St Vincent’s artistry has been rooted in pushing boundaries since the beginning. Annie Clark’s genre-bent songs combine sculptural vocals, intense guitars and surrealistic witticisms with an intensely personal point of view, resulting in funhouse-mirror pop that gives the sensation of delighting the artist as much as it does her audience. While David Bowie and Kate Bush are obvious influences, she’s also been upfront about the way the orchestrations from early Disney films made an impression on her: “All that stuff, it’s your first introduction to magic,” she told the podcast This Song in 2019.
Last year, she made her BBC Proms debut with a set featuring orchestral reworkings of her catalog, with the Jules Buckley Orchestra and a rock combo tearing through new arrangements of discographical chestnuts like the exuberantly loopy Digital Witness as well as cuts from her most recent album, 2024’s All Born Screaming. The experiment was successful enough to spawn the live album Live in London! and, now, a road show where Clark and the conductor Buckley, as well as a touring band (keyboardist Rachel Eckroth, guitarist Robert Ellis, bassist Allee Futterer and drummer John Hadfield), pull up to perform with local orchestras.
On Thursday, Clark and her crew set up shop at Boston’s Symphony Hall to join forces with the Boston Pops, an endlessly versatile offshoot of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Clark graduated from the Berklee College of Music, a short walk from the hall, in the early 00s, and early in the show, she deadpanned, “It’s the first time Euripides has seen us play,” referring to one of the 16 replica statues lining the hall’s walls.
The Athenian playwright and the show’s other attenders were treated to widescreen versions of Clark’s catalog, beginning with a triad of songs from All Born Screaming including the fever-dreamy Hell Is Near and the existentially troubled Violent Time. The latter was given new depth by its new arrangement, the pulsing electro beat propelling its recorded version dropping out in favor of a more severe rhythm that framed the orchestral tumult and highlighted the anguish at its core: “I must have been dreaming / I fell down the well / Waking up, waking up in hell,” Clark wailed as the strings and woodwinds whipped into a frenzy.
Clark’s guitar playing was also on display throughout the show, with an assistant bringing out various parts of her instrumental arsenal at appropriate moments. Marrow, a churning cut from 2009 album Actor, got extra bite from her insistent shredding. Now, Now, from her 2007 debut Marry Me, pitted her delicate arpeggios against ghostly string harmonics in a way that made its verses’ taunts feel airy, making its singsong ending – “You don’t mean that, say you’re sorry,” repeated enough times to turn the words into an overbearing command – hit even harder.
The show’s centerpiece was Smoking Section, the smoldering closer of 2017’s Masseduction. Here, it was transformed into a suite, with an opening movement of rushing woodwinds and keyboards feeling like the churnings of an anxious brain, a fitting lyrical prelude to a song in which the protagonist fights her way out of a depressive trough toward a hopeful tomorrow. The closing refrain of “It’s not the end” became more poignant with the orchestra swaddling it, seemingly providing comfort.
From there, Clark’s demeanor became lighter even as the musicianship kept its sky-high standard, and by the time the setlist reached 2014’s delirious selfie-age indictment Digital Witness, she was dancing across the stage, offering the microphone to various musicians so they could provide that song’s punctuating, Valley Girl-drawled “yeah”s. She popped into the crowd during the thundering New York, sporting a hat proffered to her by an excitable front-row dweller and supplying hugs and high fives, and for the encore opener Candy Darling, she plopped to the stage floor, kicking up her heels in girlish fashion as she cooed her 2021 ode to the “queen of south Queens”. She gathered herself for the final track, Slow Disco, a Masseduction ballad that, on record, is accompanied by strings. The orchestral arrangement was bigger but not by too much, putting a bow on a night that showed how Clark’s art pop has always been entwined with high art.
