I went to St. Vincent on Monday. Annie Clark is odd and exciting and beautiful. She is a talented musician whose music is not easy for me to listen to (but I do genuinely enjoy “Cruel,” the song in the above link).

And she is an incredible performer. At many points during the show, she acted like a wind-up toy so convincingly that I’m still not sure she’s 100% human.

Her most human moment that night: She introduced “Year of the Tiger” by telling us that the riff was a melody her mother used to hum. She sort of rambled on, adorably, and later said she wished she hadn’t started talking. When the spotlight faded and she stepped back from the mic to get ready to play the song, she turned to the drummer and pantomimed shooting herself with her water bottle, making a “pakew” sound and letting the bottle fall to the ground.

In the final song before the encore, she took off her guitar, grabbed a corded mic, and LEAPT into the crowd, singing horizontally from the fingertips of her adoring fans. Carefully, lovingly passed back to the stage by the crowd, she leapt again. And the next time she left the stage, she went out on foot into the standing audience, her cord trailing behind her. She danced with those who bookmark this moment in their lives, never missing a lyric.

The crowd at the Slowdown that night was the best concert audience I’ve ever been a part of. I stood on the rim, not down in the pit. But it didn’t seem like there was the normal passive-aggressive shouldering through to be closer to the stage. And there was this gentle nodding of heads. From the side view, it seemed like they were all connected. And I think maybe they were.