St. Vincent waited nearly 20 years to use the name of her new album

When Annie Clark was 22, she heard a phrase that stuck with her: "all born screaming."

Clark, also known as St. Vincent, tried to write a song with the phrase, but it didn't work out. Still, she never forgot it. Nearly 20 years later, she finally found a place to use it: as the name for her new album, which comes out today.

"Music is mysterious and it reveals itself to you when you are ready and when you are a rightful recipient of it — when you've earned it," she tells Tom Power in a Q interview. "I had to live a lot of life to really earn the title All Born Screaming."

This is Clark's seventh album, but the first that she's produced alone. In the past, she's co-produced with Jack Antonoff (who also produces Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey) and John Congleton (who has produced Death Cab for Cutie and Erykah Badu).

For All Born Screaming, Clark wanted to be in full creative control. She wanted to sing emotionally heavy songs like Hell is Near and Reckless as many times as she needed to without feeling bad about putting someone else through that.

"I need to find my language when there's nobody else in the room," she says. "It's the sound of the inside of my head."

This creative control allowed Clark to use analogue music tools to build the sound of the "industrial dance music" on All Born Screaming. She used modular loops, old drum machines and electricity through analogue circuitry.

Clark felt that the analogue tools allowed her to lean into chaos — something that was deeply important to her on this album.

"If I can start from a place of chaos and harness that into something orderly, then it will be alive from the beginning," she says. "It will start with life instead of starting from a splice loop."

But Clark had to ensure that she didn't let the exploration of trying out new tools distract from the ultimate goal: a great song.

"What's the heart? What's the spine?" she says. "Finding that, it's the most important thing."

Clark's songs on All Born Screaming may not be as overly personal and biographical as the songs on her last album, Daddy's Home, which is about her father's return home from prison, yet she says all her songs are personal — even if fans don't know exactly what it says about her life.  

"After the work is out there in the world, it's not about me. Who the f--k cares what was going on in my life?" she says. "It matters to you and it means something and it helps you feel seen."

The full interview with St. Vincent is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with St. Vincent produced by Lise Hosein.