“And I close my eyes
To everything you’ve rearranged.
And I close my mind
To everything you’ve kept the same.”
Sufjan Stevens began his career in 1999 with A Sun Came, an ambitious 70+ minute endurance test of an album. Released on his own Asthmatic Kitty label, the album contains many of the elements that would define the cultivated sound of later albums, but lacks the restraint that elevates those to greatness. The multi-talented Stevens is credited with playing more than a dozen instruments on the album, but often it seems that this is slightly gimmicky as extra layers are simply thrown onto the crowded tracks and distract rather than enhance.
This debut album was one of the last Sufjan Stevens albums that I heard after discovering his mid-2000s albums and becoming obsessed with his 2010 masterpiece, The Age of Adz. It is interesting to peer behind the curtain, so to speak, and take a look at the inexperienced songster still uncertain of how to form his sound. Contrasting the 2001 release of Enjoy Your Rabbit, a glitchy IDM album based on the Chinese zodiac cycle, A Sun Came makes much more sense as a precursor of the acoustic-based achievements of Michigan and Seven Swans.
A Sun Came was recorded while Sufjan was in his final semester at Hope College, and manning the woodwinds for folk-rock band Marzuki (named after Sufjan’s brother, Marzuki Stevens) and playing in garage band Con Los Dudes. But neither of those bands gave Sufjan the opportunity to flesh out his style and build musical platforms for his poised whisper and heartfelt poetry. Digging into this album though, it becomes apparent that Sufjan’s career could have gone in a number of directions. His experiments don’t all land (e.g. the spoken word pieces, featuring altered voices and bizarre stories of siamese twins, maggots, boogers, and slippery vomit; and the closing track, Satan’s Saxophones, is an ear-chafing monstrosity that can only be accepted as an intentional satire of atonal free-form jazz. But, you know, there is actually good freeform jazz—try out some later career Albert Ayler), and to my ear the best songs here are those that point in the direction of his future sound.
Throughout the variegated album, Stevens’s influences are wide-ranging: Appalachian folk, modern indie rock, sample-based noise rock, Celtic, Indian, etc. It is like everything the young man had heard was fair game for integration. On one hand, the unfiltered Sufjan is fun to see; on the other, the bloated, sprawling result, an album of dense songs chock full of disparate ideas, suffers from the lack of censorship. There are numerous eccentricities here that a seasoned musician would have left on the cutting room floor (or, more likely, would not even have entertained for possible inclusion at all). Granted, though, sometimes the line between frivolous, juvenile drivel and compelling, transcendent innovations is blurry in the world of music.
Amidst the crowded sea of influences and potential, the core of the future Sufjan is visible. Several songs showcase the elegant, earnest songwriter that would be the centerpiece of some of the most acclaimed albums in the indie singer-songwriter genre. ‘Rake’ and ‘Happy Birthday’ compare nicely to the songs on Iron & Wine’s 2002 debut The Creek Drank the Cradle (or some of the earlier archival material from Around the Well). ‘Kill’ sounds like an outtake from Elliot Smith’s Roman Candle (“I want to kill him, I want to cut his brain, and when it’s over, I know I’ll feel okay” could fit right into the rhyme scheme of that album’s title track), while ‘The Oracle Said Wander’ sounds like a Sonic Youth B-side.
Throughout the rest of the album, the only thing that really stands out is the pervasiveness of woodwinds. In some cases—such as repetitious opener ‘We Are What You Say’—their presence is intrusive. In that case, the flute enhances the chorus and bridge, while the recorder grates on the ears in its latter half. But countering that is the Indian-tinged ‘Ya Leil’ which is bursting with vitality, and its woodwinds are directly responsible for much of its buoyancy.
Most of the rest is average, artfully constructed pop that sounds like throwaways from any number of popular indie bands of the day. Stevens recorded these songs in the same era that Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over the Sea, Wilco’s Being There, and The Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin were making waves in the indie community, and the songs on A Sun Came can be partially linked to these and many other influences.
Ultimately, the biggest triumph of the album is its diversity—Stevens attempts to condense his wide-ranging historical and contemporary influences into a single album—but it also makes the album hard to process in a single sitting. While the integration of influences is admirable, Stevens never really gets past absorbing them; instead, he often latches onto a groove inspired by one thing or another, and rides that sucker for the length of the song. It seems like he wanted to try to keep the album balanced amongst the various styles that influenced him—‘A Winner Needs A Wand’ latches onto an alt-folk groove, ‘Demetrius’ sounds like a stoner-rock track (until breaking down into an annoying experimental mish-mash), and ‘A Loverless Bed’ is a Beck-inspired hip-hop infused ballad—but he only succeeds in showing us that he can imitate this music, not that he can take it and make something new and exciting out of it.
Aside from the misplaced interludes (which Stevens must have taken from hip-hop albums; the altered voices employed here sound strangely similar to the one used by Madlib on Quasimoto’s The Unseen), the other oddball track that sticks out like a sore thumb is ‘Super Sexy Woman’—a quirky folk-rocker that actually sounds really cool, if derivative, with Sufjan echoing himself in a brave falsetto, but the lyrics are simply too obviously parodical and silly to take the song very seriously. “She’s got superhuman lips, for super suction. She’s got superpower hips, for super reproduction.” (Those are far from the worst lyrics in that song). Is this really the guy that will pen the heartrending lyrics of Carrie & Lowell?
As Sufjan’s career moved on, he became much more publicly serious about his faith and his music. The oddities here may undercut that stance, which, if I’m being cynical, may have been intentionally emphasized to portray Sufjan as a kind of mystical prophet the way Dylan was viewed back in the day. Regardless of Sufjan’s spiritual beliefs, stripping back the gimmicks and frivolousness and plying more meaningful lyrical territory results in much better albums with staying power and emotional heft. Case in point is the closing track on the reissue of the album, a rerecording of ‘Rake’. Accompanied by sparse instrumentation and female backing vocals, Sufjan calmly plucks his banjo and whispers the lyrics. He sounds fully formed and confident here, proving that his songs and melodies are strong enough to punch without all the added fluff.
Favorite Tracks: Rake; A Loverless Bed (Without Remission); Super Sexy Woman; Kill.
Sources:
Harrington, Richard. “Sufjan Stevens’s Musical States of Mind”. Washington Post. 23 Sept. 2005.