Career

2003–2007: Career beginnings and Marry Me

In 2003, Clark released an EP with fellow Berklee students entitled Ratsliveonnoevilstar.[22] She also worked with Heavy Rotation Records, where "she revealed a much more private and intimate rendering of 'Count' for Dorm Sessions Vol. 1"[23] and studied with professor of guitar Lauren Passarelli. Shortly after leaving Berklee, she returned home to Texas, where she joined the Polyphonic Spree just before they embarked on a European tour.[16] In 2004, she joined Glenn Branca's 100-guitar orchestra for the Queens performance,[24] and she was also briefly in a noise rock band called the Skull Fuckers.[25][26][27]Clark left the Polyphonic Spree and joined Sufjan Stevens' touring band in 2006. During this period, she recorded and released an EP titled Paris Is Burning (2006).

A line in a Nick Cave song

In 2006, she began recording a studio album under the stage name St. Vincent. In an interview on The Colbert Report, she said that she "took [her] moniker from a line in a Nick Cave song" that referred to the hospital where Dylan Thomas died: "And Dylan Thomas died drunk in / St. Vincent's hospital" (from Cave's song "There She Goes, My Beautiful World", from the 2004 album Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus). The name is also a reference to her great-grandmother, whose middle name was St. Vincent.[28] Clark released her debut album, Marry Me, on July 10, 2007, on Beggars Banquet Records. Named after a line from the television sitcom Arrested Development,[29] it features appearances from drummer Brian Teasley (Man or Astro-man?, the Polyphonic Spree), Mike Garson (David Bowie's longtime pianist), and horn player Louis Schwadron (the Polyphonic Spree).