Earlier this year, St. Vincent’s Annie Clark released All Born Screaming, an album which managed to capture the absolute clusterfuck of emotions that make up being alive in the year 2024 in a compact 10 songs and 42 minutes. The self-produced record is raw and gritty and sensual and experimental and fun. It also showcases Clark as an artist in her peak, in absolute control.
It’s why the news that she is releasing a Spanish-language version of the album titled Todos Nacen Gritando is so exciting. You see, St. Vincent only speaks un poquito de Español. “I studied Spanish in junior high and high school, and I mean Soy de Tejas, vivo en California,” she said during a recent phone conversation playfully peppered with moments in Spanish, (which worked because Spanish is my first language). “But I’ve always wanted to become fluent. Now I do Duolingo just to keep the muscles working.” She translated the record with the help of her best friend and frequent collaborator Alan del Rio Ortiz, going back and forth to fine tune words so that they could fit in they pre-established melodies, and then re-recorded every single song. The result is exhilarating—Clark has a thick accent and sometimes she mispronounces words, but it only makes the album that much more charming, and meaningful. Here is St. Vincent showing a vulnerable side, indulging in a larger-than-life idea simply because it’s something she desires, and also as an act of love and gratitude to all her Spanish-speaking fans in Latin America, Spain, and the rest of the world. “I was thinking about the places that I love playing the most. I’ve had so many formative experiences playing in Mexico and Latin American and Spain,” she says. “It’s so amazing to see people for whom English is not their first language sing along to every word. You know in a lot of cases English is their second or third or fourth language, who knows? So I thought, if they come to me, why don’t I try to go to them? And it was an excuse for me to jumpstart getting better at Spanish to eventually become fluent in it.” Ahead of the release of “Pulga,” out today, St. Vincent talks about putting the album together and how the translations sometimes gave the songs new meaning.