At the Prima Estate Festival in Lido di Camaiore, St. Vincent walked onstage like someone who doesn’t believe in introductions. Dressed in black — all angles, all edges — she didn’t wear clothes so much as she inhabited a design. Broad shoulders, a panther-like stride, and that guitar strapped to her body like a natural prosthesis, as essential as breath.
If you know Annie Clark — born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1982 — you know she’s never played nice. Not in interviews, not in her songwriting, and definitely not onstage. She delivered one of the few lines of the night between songs with dry clarity: “I’m not playing a rocker. This is me. Let’s see where this all takes us.” And with that, she launched into a set that felt like an excavation of her own discography — Broken Man, Sugarboy, New York, Cheerleader. Between each track, she moved with uncanny precision, pausing, staring into a void as if truth were about to detonate right there in front of us.
Photo by Claudio Salerno
One of her most captivating contradictions has always been this: the total control she exerts over every detail, masked by the illusion of unpredictability. The stark wardrobe, the stage design calibrated to the inch, the signature guitar she designed in 2016 “to fit women’s bodies too,” it’s more than an instrument — it’s an extension of her thought process, a gentle weapon, a sculpted voice in wood and wire.
There’s something alien, and yet deeply human, in the way she performs. One moment she’s descending from the stage to embrace front-row fans like they’re lifelong friends; the next she’s back under the lights, silent and ice-cold, shredding through a solo that sounds like it was conceived in a padded cell.
During Los Ageless, she mimed a nervous breakdown on the floor, convulsing amid pulsing synths, only to rise and sing, almost sweetly, “You’re the only motherfucker in the city who can handle me.” And when the set came to an end, she hugged her bandmates one by one — introducing them like childhood companions.
Photo by Claudio Salerno
In 2025, St. Vincent triumphed at the Grammys, taking home three awards: Best Rock Song for Broken Man, Best Alternative Music Performance for Flea, and Best Alternative Music Album for All Born Screaming. On that stage, she also revealed for the first time that she has a wife and a young daughter. It’s to them, she later confessed, that she owes this new sense of calm — a serenity that now colors her performances. Less constructed, more raw. Still radical. Still hers.
