With his fourth album, Seven Swans, Stevens did what few artists outside country music are willing to do and wore his Christianity on his sleeve. But they were really a very happy and optimistic community and they all seemed to be working together, and it was, like, women of the world take over.” “I noticed there were all these single mothers and women and grandmothers, but there weren’t any men,” he once told an audience, “and so I had sort of devised a story in my mind that they had all died in the war and that the women were all widows. For the Widows in Paradise … showcases his ability to craft rich stories from a snapshot, inspired as it was by a high-school football trip to the town of Paradise. I started to feel like I was becoming a cliche of myself.” Nevertheless, Michigan is an exceptionally ambitious record. “The whole premise was such a joke,” he told Paste in 2009, “and I think maybe I took it too seriously. Featuring songs inspired by places, events and people relating to Michigan, it was the first of what Stevens dubbed his 50 States project, through which he planned to release 50 albums inspired by each US state. It was with his third, Michigan (2003), that his career and reputation stepped up a gear.
For the Widows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in YpsilantiĪn experimental album of lyric-less electronica inspired by the animals of the Chinese zodiac might sound like a surefire recipe for mainstream success, but somehow Stevens’ second offering, Enjoy Your Rabbit (2001), failed to catapult him to fame. The album, which he released on his own label, Asthmatic Kitty, hitchhikes enthusiastically through genres and styles, never settling on one sound.Ģ. The second is restrained and acoustic on the third, his voice sounds as if it’s being whispered through a megaphone then there’s a 15-second spoken-word interlude – complete with helium effect – about conjoined twins attached at the head. The medieval hues of bombastic opener We Are What You Say aren’t representative of what is to come, but no single track is. His debut album A Sun Came, written and recorded while he was still in college, was an introduction to his scattered, impulsive musical style and his distinctively delicate vocals.
#To be alone with you lyrics sufjan serial
His music is as intimate as it is elusive and just as often told from the perspective of a 1970s serial killer as from his own. Perhaps because he manages to bare his soul while revealing so very little. With his wavering voice and penchant for high concept experimentation, he has had his fair share of detractors, yet few artists elicit the level of affection enjoyed by Sufjan Stevens.
0 kommentar(er)
