Sufjan Stevens
All Delighted People – EP
7.5/10 Delighted People
(Or 36/48 Unfinished State Albums—that’s right, Sufjan. I’m still counting.)
If I was crying in the van dorm with my friend, it was for freedom because last October, I stumbled upon an article on Pitchfork in which Sufjan Stevens’ musical world seemed to be crashing down on him. He questioned the point of making music—the relevance of the album, the song, his grand conceptual productions. It was jarring news to hear after nearly five years of waiting since his last proper release (and no, we’re not counting outtakes, Christmas songs or musical scores about crowded expressways in New York). A month later, I snatched up a copy of Paste hoping for good news in their exclusive interview with Sufjan. All I got was more musings on his identity crisis. He’s abandoning the antiquated album format. He vows not to return to Illinois-style song writing. The BQE project has shaken him to his creative core. Forget being haunted by the ghost of Carl Sandburg, it sounded like the ghost of Sartre was whispering sweet existential nothings into Sufjan’s ear as he cried himself to sleep at night. And then seemingly out of nowhere, we were blessed with some rapid-fire announcements from Asthmatic Kitty: fall tour dates, an immediately streamable EP, a new album due October 12th. What?
And so that suddenly brings us to the All Delighted People EP. The 8-track digital release clocks in around the one hour-mark with songs ranging in length from a modest 3 minutes to oh, I don’t know, 17 minutes. Sounds like someone’s been hanging around with Joanna Newsom. With all this existential handwringing going on, I worried the EP would be some drastic step away from the Sufjan we knew and loved. True, you won’t find any charming Americana odes to Andrew Jackson’s presidency or clever turns of phrases that will help you on a US History exam (“Stephen A. Douglas was a great debater / but Abraham Lincoln was the great emancipator”)—but those were never really the things that kept me returning to his albums in the first place. It was his ability to make you feel something with each of his narratives: sympathy for a serial killer in “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.,” the growing pains of “Romulus,” loss and shaken faith in “Casimir Pulaski Day.”
And this EP doesn’t lack emotional depth. The press release describes it as being “built around two different versions of Sufjan’s long-form epic ballad ‘All Delighted People,’ a dramatic homage to the Apocalypse, existential ennui.” The original version includes ethereal vocals backed by delicate orchestral diminuendos and chilling crescendos, ending in a violent Beatles-esque flurry of violins—I heard a rumor that if you play it backwards, there’s a hidden clue that the album is dead. Trading strings for banjos and his trademark trumpet lines, the “Classic Rock Version” runs more soulful than fragile, ending in a distorted guitar solo over electronic whirs and blips. But whether it’s sung in heavenly harmonies or a heavy tone, the song certainly carries a world-weary outlook: “Tried to save the things I made / Oh! But the world is a mess, Oh! But the world is a mess / And what difference does it make if the world is a mess?” This is no existential crisis that can be conveyed in a conjunction of drones—this is visceral.
But despite being built around these two songs, the real highlights of the EP for me came last with the one-two punch of “Arnika” and the “17-minute guitar jam-for-single-mothers, ‘Djohariah.’” “Arnika” is classic Sufjan. Jumbled plucks of guitars and banjos follow the lead of Sufjan’s plodding vocals and jaded lyrics, accumulating the beat of a drum and a creaking floor to his steady chant of “I’m going, I’m going, I’m going.” The song builds up, ebbs and flows, with echoing vocal flourishes, but ends with Sufjan’s voice trailing off alone: “No, I’m not afraid of death /or strife or injury, accidents, / they are my friends.” “Djohariah,” on the other hand, plays like “Sister” all stretched out. The mellow opening, first punctuated by short electric guitar phrases, soon builds into a mess of so-called “challenging guitar solos,” moving through varying degrees of dissonance until the song begins nearly 12 minutes in. Starting with his signature sparse guitar and high female harmonies, he sets the scene: “And the man who left you for dead / he’s the heart grabber back stabber double cheater wife beater / you don’t need that man in your life.” Adding in some horns, beats and handclaps, the EP ends on more uplifting note than it began with choruses singing, “Go on, little sister, go on! / For you’re beautiful, beautiful / all the fullness of the world is yours.”
So all delighted fans of Sufjan, raise your hands. After all the worrisome, angst-ridden interviews that have circulated the past few years, much has been made of how this EP is largely a regurgitation of what Sufjan’s done before anyway—but since when has that steered him wrong? And based on the two tracks from the upcoming The Age of Adz that have been released, it sounds like the restless Stevens won’t be staying in the same place for too much longer.
