St. Vincent just won three Grammy Awards at the 2025 ceremony: Best Rock Song for “Broken Man,” Best Alternative Music Performance for “Flea” and Best Alternative Music Album for “All Born Screaming” (2024). That should be justification enough to subscribe to her hype.
But beyond the accolades, the artist a.k.a. Annie Clark, is for the culture.
In September, to connect with her worldwide audience including many fans in Latin America, the Dallas-raised singer rerecorded “All Born Screaming” in Spanish (“Todos Nacen Gritando”). The Statesman spoke to Clark about Texas and her connection to Spanish culture, her journey through the translation process and more ahead of her April 7 show at Waterloo Park.
(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
American-Statesman: Your album “All Born Screaming,” was just released in Spanish. You worked with one of your friends to make “Todos Nacen Gritando,” correct?
Annie Clark: Yes, I worked with my best friend Alan Del Rio Ortiz. We’ve been best friends since we were 15 years old. He’s from Monterrey, Mexico and fully bilingual, so he helped me translate.
This decision was obviously made to connect with your fans in Latin America, but why Spanish? You have fans all over the world. Does this decision have anything to do with you being from Texas and growing up in close proximity to the border. As you know, we have more Spanish speakers in Texas than any other state, besides California.
Yes, absolutely. Growing up in Texas, Mexican culture is very prevalent, I studied Spanish in junior high and high school, so it made sense for a lot of reasons. One of the personal reasons was that over the course of my career I’ve played a lot of shows in Mexico, South America and Spain, and I was very moved. I would go to these places and my fans would sing my songs back to me in perfect English, which is probably their second, third or maybe fourth language. I wanted to do something to kind of meet them halfway. I thought I could come part of the way to them in their first language to thank them for coming to me all these years. That was the first thing I thought about.
I had the most contact with Spanish speaking cultures growing up in Texas. It’s so intertwined. I also feel like this particular record deals with life, death and love, oftentimes through sacred Catholic imagery. That’s another reason why it made sense to do this record in Spanish.
What drew you to those themes in this album? How did you come to integrate that aesthetic, apart from the Spanish?
I grew up around Catholicism. I think culturally growing up in Texas, Christian iconography is the most prevalent. It’s a lens through which we can conceive love and pain, if the way that we conceive of love and pain is through the suffering of Christ. There’s a lot to unpack there just in how we create, but that’s probably not a conversation for the newspaper.
As I speak to you, I’m looking at a piece of art that says “Hell hath enlarged her mouth.” I forget what they’re called, but there’s an Italian custom where if someone was sick or if you wished for something, you’d have an artist paint what you were wishing for. So, I’m looking at this piece of art that is a woman who clearly has tuberculosis. There’s a woman underneath praying to three angels and a cross above her head. This is the art that’s in my studio. This is the sort of iconography that resonates with me, so it’s natural that I would put it into my work. I’m looking at some particularly wild art, but yes. Who knows why we’re drawn to the things we’re drawn to.
I find it especially pleasing that you took the time to find the phrasing that reflects closest to the lyrics you want to describe.
Translation is a funny thing, right? It’s funny because it’s not literal in a lot of cases. You’re leaning on things that are expressions in English but not an expression in Spanish, so you have to figure out how to say what you’re trying to say in Spanish in a way that actually makes sense but also sings well. There were a lot of things that may have been a direct translation of what I said in English but didn’t sing well in Spanish.
What do you mean by not singing well?
I mean a certain sound. In order to keep a rhyme scheme, you have a certain amount of syllables, or a flow. If a word in English has two syllables but the word in Spanish has four, then you have to figure out a way to make it sound good because ultimately music needs to sound intentional. For example, there’s a song that in English is called “Reckless” but in Spanish is called “Salvaje” which means savage. The word span of “Temeraria” (which is the direct translation of “reckless” in Spanish) is five syllables while “Reckless” is two. So we changed it to “Salvaje” which actually changed the meaning of the song.
I feel like so many things are lost in translation, like you’re not going to get as much out of something if you’re not consuming it in its native tongue.
Exactly. Translation is fascinating and immense. I’ve been reading the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector and just the translation makes all the difference. You could take that sentiment all the way back to the Bible where maybe they intended something to mean one thing but it got translated and interpolated and the next thing you know the meaning or intention changes immensely.
I bet it’s even harder when you’re translating your own story. It must have been a journey translating your own life experiences, feeling and emotions into your music then having to double back and retranslate to make sure everything is sticking the way you want it to.
I found it really liberating as a singer. I find that if I’m singing or listening to a song in English that I’m enjoying and there’s one lyric that’s a little lazy or trite, I can’t suspend my disbelief because I have my songwriter brain on and suddenly the spell is lost and I’m no longer enjoying the music. If I’m listening to music in Spanish, where I speak Spanish but don’t understand everything, I don’t have the same baggage. I can just enjoy the sound and feeling of something. I don’t have those hang ups. I found a similar thing with singing in Spanish, where I just got to enjoy singing and enjoy the sound and feeling it gave me to make sound with my voice.
What is your perspective on the relationship between people in Texas and Spanish, especially those who primarily learned Spanish in school?
I learned it in junior high and high school, then in the past couple years I’ve been wanting to become fluent, because it’s a beautiful language. It’s another pathway to communication with large swaths of the population on planet Earth. So I started studying again and I have a teacher and use Duolingo just to become better. I started doing that during and after the making of “Todos Nacen Gritando.” I’m sure I’ll look back in five years when I’m way better at Spanish and go, ‘Oh, I could have pronounced that better.’ That’ll always be the case.
I did find that when I was in Mexico City about a month ago, I talked to a number of people who said they preferred the Spanish version because they felt like now that it was in their native tongue they understood certain things better. I think it was simply a humble offering to my Spanish speaking fans. The fact that some of them now have a deeper relationship with the music as a result means “Todos Nacen Gritando” served its purpose.
St. Vincent in Austin
St. Vincent will be performing an all ages show Moody Amphitheater on April 7 with support from Glass Beams.
When: 6 p.m. Monday
Where: Moody Amphitheater (1401 Trinity St)
Info: moodyamphitheater.com
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: St. Vincent talks Catholicism, singing in Spanish, growing up Texan ahead of Austin show
Reporting by Mars Salazar, Austin American-Statesman / Austin American-Statesman
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
