“I don’t know how to break this to you, but I’m from Dallas.”
The first words from from St. Vincent (the stage name of Annie Clark), roughly three songs into her 90-minute set on The Lawn at White Oak, were playfully divisive as she glared at the audience and jokingly pointed at a few half-heartedly booing Houstonians.
“But we can come together and set our differences aside,” she winked.
The crowd obliged on a brilliantly cool evening a couple hundred miles south of the singer-songwriter-guitarist’s hometown. She had them eating out of the palm of her hand all night.
Dressed like a fashion icon in a structured gray top and black shorts, St. Vincent both pattered and flounced — at times stutter-stepping like a Kabuki dancer with her long jet black hair and porcelain skin, and at others appearing as a ballerina marionette being flung around the stage like a rag doll.
It was part rock show, part performance art. “It’s all theater,” she joked when she nearly tumbled off the front of the stage late in the show, also mouthing “Oh, my God!”
St. Vincent has the allure of a night club torch song singer and the captivating aura of pop singer. But, make no mistake, there was more rock than art in this particular night of art rock. Channeling a wide range of musical heroes from Prince and David Bowie to Kate Bush and Tori Amos to Nine Inch Nails and Queens of the Stone Age, St. Vincent’s songs — dominated by tunes from her 2024 release All Born Screaming — pulsated and growled behind her multi-octave voice.
Backed by a group of seasoned pros including former Beck and Jellyfish guitarist Jason Faukner, and Houston’s own Robert Ellis on bass, her music, often known for its lavish, textured qualities, was faithfully executed. But there was still plenty of room for the pomp of a rock show, with drummer Mark Guiliana even stepping out for a brief but impressive solo.
All this while St. Vincent commanded center stage deftly demonstrating her own musical chops, honed as a guitarist for Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens. Her ability to simultaneously perform challenging guitar parts while delivering spot on vocal gymnastics was a masterful feat of musical athleticism.
Wisely, she chose to pair many of her more subdued numbers with more animated songs, breathing new life into both. Opening with the quiet and pensive “Reckless” while bathed in white light, she then launched into the raucous “Fear the Future” and “Los Ageless” from 2017’s MASSEDUCTION before hitting what felt like one of the night’s high points with “Big Time Nothing” from All Born Screaming.
Despite being outside, the sound was immaculate. As loud as it could have been with roaring guitars and, at times, thundering drums, there was a listening room-style control that mirrored an audience so attentive, you could hear the traffic whizzing by on I-45 between breaths when St. Vincent engaged the crowd.
Theatrical indeed, the show was clearly well orchestrated, but she was also flirty and playful belying the fact that the songwriter is fiercely protective of her private life off stage.
She finished the night with a vocal-and-keyboard-only version of “Candy Darling” from the 2021 album Daddy’s Home, first teasing “Amarillo by Morning” and then “Friends in Low Places,” before pretending to remember which song she was actually singing.
It was theatricality born of someone who also happens to be a wildly authentic performer and a slyly funny person. Her audience swooned with every note.
