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.
Vogue: So what was the process of actually going song by song and translating it like?
St. Vincent: Well, Alan first did a pass and would say ‘Ok, here’s what the literal translation would be, and then here’s how we would say it’, and I would go in and try to sing it. But sometimes the word doesn’t sing very well, so we’d try to find another way to say it. Like [a lyric] in the first song “Hell Is Near,” in English it’s “I was bare,” but the literal translation was too many syllables for the melody so I was like, ‘ok, desnuda, great! [Ed. note: Desnuda means naked]. Or the same thing with “Reckless”... Que es reckless en español?
Hmm, I feel in Puerto Rico, where I’m from, the slang word for that would be like… algarete. But “reckless” feels like a tricky word…
Alan is from Monterrey so the accent and the expressions that we used are Mexican. I’ll have to go back and look at the word that we were trying to use, but where we landed was salvaje. [Ed. note: Salvaje in English is more like untamed or wild, like in nature.]
Oh yes, salvaje is so good!
Which was like Ooh! And I found the experience really beautiful because at the beginning it was wort of liberating to sing a sound that I didn’t know intimately, like exactly what I was saying. And then as I sang it more and we worked more on the translations, then I knew what I was singing; but at the beginning just singing sounds [and thinking] does this sound good? That part was nice. It was kind of a trippy thing that was very liberating.
Is it something like, you have the emotion of what you know you’re singing, but then you also have this sort of new vocalizations that are different from that?
Yeah, and you kind of go like, does this feel emotional without getting too in your head about it like I do with my first language. And then if something didn’t sing well, didn’t feel emotional, [being able] to change it. I’m thinking of the end of “Hell Is Near,” which in English it’s “Give it all way/You Give it All Away/Because the whole world’s watching you”; but in the Spanish version it’s “Regálalo todo/Regálalo todo/Para el mundo entero”. And that went from a sort of comment on the surveillance state to something that was just “you give it all away, you give it all away/to the whole world”, and that’s beautiful. All these kinds of ways in which the songs changed for me, I think in kind of generous ways that I might not have allowed myself in English, if that makes sense.
Yeah it’s like you’re exercising a different part of your brain in a way, and it’s a little bit giving yourself into randomness.
Yes, which is harder to know when you know what you’re doing. [Laughs]
What’s your favorite song to sing in Spanish?
I think “Mero Cero” (“Big Time Nothing”), because it’s kind of a rap.
How much did you rehearse before recording?
I would sing it and then I’d send it to Alan and he would be like ‘hmm, your pronunciation on that is weird, change that’; I mean, I’m not going to sound like a native speaker because I am not. My biggest hope would be that I would get about as good as Nena singing “99 Red Balloons.”
I was going to ask if you’d ever had that “I love this song and I have no idea what the singer is saying” feeling…
Oh yeah! I mean, my god. Most of Rosalía, Cuco, Bomba Estéreo, all of us Os Mutantes… and it’s liberating when you’re like, ‘Oh this just feels good. This sounds good.’ And there’s certain times where if I’m listening to a song in English and a lyric feels cheesy, it stops me. I can’t suspend my disbelief. Whereas if I’m listening to something in Portuguese or in Spanish and I’m not entirely sure what they’re saying—I mean my Spanish is a lot better now—but it’s more, does this sound good?
What I thought was so interesting is, you know when you listen to a song you pick up lyrics here and there, and then when I listened to it in Spanish I picked up different lyrics, so it allowed me to discover the song in a new way.
Oh good! I mean, I can sleep at night because this was not cynical, it was genuine. It’s fans that made it possible for me to be an artist, and to go to Mexico and South America and Spain, and so it is a sort offering, a humble offering and a sort of show of respect. I know that I’m not a native speaker, and I’m not going to sound like a native speaker, but I thought it could be interesting and I thought it could be beautiful. And it was a heavy lift! You know it wasn’t just re-singing things, like I had to re-do all the vocal production on the entire record. [Laughs] I got about halfway through it and I was like, what have I signed myself up for? And certain songs were easier to translate because of the melody and the words and other ones were like ‘Oh my God, there’s so many words in this, what have I done!
