St. Vincent: All Born Screaming Tour

This event is General Admission Standing Room on the Floor, and Reserved Seated in the Balcony.

St. Vincent Presale: Wed 11/13 10AM - Thu 11/14 10PM

Venue Presale: Thu 11/14 10AM - 10PM

Spotify Presale: Thu 11/14 10AM - 10PM

Public On Sale: Fri 11/15 10AM

Annie Clark made her recorded debut as St. Vincent in 2007 with Marry Me, quickly becoming regarded as one of the most innovative and fascinating presences in modern music. Her subsequent albums would include Actor (2009), Strange Mercy (2011), her self-titled fourth album and winner of the 2014 GRAMMY for Best Alternative Album. In 2017, her fifth album MASSEDUCTION would break St. Vincent into the U.S. and UK top 10s and win two more GRAMMYs (Best Rock Song for its title track, and Best Recording Package). 2021’s Daddy’s Home found St. Vincent channeling the hungover glamor and gritty sepia-toned soundtrack of 1970s downtown NYC to an ecstatic reception, ultimately winning her a second Best Alternative Album GRAMMY. Following a 2021-2022 global tour that reaffirmed St. Vincent’s status as one of live music's preeminent forces with headline appearances at the likes of the Hollywood Bowl and Radio City Music Hall, Clark would begin work on album number seven: Her first fully self-produced album (having co-produced every one of her previous efforts), All Born Screaming is St. Vincent at her most primal. Featuring Clark leading “a curated group of rippers” through the brawny “Broken Man,” the mordant catwalk sashay through the deafening assault of self-loathing that is “Big Time Nothing,” the sublime, elegiac earworm “Sweetest Fruit," All Born Screaming is equal parts spiritual desolation and rapturous acceptance. “If you’re born screaming, that’s a great sign,” says Clark, “because it means you’re breathing. You’re alive. My god. It’s joyous. And then it’s also a protest. We’re all born in protest in a certain way. It’s terrifying to be alive, it’s ecstatic to be alive. It’s everything.”
Links: Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Spotify

In April 2023, Wallice found herself on stages in arenas full of strangers. The Los Angeles songwriter was on the other side of the world, playing shows to 10,000 or more people who had, in many cases, been standing in line for days to see their favorite band, The 1975. Wallice was the opener, playing the biggest shows of her life to crowds that mostly didn’t know her name. It was a thrill, of course, but there was dejection to it, too, to staring out at front rows of blank faces, struggling with the sleeplessness of a few days spent in line.

So Wallice did what songwriters do: She turned the uncanny experience into “The Opener,” the six-minute gambit of her first LP, The Jester. As the track moves from tender ballad to defiant rocker, she considers all the bad things she might say about her own art—a Radiohead rip-off, too innocent, too determined—and moves forward, anyway. “Gonna get what I deserve/I’m still the opener,” she roars in the final seconds, balancing future hopes with present conditions across a razor wire of howling guitars.

This push and pull between expectation and actuality animate much of The Jester, Wallice’s ultra-dynamic and charged 14-song debut. Though Wallice has been writing songs since she was a preteen playing cello and releasing them for almost as long, her career took shape during the last four years, when a series of singles and EPs suggested her as a new chronicler of early adulthood’s struggles and delights.

Written while living with her mom and working in the eyelash extension business, that music—Wallice, 26, says now—was about coming of age. Now with a place of her own and a decade-long relationship, Wallice is making music that reckons with age and reality, that learns to find joy and meaning not in the life you wanted but in the life you have. As it pivots from soft acoustic waltzes to fluorescent electronic bounces, from warped piano drifts to unabashed rock anthems, The Jester holds fast to that thread: gratitude for what you’ve got and hope for what might yet come.

A year before those shows across the globe, Wallice returned from her first substantial tour with similar questions about her path forward. Having first found widespread attention online, she struggled with the novel notion of putting on a show each night, of performing for a crowd no matter what else was happening. On April 1, 2022, during their first writing session together, she told Ethan Gruska & her longtime collaborator Marinelli about those feelings; together, they stumbled upon the concept of “The Jester,” or about sometimes having to mask what’s inside for the sake of entertainment.

They hatched the first half of “Heaven Has to Happen,” a confession about suffering from imposter syndrome even while you’re living your dream. “How many more jokes can I make before the wool gets pulled out from over my eyes?” Wallice sings just before a brief, mid-song outburst of distorted bass. For the better part of two years, that’s where Wallice and Gruska left the track.

Such collaborations proved essential to The Jester, allowing Wallice to push outside of her self-

doubt and pull the songs in new directions. A childhood Strokes fan, she was chuffed to work

with Albert Hammond, Jr. on “Clown Like Me,” a tricky power-pop warning about the damage you do to yourself by damaging other people. She tracked down Sam Evian to help shape “Flash in the Pan,” a cool, trumpet-graced hymn about realizing your time and energy are worth more than the trouble of waiting for something or someone to love you back. Similar questions about time, patience, and self-image trace “Hurry Babe,” a graceful and charming country-rock number made with Hovvdy’s Charlie Martin. Wallice questions her body, her drive, and even her

commitment as a friend before realizing that it’s being happy alongside the people you loves that matters most. “You can take my time, baby,” she sings back to herself, answering her own

anxiety. “Wanna spend it with you.”

For the last decade, Wallice has collaborated on every song she’s released with David Marinelli, this “kooky guy with big hair” she met as a teenager during band and orchestra class and whose mom was sometimes her substitute teacher. They share the unbridled honesty and unguarded chemistry of the best tandems, able to parse bad from good in an instant. But Wallice loves full albums (In Rainbows remains an epiphany), singular pieces of music that cohere. To get there for The Jester, the duo wanted to incorporate another voice who had more experience with entire records. They invited Mikey Freedom Hart into their mix. He had worked on albums by Blood Orange, Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, and Jon Batiste, so they submitted to his expertise, spending 14-hour days in his New York studio (and one very special night in Electric Lady).

The trio bent every song into multiple forms, looking for the sound and structure that best fit the tension within Wallice’s real tales. The range Wallice mines during these 46 minutes is astounding. As cool as a late spring breeze, the exquisite jangle of “Gut Punch Love” camouflages the tragic story of her mother’s first fiancé, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances, after presenting her with a wedding ring. With its pulsing synths and cascading vocal lines, “Look At Me” sashays from electropunk to blissful electropop, Wallice’s voice spiraling atop synth lines that feel like a sunrise. Where “Curtains To Close” is a symphonic waltz through the annals of depression (and an allegory featuring an actual clown), “Sickness” is a barn-burning bit of grunge about lust and longing, like Mudhoney wrapped in a velvet glove. “I don’t know how to sing about sex/Those parts of my life don’t intersect,” Wallice offers during “The Opener,” a hesitancy she attributes to the expectation of politeness and propriety often placed on Asian-American kids.

Across the next 13 tracks, she starts to sing about that aspect of her life, anyway, but always on her own terms. Here are the multitudes of growing up, one sharp song at a time. The first bit of The Jester that Wallice wrote was the first portion of “Heaven Has To Happen Soon,” with Gruska. But their schedules didn’t allow them to finish it together, so it sat in that half-done state until The Jester was almost final, its acoustic guitar drifting out as if to sea. But then, she, Hart, and Marinelli landed upon a fitting exit, with her voice cutting through shrieking saxophone and pounding drums to offer one last verse. “Askin’ the universe a favor,” she sings. “Can you save the rain for later?” The question feels more like a demand, Wallice stepping up and saying what she needs—a little space of her own to offer up this charged, charming triumph of a debut.
Links: Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Spotify

Event Venue

College Street Music Hall, 238 College Street, New Haven, United States