Music is an art form and so is translation.Annie Clark, whos better known as the boundary-pushing art-rock firebrandSt.
The result wasTodos Nacen Gritando, which will come out Nov. 15.
A first taste of the album, Hombre Roto (originally Broken Man), came out last week.
St. Vincent.David William Baum*
But Clark tellsRolling Stonethat remaking all 10 of the albums songs wasnt an easy task.
One obstacle, for instance, was Reckless, the records keening second track.
The word for reckless, it just wasnt singing right, she says, likely referring to the multisyllabictemerario.
So we changed it tosalvaje, which means savage.
Theres, like, stacks of vocals.
I got about halfway through the record and was like, What have I done?
What have I undertaken?
But I was already halfway at sea, so there was no turning back.
I had experiences in Mexico, crowd-surfing, where I had to wrestle somebody for my shoes.
They werent trying to steal my shoes; they just wanted a part of it…. And it stopped me in my tracks; it made me tear up.
Ive had similar experiences in Colombia and Argentina.
I just love it.
So this is just a humble offering to those fans.
How fluent are you now?Im getting better.
I still get very confused by the tenses.
Im not sure how to say many things in the future or the past tense.
I could speak like a robot who only talks about things that are currently happening.
And then theres the subjunctive case, would that it were so simple.Yeah, that stuff.
And verbs like,me encanta: It pleases me.
But Im getting better.
Two of my sisters are fluent, so Im hopeful.
Theres so many words for the same thing.
There are no rules because its such a kind of a mutt of a language.
To sing it in Spanish, there were too many syllables.
It became kind of really generous instead of any hint of menacing, and that felt great.
And I cant suspend my disbelief; I cant go there.
Im not going, Ah, thats a little trite.
It was genuinely a really heavy lift.
But I needed to see it through.
When you gotta do something, you do it.
You toldRolling Stoneyou did hundreds of vocal takes on the originalAll Born Screaming.
Was it the same withTodos Nacen Gritando?[Laughs.]
It was a freeing process because I wasnt tripping so hard on the meaning.
Once I got the pronunciation, I didnt have the same kind of emotional roadblocks to singing because … Maybe its because you already lived the emotion of the original.Right.
Its easier to get there probably because I knew where it had ended up emotionally on the English version.
So heres what you would say instead.
OK, that wasnt going to work.
So it becameRompe corazones con unas cervezas,which sort of means heartbreaker with the beers.
There are fewer words in Spanish than English.
They sing the backgrounds and stuff.
Luckily with Broken Man or Hombre Roto, all the backgrounds just saying, Ah.
But it wasnt cynical on my part whatsoever, so I can sleep at night.
If its in that zone, thats OK.
