This month Topic
magazine dedicates their 9th issue to Music. Sufjan Stevens, every
indie-yuppie’s (and blogger's) favorite nü-folk multi-instrumentalist
singer-songwriter, has contributed the lead essay. And you know what?
It’s really, really fucking good. Obviously Suf is a scribe; lyrically,
his songs are lovelier and more publishable than a book of Jewel
poems. Of course, instead, Ms. Saaaave Your Soul got the stupid book
deal and Sufjan just dashes off a random piece for a
pretty-yet-overpriced, proud to be on the fringes pop-culture mag. As
if there aren’t enough of those. Still, there’s something in this
essay. I’m thinking maybe Sufjan ought to take a little break from the
music, hole up in a rat-infested basement, and start crafting his
memoirs. The brief peeks into his childhood that he offers here could
rival one of David Sedaris’s or Augusten Boroughs’s lingering,
freeze-frame gut-busters. Except Sufjan isn’t going for a laugh. He
doesn’t need to.
In the obscure backrooms of my memory, there is a gauzy portrait of me drumming pots and pans
on the kitchen floor. I am a bumbling infant, top-heavy, lower-lipped,
thumb-suckling, encountering gravity for the first time, buffered by an
afghan laid out on the linoleum, banging on the consequential music of
kitchen utensils: a chopstick on a glass lid, a plastic spoon on a rice
steamer, the tap dancing of a whisk on a box of spaghetti. This is my
first performance. I am eleven months old. I am a drum major. I am a
ragtime rhythm section. I am a wild animal knocking rocks on the hard
shell of mother earth, the prehistoric paradiddle. I am nerves and
muscle gaining strength.
Sufjan
casts three minute magical charms with his songs: his turns of phrase
and brutal poetry set to exquisite lullaby-like chords evoke the best
parts of Elliott Smith and Jim O’Rourke. Some are are like prayers to
God, others are ruminations on his life, but many are about tiny,
obscure details — particularly those associated with Sufjan's two
state-themed releases, Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lakes State and Illinois.
His goal is to record an album about each of the fifty states. But
first he had to learn how to play the instruments nobody else wanted to
rock in band.
In
sixth grade, Ms. Zeisler tricks me into playing the oboe. I want to
play the trumpet, the trombone, the royalty of brass. The king and the
queen. Look in the mirror, she says. Your lips, your overbite, your
jaw. You have the mouth of an oboist. I resign myself.
He
eventually found his way to a guitar, too. Then came the whole
granola-worship period, which he brushes over nicely without
over-glorifying it.
In
college, I wear sandals with socks, cut the edges of my jeans and grow
my hair...another friend lends me a guitar with nylon strings and a
plastic back...I hold the instrument like it’s a small child, a
newborn, wiggling and kicking in my lap. I have two left hands,
stumbling with the simplest of chords. Right brain and left brain begin
to fuss and fight, but after two months they come to terms. They hold
hands.
The
oft-debated fiction writing workshop question: Should you write what
you know? Many seasoned authors say that it’s hardest to write about
the things that you are closest to, yet that’s often where one’s best
work can find its way to the page. Or should you risk writing what you
don’t, realistically, know anything about at all,
and find great success in the challenge? Sufjan says he takes the first
path. But then where does a song about a notorious rapist and serial
killer come in? John Wayne Gacy, Jr.
has the kind of unforgettable melody that could depress a dead person.
So I guess it isn’t surprising that Suf ends here by lamenting his
unavailable mother and other assorted piles of emotional baggage. If
the whole album per state thing falls through, keep your eyes peeled
for some kind of one-man memoir performance side-project with a backing
band in tow. Sufjan Stevens and the
Noise-Makers-cum-Abandonment-Issues? Yeah, he’s definitely a writer’s
writer.
Write
what you know, I am told, so I look around the room and serenade the
laundry hamper, the soda cans, the psychology textbook. I sing about
the loneliness of oboes, the cabbage leaf, loose teeth
and Cindy Seasons, who has since been in and out of rehab...I sing
about my mother, the loneliest of oboes, who had left us years ago,
hands cupped over her ears to keep out the orchestra of her children,
the music of everyday life which was too much to bear...This song will
find its home in the hymnals of churches. This song is sung in the
loneliest of bedrooms, behind closed doors, by young men and women who
fear they are the last ones on earth.
ELSEWHERE:
Lyrics and a guitar tab to John Wayne Gacy, Jr. (from Illinois)
Matt Ashare on The Strange New Face of Indie
Sufjan's MySpace
P-fork hearts Sufjan 4-Eva
DOWNLOAD:
All Sufjan on Elbo.ws, all the time
The Henny Buggy Band (MP3), off The Avalance: Outtakes & Extras from the Illinois Album