Letter to A re: Sufjan

So, Sufjan last night. He played a couple things from All Delighted
People and most everything from Age of Adz, which came out Tuesday and
if you don’t have it yet, I can drop it for you!

It probably encompassed more mood swings than any other concert I’ve
ever been to, so I just have to share with a fellow Suf lover. Fair
warning: opinions expressed below!

He led off w/ the full version of All Delighted People, which was a
really solid opener I thought. Rocked out a bit more than it sounds on
the EP. During the song he did, indeed, gesture for anyone currently
delighted at the show to raise their hands, but as it was only the
first number and I was a little frightened of what I heard of Age on
the car on the way over, I declined to do so.

Very quickly after that, I began to feel like a long time Bob Dylan
fan who just happened to get her first ticket to see him at the
Newport Folk Festival. I thought all the songs were too long by at
least twice, all the lyrics were flat and depressing, and all the
dissonance added up to nothing. Also, almost every song had
psychadelic animation projected behind the stage, planets flying
around and turning into purple vines and then naked women, etc. I will
just be really closeminded here and say those images annoy me. They
just make me feel like a toddler crawling around on the shag carpet in
the basement, lost among the covers of my mother’s record collection.
And also, if your song needs animation that looks like it was
concocted by someone tripping in 1970, maybe you should have
considered including one of the following things in it: a melody, a
verse, a harmonic progression.

About the middle of the show, Suf confirmed that the analogy I had
formed was correct, by saying “W’ere really happy to be here and
playing all new stuff–bet some of you are really bummed. But I had an
aesthetic crisis, and this is my new way of songwriting, based on
sound and ideas. Coming from the same place, I promise.”

After that, I was just sad. I’m not a hater, I like artists, I like
development. I read Language poetry for fun. But I just really missed
beautiful Suf. I wasn’t ready for noisy Suf. Plus, this stuff is
really heavy–based in part on work by an outsider artist from New
Orleans who was a paranoid schizophrenic and died alone despite having
eleven children. Suf introduced every song as “this is a reflection on
the apocalypse,” or “this is a reflection on standing on the rim of a
volcano and thinking about jumping in.” Good thing he told me not to
do it; I was considering it after that song too. Which isn’t to say
that any of the songs or the performance itself was anything less than
really, really well done. I just didn’t like it, and I didn’t like the
idea that there was no more were Illinoise came from. So sad.

But then.

Something happened right about when D figured out I was miserable
and wanted to leave. Suf announced they were playing the whole 25
minute mess of Impossible Soul (it’s a little like listening to one of
my undergrad’s papers, very draftlike), the last track on Adz. And
then I said, okay, I’ll stay at least until the autotune part. Which
sounds pretty fun in person, I have to say. Then it sounded better.
Then we had someone gone from soulful guitarness to rock to Passion
Pit dance groove and we still had two more lives to go, and everyone
was dancing, and Suf was dancing (like the white boy he so is) and
suddenly it felt a little better. A little.

Then something really amazing happened. They followed up Soul (during
which, I have to say, a few hecklers had made their preference for
“old stuff” known, which made me feel embarrassed for being a similar
kind of dismissive on the inside), with All Things Go from Illinoise,
and I got, I saw it–the new stuff is that road about 1500 miles
further down. I went from being near tears to being kind of amazed.

Just to seal the deal, he came out to play The Revenant on the piano
all by himself, and then that sad pretty one about bone cancer and
ended with what I think might be his greatest piece of pure, lyric
poetry-esque song writing, the song for John Wayne Gacy, which was as
beautiful and creepy as hell.

And then we drove home totally exhausted, and I woke up singing to
myself, “it’s not so impossible.” Hmmm. Maybe.

That is all, if you put up with all that this far!

Happy listening!