St. Vincent’s road to the Detroit Opera House was paved when she stepped off a London stage in September.
What had been intended as a one-off performance — a collaboration with a 60-piece orchestra at the famed Royal Albert Hall — became a magical, enthralling experience that left the artist born Annie Clark craving more.
She immediately approached her manager: “Please start booking this! Let’s go.”
“The second I walked off the stage, I was just like, ‘I need to do this again,’” St. Vincent recounted. “I had just ridden the most epic wave of beauty.”
And so here we are 10 months later, with St. Vincent heading to Detroit on Friday, July 24, performing with the Detroit Opera Orchestra to reconceptualize some of her best-known songs along with lesser-played deep cuts. The 16-date North American tour, which also took her to Interlochen on Wednesday, will include a Sunday, July 26, stop in Grand Rapids.
Grammy-winning Pakistani American musician Arooj Aftab will open the shows.
Along for the St. Vincent ride is conductor Jules Buckley, who oversaw the Royal Albert Hall performance, a BBC event that was captured on tape and released as the album “Live in London!” this spring. Buckley and St. Vincent keyboardist Rachel Eckroth handled most of the orchestral arrangements.
While this summer’s tour certainly takes its cues from that special night in London, St. Vincent said the creative fine-tuning hasn’t stopped. The guitarist-singer-songwriter has intentionally combed through her two-decade catalog for material fitting the musical occasion rather than presenting a mere greatest-hits set.
“I had just come from doing the ‘All Born Screaming’ (album) tour, which was like a real blood-and-guts kind of tour. It was a rock show. It was messy and violent,” she said. “So there was an aspect to making sure the song selection for this tour was nothing cheeky, nothing cute. Like, just make sure that every song is very much from the heart.”
There are plenty of ways to approach an orchestral crossover performance, and Lord knows many pop artists in recent years have tried, often to dubious effect, with strings jammed in just for the sake of it.
But St. Vincent’s sophisticated, textured repertoire is made for the cause — an imaginative body of work ripe for reimagining.
Presented with that assessment during a Free Press interview, the Texas-raised musician accepted it graciously.
“My first two or three records were so influenced by orchestral music. I was listening to Stravinsky, and I was listening to Disney film scores, and I was listening to Debussy and Satie,” she said. “The music I recorded — the DNA of it was orchestral music. So it’s almost like now I get to play this as it was intended, as my ears heard it but my budget could never afford.”
As heard on “Live in London,” and likely Friday at the Detroit Opera House, the orchestral setting allows for musical transformation. 2017’s “Smoking Section” blossoms into a majestic epic — “full beauty instead of quiet defeat,” as St. Vincent put it. “Los Ageless,” one of her biggest hits, eschews the tough, slinky sound of the record to “be the sort of torch song it actually is.”
St. Vincent and her band are in the thick of the onstage proceedings, even if roles slightly shift to accommodate the symphonic approach — say, cellos taking over a guitar part. And while she’s certainly been known for her dynamic, production-heavy live shows, the visuals Friday night will come with a more subtle touch (“I didn’t want to put a hat on a hat,” she said).
“My job as a guitar player here is to add texture and make it congeal with this group,” she said. “It’s not about wanking on the guitar. It’s about 60 people becoming one voice.”
In her kaleidoscopic career, the 43-year-old musician has put herself in a variety of musical environments: cabaret settings, heavy rock shows, the horn-driven funkiness of her collaborations with David Byrne. The orchestral project has offered a different sort of challenge, she said, with its own unique rigors and rewards.
“The culture of orchestras is a very different culture than being in a rock band and playing with your buddies,” she said. “I just try to show (the musicians) total reverence and also get them excited about playing, sort of get them on my side. … I guess my rapport is one of reverence but also a little of ‘come on, team!’”
What’s next on St. Vincent’s musical journey? Well, she wouldn’t have predicted this latest artistic adventure, and she’s happy to let the bookkeeping writing itself.
“I know some people have vision boards and manifesting. But I never do,” she said. “I just sit and do the work that’s right in front of me. I just put one foot in front of the other, really, and trust that if I’m doing that righteously, it will lead to something worthy.”
Contact Detroit Free Press music writer Brian McCollum: 313-223-4450 or bmccollum@freepress.com.
St. Vincent: Live with Orchestra Tour
With Arooj Aftab
8 p.m. Friday
Detroit Opera House
1526 Broadway, Detroit
ticketmaster.com
(St. Vincent will also perform at Grand Rapids’ Frederik Meijer Gardens with the Grand Rapids Symphony at 7 p.m. Sunday.)
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: St. Vincent ready to make orchestral rock magic at Detroit Opera House
Reporting by Brian McCollum, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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By Brian McCollum, Detroit Free Press | USA TODAY Network
