Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent, gave up playing soccer in favor of guitar when she was 12, but she still remembers a few tricks she picked up while “sitting on the bench, watching the good players play.” In order to demonstrate her latent, hyper-specific soccer talent, she recorded a video for Rookie to demonstrate the Rainbow, a move which, more than the standard nutmeg, is a skillful way to embarrass a defender when properly executed.
Clark talks about “vicious defenders” she faced while playing soccer in primary school, and looks like she’s having a great time running around with hands in her jacket pockets at the Knockdown Center warehouse space in Queens. The message isn’t that Clark has hidden talents aside from music, but that she practiced the move for three years, harnessing her “obsessive energy” that was later applied to music, and can still perform the Rainbow out of that forceful determination.
St. Vincent’s new self-titled record is out Feb. 25.