Annie Clark, better known as songwriting dynamo St. Vincent, is touring Australia at the moment, but she hit a major landmark in her career last night stateside at the Grammys. She became the first female solo artist to win a Grammy for Best Alternative Album in 20 years, and though she was halfway across the world when her name was called on the podium, she treated fans on her mailing list to a letter explaining the long, sometimes tumultuous road that led her to the big Grammy win, and thanking the people that helped her along the way. We named her self-titled album the best album of 2014, so we couldn’t be happier for the Texas-raised songstress.

Check out the letter below:

in 2007, i signed to beggars banquet records.  i was living in dallas, texas in my childhood bedroom at the time, which i had fashioned into a makeshift studio in order to record some of what would end up being my debut album “marry me.”

the first days of touring my own songs and as “st. vincent” are very vivid.  in early 2007, in anticipation of the release of my record, my (much beloved) agent put me on the road as solo support for jolie holland and midlake.  he saw potential in me, but rightfully, thought i needed to get my live act together. get comfortable playing for people.  get road-tested.  like most of the rest of my career, it was a trial by earth, wind, and fire.

i was performing solo; just my voice, a guitar through an array of effects pedals, a “stomp board” — a homemade device i made out of a piece of plywood and a contact microphone that i ran through a bass EQ pedal, and a keyboard.  i thought the keyboard looked unmysterious on it’s own, so i designed a lighted wooden enclosure to go around it.  my brother-in-law helped me build it in his garage.  it weighed a gazillion pounds and gave me splinters to carry, and i don’t think anyone was under any illusion that there was anything but a keyboard inside it.  neither the first nor the last in a series of hilariously ill-fated ideas.

january 2007, i borrowed my father’s station wagon and drove 12 hours from dallas to frozen lincoln, nebraska to open for jolie holland (what a voice) at a half-full 150 capacity carpeted club.  i believe the compensation was $250/gig but it could have been as much as $500 — more $ than i’d ever seen for a gig for sure and guaranteed, no less!  in my memory, this midwestern jolie tour dovetailed right into opening the midlake tour.  they were out in support of their excellent record, “the trials of van occupanther” and were the sweetest good texas boys you could ever hope to meet.  the drummer of midlake, mackenzie smith, would later prove to be a great collaborator, playing on actor, strange mercy, and st. vincent.

on this tour, i’d enlisted my dear friend, jamil, to come and sell merch and help do the long drives.  we’d just played a show in detroit and while we’d been inside, a blizzard had swept through and covered the stationwagon in snow and ice.  it was treacherous.  jamil, who always had some incredible hustle going, hired a homeless man named larry to dig the stationwagon out of the snow.  (in college, he had a gold lexus, stripped it of the good parts, and resold it.  when i asked if he was sad to see it go, he said, “girl, they think they bought a lexus but they bought a corolla.”)  i’ll never forget driving out of bombed out-detroit, apocalyptic at 1 AM.  interstate 94 tense and quiet, jamil trying to make sure we didn’t crash or stall on the icy road.

i have eaten years of veggie subway sandwiches on highways 10-90, stayed at a super 8 motel behind a kansas federal prison, peed in cups in dressing rooms when there was no bathroom, gotten eaten alive by bedbugs at a cincinnati days inn.  i would not trade a single highway or city or moment or person i met for anything.  i have loved it all.

i’m very grateful to have received this grammy.  thank you to my producer john congleton, thank you family, thank you friends, thank you to all the incredible musicians involved, thank you managers and agents and publishers and labels and publicists and everyone who works hard at their jobs.  and thank you guys.  thanks for everything.

How’s this for a compliment? Rolling Stone recently deemed St. Vincent “the most thrilling solo artist in indie rock right now.” It’s no small feat to receive this level of respect from one of the best-established cultural publications of all time, even though hyperbole is inevitable in any sort of art criticism. Yet praise for St. Vincent, real name Annie Clark, simply cannot be overdone; over the course of three albums, Clark has proven herself to be arguably the most unique, exciting, passionate, and genuinely incredible musician to break out in the twenty-first century. Her fourth album St. Vincent, possibly her best yet, continues in its predecessors’ unparalleled excellence, expanding on past motifs in just the right ways. It combines the best qualities of her solo output, as well as those of the disappointingly tepid Love This Giant, her collaborative album with personal idol and musical legend David Byrne, into a robust, fiery, emotionally heavy package with no filler to find anywhere and only genuine ideas explored.

Of course, outside influences can be identified as well: Byrne in the funk rhythm of jolting opener “Rattlesnake”, the percussive stutter of the great “Every Tear Disappears”, and especially the brass section of “Digital Witness”; Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin in the overpowering, monstrous last two minutes of “Huey Newton”; Pink Floyd in the background ambience of the devastating, downright gorgeous “I Prefer Your Love.” But, more than anything, Clark’s own catalog informs St. Vincent without dictating it. The wonderful third track “Prince Johnny” employs the same sort of grey, uneasy haze of Strange Mercy gems like “Surgeon” and “Dilletante”, yet aches even more earnestly than much of that album’s thoroughly yearning tunes; the shell-shock dynamic shift of “Huey Newton” is an improved take on Actor highlight “Marrow”; the acoustic guitars surrounding album highlights “Regret” and “Psychopath” recall the early days of Marry Me. Really, St. Vincent is a distillation of Annie Clark’s musical past, simultaneously a reminder of where she came from and where her music is heading.

Musically, St. Vincent succeeds by expanding upon previous instrumental tendencies; its lyrics also stem from the same seeds as on older albums. As with Actor and especially Strange Mercy, the lyrics here are deeply personal despite the frequent cloud of metaphors and imagery surrounding them. The figurative language is often so thick that, although it’s clearly sincere and close to Clark’s heart, its true meaning can be hard to interpret. For instance, when Clark sings “Summer is as faded as a long sicada call/memories so bright I gotta squint just to recall” on “Regret”, it can be difficult to establish whether she looks back upon this time with shame or positivity, although the song title very blatantly suggests the former. Elsewhere, the words of “Huey Newton” simply sound like an assortment of disparate images tossed together, seemingly unrelated turns of phrase that only coexist to sound eerie, a job they do perfectly.

Of course, when lyricism is this personal, true feelings inevitably shine through. Clark’s words on “Severed Crossed Fingers” and “I Prefer Your Love” make no effort to conceal their woe and desperation, imbuing these tracks with a heartache unmatched in her catalog to date. “The truth is ugly, well/I feel ugly too” and “Spitting out guts from their gears/draining our spleen over years” pierce the former track, ensuring that its melancholy and poignancy don’t go missed; “I prefer your love/to Jesus” is actually quite straightforward coming from Clark on the latter track. “I Prefer Your Love” is indeed deeply personal — it’s about her mother’s battle with disease — and its somber strings emphasize just how heartfelt this slow-burner is.

However, despite the blatant feelings of these two tracks, there is a moment on St. Vincent when the lyrics bring the music down just a tad. The sarcastic, preachy lyrics of “Digital Witness”, albeit humorous in their irony, aren’t quite up to par with the rest of Clark’s poetry, and the out-of-place brass section dominating the song sounds like the stronger side of the still weak Love This Giant. Released as the second single from the album, “Digital Witness” marks the first instance of Clark’s output feeling like a mild letdown. Yet, despite its somewhat silly, yet well-intentioned and socially relevant lyrics, and its borderline camp instrumentation, the song’s a grower; it might be this album’s weak point (or maybe that’s “Bring Me Your Loves”, a tune so jarring that it takes some time to accept, yet, naturally, it too grows into greatness), yet it’s still a fantastic, invigorating scorcher of a tune, and it shines even more brightly in the context of the album.

It’s interesting that “Digital Witness” benefits so greatly from its placement within the album, because it follows the best song present, the overwhelming, no-looking-back “Huey Newton.” Although the lyrics on this track sound meaningless in sequence, Clark delivers them in a manner as spooky as the underlying instrumental, a minimal mesh of muted OK Computer synths, distant digitalism, and straightforward percussion. As if this weren’t menacing enough, Clark completely reverses the song with two minutes remaining, converting it from a relatively tranquil meditation into a stomping, larger-than-life, so-heavy-it-could-be-metal anthem in what feels like a millisecond. The transformation is so quick it can make hearts skip beats and incite listeners to jump out of their seats in shock, and it may damn well be the single most rewarding moment in the St. Vincent canon to date.

Clark seems to be fully aware of just how special “Huey Newton” is: the disgustingly distorted guitar part guiding its metallic second half is none other than the fierce, unidentified-until-now riff used way back in November 2013 to initiate the St. Vincent promotional campaign. It’s that menacing, dirty jam that played under the European tour announcement on her website, a placement that might imply that it would be the intro to the first single released from the album. Yet on “Birth in Reverse”, no such riff was to be found, although equally funky and distorted guitars form its excellent instrumentation; furthermore, no other singles contained the riff, and the ninety-second previews that iTunes offered for each song showed no evidence of its presence on the album. It’s as though Clark did all she could to preserve the sheer joy of the surprise 2:38 into “Huey Newton”, the moment when she proves herself a master of unexpected, cathartic shifts in mood and sound, and an artist unrivaled in innovation and individuality.

The majority of, if not all, St. Vincent fans will cherish St. Vincent. It demonstrates Clark reimagining everything she’s done in the past in its best possible form, resulting in not only some of the most dynamic, exciting pieces of her career, but of all twenty-first century music. On St. Vincent, Clark sounds thoroughly modern and of her own kind while she picks delicately from the past for influences. That she sounds this new while still wearing old colors completely justifies anything and everything good anyone, whether fan or fledgling critic, casual listener or Rolling Stone writer, has ever said about her.