Most bands that manage to become media sweethearts for a week or a month—you know, bands that pop up out of nowhere with reviews and bon mots all over the place—usually get filed under “stop paying attention because they are worthless.” As an example, this pile is where I’m keeping Vampire Weekend until someone manages to write a review of the band that doesn’t include the term “afro-centric.” Seriously, where the fuck did they come from and why am I seeing them everywhere all of a sudden? Such overnight success is suspicious to say the least.

But sometimes I hear just enough interesting tidbits about someone to keep them just on the edge of my radar. If I keep hearing little things here and there that sound vaguely interesting, I might even graduate them to “cautiously optimistic.” This is where Annie Clark, the mastermind behind St. Vincent, sat in my mental framework by the time I’d actually gotten around to listening to the title track off her first album, Marry Me. Having since concocted a whole music video in my head for the song, I think it’s safe to say that St. Vincent is one of the very few artists that managed to survive the initial flurry of offputting hype and actually make it into my record collection, and possibly my heart.

Marry Me appeals for several reasons, not the least of which is that she outdoes Feist in the charismatic singer-songwriter sweepstakes of 2007 by virtue of being more interesting; where The Reminder was shockingly pretty but felt a bit like treading water, Marry Me is more dynamic and varied. But I think the biggest reason why I like this album is Clark’s penchant for playful throwaway lyrics. You may or may not already know that I’m pretty horrible when it comes to hearing lyrics in music, let alone remembering lyrics, let alone analyzing them and figuring out a song’s meaning (”wait, Jack and Diane is about a couple named Jack and Diane? No, really, I had no idea! I just clapped along when I heard handclaps!”).

But Marry Me is full of choice quotations so insistent that they’ve infiltrated even my thick skull, from “Now, Now”’s “you don’t mean that / say you’re sorry” to “Your Lips Are Red”’s “My face is drawn / My face is drawn on with this number 2 pencil” to “Marry Me”’s often-cited “Marry me, John I’ll be so good to you / You won’t realize I’m gone.” And though I haven’t really been able to figure out what it means, the chorus to “The Apocalypse Song” has burned itself permanently into my head: “It’s time / you are light / I guess you are afraid of what everyone is made of.”