, “I’m going to do the whole record in Spanish.” It was genuinely a really heavy lift. But I needed to see it through. When you need to do something, you do it.

You told Rolling Stone you did hundreds of vocal takes on the original All Born Screaming. Was it the same with Todos Nacen Gritando? [Laughs.] If I was doing a hundred takes, it was because I was sending it off to Alan and going, “Did I get this pronunciation?”

It was a freeing process because I wasn’t tripping so hard on the meaning. With English, you’re tripping so hard on the meaning of the thing because you know exactly literally every single thing you’re singing. Once I got the pronunciation, I didn’t have the same kind of emotional roadblocks to singing because … I don’t know.

Maybe it’s because you already lived the emotion of the original. Right. It’s easier to get there probably because I knew where it had ended up emotionally on the English version. That’s fair.

How did you work with Alan on the translations? First was a literal translation, and then it was me looking at that and going, “OK, I don’t think that really sings well,” or “How can we change this?” He’s from Monterrey, Mexico, so idiomatically and accent-wise everything was going to be more Mexican just as a result. There were certain phrases like, “Yeah, I could translate this literally, but it doesn’t make any sense in Spanish. So here’s what you would say instead.”

There was a phrase in “Tantos Planetas,” “So Many Planets,” where I’m singing, “Hemorrhaging heartthrob with a six-pack of beer.” OK, that wasn’t going to work. So it became “Rompe corazones con unas cervezas,” which sort of means “heartbreaker with the beers.” There are fewer words in Spanish than English. There’s the line, “Alcemos lana de su trauma”: “We’ll make cash from her trauma,” which I think “lana,” that’s more like Mexican slang. Where the English line is, “We’ll make a killing from her trauma, oh, mama.” It’s different.

You have concerts scheduled for Madrid and Barcelona next month. Are you ready to sing these songs in Spanish? Yeah. I’m not going to sing every song from the new record in Spanish because, well, for one, I think people will only be familiar with a couple of the translations because the record won’t be out yet, but I think I’ll pick a couple to sing in Spanish.

I’m not so worried about me because I know them in Spanish, but I do have to teach the band members songs like “Big Time Nothing,” which is “El Mero Cero” — you know “big zero,” like, “boss zero” — stuff like that. They sing the backgrounds and stuff. Luckily with “Broken Man” or “Hombre Roto,” all the backgrounds just saying, “Ah.” So that stays.

So you’re ready for this album to come screaming into the world. Some people will enjoy it, some people will laugh at me, which is fine. But it wasn’t cynical on my part whatsoever, so I can sleep at night. The goal wasn’t for me to sound like a native speaker because I’m obviously not, but I was like, “If I can get to about as good as, like, Nena and ’99 Luftballons,’ then I’ll be OK.” If it’s in that zone, that’s OK.

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