Canon in Miniature #188

Sufjan Stevens All Delighted People

2010; Asthmatic Kitty

Say what you will about Sufjan Stevens, the man is as unpredictable and ambitious an artist as we’ve got right now. The issue in the past has been that his aspirations have exceeded his grasp if only slightly. Both of his state-themed albums seemed to get lost in their concepts without delivering enough great material to merit unguarded praise, though the great moments they managed almost made up for their inconsistency. You could probably even make a similar argument against his 2009 project The BQE, but in that case its ambitions were so grandiose and well-thought-out – a full classical suite complete with visual component and a 40 page essay – that its shortcomings weren’t as detrimental to the whole. So coming off of that project and a few cryptic quotes from interviews about how he’d lost faith in the album as a format in the advent of the digital age it shouldn’t have been surprising that he unleashed an hour long “EP” to house his magnum opus, an 11 and a half minute, heavily orchestrated composition whose themes seem to encompass all kinds of spirituality as reflected through Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence.” And somehow it’s here that his reach and grasp are in equal proportion.

There’s a lot to unpack in that track, so much so that it’s bound to overtake the rest of All Delighted People in any discussion of the full EP, so why not leave that ‘til the end here. After all, it’s not a case where there’s a single great song bolstering a set of sub-par songs; the remaining 6 tracks here may not have the scope and scale of the title track but they’re not utter duds either. Well, I’m still not exactly sure what “Arnika” adds to the proceedings, and if we’re picking nits the classic rock version of “All Delighted People” is unnecessary despite being an interesting re-casting of the original into a more familiar sound, but that’s still a further five tracks that stand well enough on their own that the absence of the main course here doesn’t damage them in the slightest. This is even true of the theoretically overblown 17 minute, Pink Floydian “Djohariah,” which is front-loaded with an extended guitar solo and chanting only to end up as a more traditionally folky number in its closing movement. Technically it could stand to be trimmed a bit – 17 minutes is a bit much even if I’m hard pressed to find much obvious fat – but the way it brings the EP to an appropriately huge close is apt if not necessary. Outside of that you’ve got a quartet of simple numbers hearkening back to the likes of Seven Swans or A Sun Came even as they show that Stevens’ muse lies decidedly elsewhere these days. Take the hauntingly sparse “The Owl and the Tanager” which is almost ambient in its texture with little besides a simple acoustic pattern and piano backing up one of Stevens’ most ethereal vocal performances. Take “From the Mouth of Gabriel,” which seems to synthesize the tones of Stevens’ more electronic influences with his most acoustic ones to come out with something that, vocals aside, wouldn’t sound out of place next to Four Tet or Notwist. The remaining two are stricter in their acoustic/folky/Nick Drake without morose qualities tones, but they’re also imbued with a certain air that ties them more heavily to what’s been building up around them. Sure neither “Enchanting Ghost” nor “Heirloom” would sound terribly out of place on either of his dedicated acoustic outings, but as part of the tapestry that All Delighted People creates (regardless of whether it strives to or not, and I think a big part of its appeal is that either reading works just as well) they fit in as reminders of just how much Stevens can do with a simple song even in the face of a more complex one.

“All Delighted People” is many things at once. As a base, it’s easily the most involved song that Stevens’ has written up to this point, replete with all manner of orchestral flourishes and countermelodies that may have been hinted at in his earlier work but have never come to the fore as they do here. Lyrically it’s incredibly dense and oblique, again at a remove from the relatively simple songs that Stevens made his name with. It’s essentially the sum total of everything that he has recorded and written in the decade since his debut, and on top of that it’s a remarkable composition even without its ties and breaks from the man’s history. I referred to it as his magnum opus before and that’s about as accurate a description as there is for it. What’s interesting though is how nicely it ties in one of my favorite aspects of Stevens’ lyrics: their universality. Stevens is a spiritual person, but while “All Delighted People” is rife with religious overtones it never goes too far into preachiness; the lyrics are spiritual without being cloying or overly directed at those already in the flock. It's a trick he's pulled off quite well before - I'm thinking specifically of his Seven Swans album which is one of the few specifically and obviously Christian albums in my collection that I don't see as condescending towards the non-devout - but in the guise of what is pretty much an all-encompassing prayer for the fucked up world we've made it's amazing that he doesn't lapse into moralizing. No matter what path you walk along, you're not excluded from his audience and that's the sort of message and outlook that I wish more openly spiritual artists would adopt, especially when they're going about making music as great as this is. [8.4]