Madame Butterfly

Postmodern rock star Annie Clark, better known as St. Vincent, is ready for her next metamorphosis.

- Carrie Battan

“Isn’t it nice to be lying down?” Annie Clark asks me, her eyelids growing heavy over her inquisitive doe eyes. All afternoon, the musician has been steering us toward this moment, when she can kick off her shoes and kill two birds with one stone: doing an interview and getting a few moments of rest.She’s tucked into bed at the Marlton Hotel in Greenwich Village, where she has been holed up for several months. Like Clark herself—whose slight physique and high-voltage sound make for a compelling contrast—the room at the Marlton is compact and austere, with a spike of flamboyance: a black chandelier with breasts as bulb enclosures.

Clark, who at 34 has been performing as St. Vincent for the last decade, deserves a moment of rest. Her recent to-do list included finishing her fifth solo album, Mass eduction, out this month, creating a set of Day-Glo music videos and visuals to accompany it, and planning an international tour called Fear the Future. “But I’ve done everything on that list,” she says, before gesturing that I can join her under the duvet. “I fuckin’ did it.” She’s caught the film bug, too: Clark made her directorial debut in February, taking part in an all-female-directed horror anthology called XX, and is soon to embark on a feature adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray for Lionsgate. “When I’m really in zero-in, eagle-eyed work mode, there’s not really anything done for pleasure. Food becomes perfunctory,” she says.