St. Vincent Plays Fallon With Marc Ribot, Hannah Cohen, & Ella Hunt

Way back in 2017, St. Vincent ended her Jack Antonoff-produced album MASSEDUCTION with the arch, swirling ballad "Smoking Section." She released a very different version of that song a couple of years later when Jlin remixed it. On Monday night, by way of promoting her recent in-concert album Live In London, St. Vincent got some friends together to play "Smoking Section" on Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show. For last night's performance, Annie Clark sat at a table on a stage made up to look like a smoky hotel bar. She sang and played a lap steel that was up on the table next to her martini. Clark's regular keyboardist Rachel Eckroth played piano, but the rest of the band was full of ringers. Two backup singers sat next to Clark at that table: the spectral pop artist Hannah Cohen and the Scottish singer and actor Ella Hunt. Clark also had two stand-up bassists, James Genus from the Saturday Night Live band and Charlotte Kemp Muhl from the Ghost Of A Saber Tooth Tiger. And sitting on a nearby amp, she had downtown legend Marc Ribot — Clark's "favorite guitar player," as she writes on Instagram.This was an extremely cool performance! It started off as a hazy torch song, and it built into so...