The only thread with just his name was from 2005. It's pointless to bring that to the top so I started a new one.

He's got a huge commissioned gig in Brooklyn. Sold out of course. Here's Parales' review (one of the few reviewers I never want to re-write even when I don't agree). I know some of you folks don't like him, but for me when he's good, he's incredible and will bring me to tears. For me he's a guy who should be on greatest recent songwriters lists.


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/03/arts/ ... 3sufj.html

Music Review
A Dingy Road Glorified in Music and Cinema

The subject of “The BQE,” the self-described “cinematic suite” that had its premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday, is an epitome of New York City grime. Sufjan Stevens, the composer, said onstage that the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is “one of the world’s ugliest expressways.” But his treatment channeled Hollywood glamour, with three screens of images, a soundtrack of lush, triumphal orchestral fanfares and a chorus line of five people twirling Hula-Hoops.

Mr. Stevens has emerged from indie rock as a mastermind of extravaganzas, and all the better if they’re laced with fond irony. Even without big budgets, he has put costumed performers onstage and mini-orchestras on his albums. The commission from the Brooklyn Academy of Music allowed Mr. Stevens to think bigger, and he exploited it superbly, scoring the half-hour instrumental suite of “The BQE” for three dozen musicians and then deploying them for new, full-blown versions of his enigmatic songs. Mr. Stevens uses swirling, glimmering Romantic orchestration (by way of soundtracks and 1950s pop) to make his private ruminations more quizzical and more alluring at the same time.

“The BQE” is Mr. Stevens’s equivalent of the Godfrey Reggio-Philip Glass film collaboration “Koyaanisqatsi”: a skeptical view of development that eventually falls in love with sheer motion. The images, shot on 8-millimeter and 16-millimeter film by Mr. Stevens with the cinematographer Reuben Kleiner, started out contemplating Brooklyn’s buildings and streetscapes, in stillness and barely moving traffic congestion. Then they gathered speed, changing from three clogged lanes by day to streaking headlights at night. The Hula-Hoopers, doing synchronized routines, were there for amusement and for additional rotary motion; they ended up spinning lighted hoops against a background of carnival rides.

Like a movie score, the music for “The BQE” depended more on texture and gesture than on melody. There were contemplative piano interludes touched by Gershwin and Debussy, stately Aaron Copland chords, busily twittering woodwinds, twinkling music-box-like interludes and motoric arpeggios by way of Mr. Glass, and vertiginous waltzes and sustained chaotic tremolos out of “A Day in the Life.” Designed to work as a backdrop, the music touched even the dingiest images with wonderment.

But the set of songs was even better. As he sang about cars and industrialization in “Oh Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head (Rebuild! Restore! Reconsider!),” revelations in “Seven Swans,” sociopathic thoughts in “John Wayne Gacy Jr.” and lost love in “Chicago,” the music grew newly expansive, with its interludes extended to revel in the forces he had available, and with its orchestrations filled out but never overblown. In songs about historical figures and individual oddballs, with settings that could be transparent or sumptuous, Mr. Stevens was portraying an America full of vulnerable dreamers, and sometimes crackpots, while his music fleshed out those dreams in cinematic splendor.

“Is it mysterious? Is it something ripe and sweet?” he sang in “Majesty Snowbird.” It was — an extravaganza with plenty left unexplained.

Sufjan Stevens performs tonight at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, at Ashland Place, Fort Greene; (718) 636-4100; bam.org. The show is sold out.

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wow...that sounds amazing. i love sufjan and have been lucky to see him a couple of times. there is always so much to take in at his shows - he makes you smile, laugh and think at the same time. even away from his shows his cd's are amazing. thanks for posting!

seven swans is a fantastic cd

i need to check more

King

yeah?

you ain't king, bitchboy

He was a second account, mubs. Try and guess who.

He was a second account? Really? That prick made some pretty rude statements to me...now I need to know who it is/was.

Yeah, for realz?

That was my assumption.

I don't know, maybe he was. It seems like he could have been an account shared by a few people, his constant changing of shtick, etc.

i love listening to vito's ordination song into all the trees of the field will clap their hands

great song. one of those songs, that shows how good sufjan is a taking a simple melody/chord progression, and developing it in a way that keeps your attention for 6+ minutes.

agreed

the lyrics really have an effect on me too...not only the words, but i love his delivery..especially of the last 4 lines

Rest in my arms
Sleep in my bed
There is a design
To what I did and said

i agree. love that part.

Flint (For the Unemployed and Underpaid) is a pretty devastating little song.

that song owns me EVERY DAMN TIME

I'd only really listened to the Michigan album as background music, not really paying much attention to the lyrics, but the other day I did at least for the few tracks and yeah, this one floored me.

Romulus sir

That's one I remember really liking, but I can't tell you anything about it right now. I need to give that album a better listen.