Monday night Annie Clark released an advance listening of her new album St. Vincent. It is a rather welcomed movement back into the landscape of Marry Me (2007). The album, which unfolds quite dialectically, back into and out of the conventions of social alienation, regret, and maternal love, assembles in front of us as a wholly mature orchestra, one that sees the authentic synthesis of all of her previous efforts into one final sound-wave. In St. Vincent, the complicated relationship one has with their past is clearly expressed in its most awkward and precise form. Let us consider the lines in ‰Psychopath,‰’ “Keep me in your soft sights/When all of the rest have moved on/And I‰’ll keep you in my soft sights/When all the crowd has gone home‰Û: the crucial feature here is the awkward sense of longing or desire to see or manifest a memory, one which may not be accurate or real (of this, Clark sings earlier in ‰Psychopath,‰’ “You said “Honey quit your worryin‰’/Distance is exactly like a blowin‰’ wind/Putting out the embers and the tiny flames/And keepin‰’ the bigger ones burnin.‰Û) This sense of longing is not hard to locate within our social altitude; progressive social environments are continually relocated into a digital space, one which proves effective at further reducing and disrupting the formation of organic or meaningful social relations. It is clear that Clark knows this when she sings in ‰Prince Johnny,‰’ “I wanna mean more than I mean to you/I wanna mean more than I meant to him/So I pray to all/To make me a real girl/So I pray to all/To make me a real girl.‰Û

This impoverishment is captured quite nicely by Clark‰’s verse “Digital witnesses, what‰’s the point of even sleeping?/If I can‰’t show it, you can‰’t see me?/What‰’s the point of doing anything?/What‰’s the point of even sleeping?/So, I stopped sleeping, yeah, I stopped sleeping/Won‰’t somebody sell me back to me?‰Û: thus, this awkward reflection on the digital listener indicates a certain sort of regret, a backward glance towards a moment when our identities were not completely digitalized. Though, while these verses may signal a recollection back to a small remainder of memories, those that have mostly vanished under the immensity of this digital age, what is striking is how the very medium of music paradoxically argues in favor of this digitalization. To this, Clark agrees: “Yeah, I live on wires/Yeah, I‰’ve been born twice/Yeah, I live on wires.‰” Thus, St. Vincent generates a space where we can only understand and appreciate the album by delving into the digital world that constructs it; St. Vincent hinges on the existence of this digital space, one that is arid of values and full of abstracted social engagements (in one instance, Clark denounces social media by affirming it).

In a certain sense, if we destroy or remove St. Vincent_‰’s digital space, the identity of Clark would also disappear. “Yeah, I live on wires‰” is the clearest indication that the relationship we have towards her and the album remains only possibly because of the immense network of digital interactions we have with the album. This immense collection of relationships, in a sense, is _St. Vincent. Along these lines, we come to see the logic behind such lines as “Follow the powers lines back from the road/No one around so I take off my clothes/Am I the only one in the only world?‰” — in the most basic sense, we can answer Clark‰’s verse with a yes. The world of St Vincent forms the experiential horizon, which paradoxically, acknowledges itself as a grand project of social reduction and impoverishment, while simultaneously affirming its project as such. Thus, St. Vincent becomes another sublime object of reflection; it transgresses the boundaries that it invites.