St. Vincent would “probably be dead” without music.
The ‘Pay Your Way In Pain’ hitmaker feels “grateful” that songwriting comes so easily to her, as she admits she’s “very lucky” that she gets to make music for living.
She said: “Still I feel grateful that it comes to me … I’d probably be dead [without it]. Dead literally or dead inside … I’m sure I would have had more fortitude and figured something out. But let me just say I’m very glad. I’m very lucky that I get to play music for a living.”
St. Vincent likes to record music into the voice note section of her phone and thinks over three quarters of them are usable material for her future albums.
Speaking about her process for making music, she added: “But the longer I do this, the less I feel as though I have any sort of control or ownership of music and its origin … which is the most supernatural thing you’ll ever hear me say … I would say about 75 per cent of [the voice notes] are usable in some way, and then about 25 per cent of them are a fragment. Sometimes when you listen back, you’re not sure where the beat is supposed to be – but that can be kind of cool.”
The 38-year-old singer has been “obsessed” with music since she was young.
She told BBC Music: “I realised I was obsessed with music when I was really young. It did something to me – and for me – that nothing else in the world did. I knew I wanted to be in it, a part of it, by the time I was nine or 10. It’s funny now, when I look at other 10-year-olds, I think, ‘Oh wow, they might know exactly what they want.’ Isn’t that wild? In one way, it makes perfect sense to me in my own narrative, and then I see it from the outside, how young a 10-year-old is, I’m like, ‘Whoa.'”