Extraordinary Histories

essays about the songs of Sufjan Stevens

[extraordinaryhistories]

#42 - 'Year of the Sheep' (Enjoy Your Rabbit, 2001)

He looked over Sodom and saw it aflame. The sky was filled with billowing clouds of ember and the screams of a thousand widows. Inky-black currents pulled escaping ships back to shore. Angels with shields and lightning swords tore entire armies limb from limb. He wondered why he alone did not deserve this fate. Then he walked back up the mountain to find some cooler grass.

—

This is a strange one.

I never really gave ‘Year of the Sheep’ a chance until I began to prepare for these Enjoy Your Rabbit writeups: that is, in other words, not until very recently. If you’ve ever been a fan of an artist known for their live performances, you are probably familiar with the idea of a ‘bathroom break’ song: a song that, for whatever reason – maybe it’s excessively mellow, maybe it’s excessively long, or maybe, if you’re a Phish fan, it was released after 1994 – sees scores of the crowd making haste to relieve themselves or get a beer before something the band starts playing something they actually enjoy. For much of my Sufjan fandom, ‘Year of the Sheep’ has been that song for me. Enjoy Your Rabbit is a long album – his second longest, excluding compilations – and an exceptionally exhausting one, given how committed it is to its challenging blend of noise, electronica and avant-garde composition. Sufjan’s decision to sequence ‘Tiger’, ‘Snake’ and ‘Sheep’ as a tight three-song package smack bang in the middle of the tracklist betrays his awareness of this; it’s a trio that offers a sustained respite from Enjoy Your Rabbit’s harshest tendencies, with each consecutive song dialling back the intensity until it reaches an absolute nadir on ‘Sheep’. 

On the rare occasions that I give Enjoy Your Rabbit a front-to-back listen (yes, ‘rare’ – I’m a bad fan), ‘Sheep’ is where my attention begins to flag, which in fairness seems to be welcomed by Sufjan, judging by its placement. I have for a long time neglected the nuances of this one: on its surface it seems like nothing more than a chunk of aimless ambience that fades out into an even more aimless ambience, a coda to the album’s first half and a palate-cleanser before the intense, wildly ambitious second half. Giving it little more thought than that, I have used this song as an opportunity to get some food or water, settling myself in preparation for ‘Year of the Rooster’s white-knuckle energy. Thus was ‘Year of the Sheep’ condemned to the dusty annals of Enjoy Your Rabbit, by far its most overlooked song by me and, I’m sure, by many other fans.

It’s not as if the sheep itself compels us to pay close attention. Within the Zodiac scheme, only a small handful of animals lack cultural capital to the extent that the sheep does. This is a largely docile, pastoral animal, known more for the ways we can exploit it – shaving its wool, milking its milk, butchering its meat – than for its behaviour. We are even more loath to anthropomorphise it than we are, say, the ox; consider how labelling someone a ‘sheep’ is considered incredibly derogatory, precisely because the sheep is perceived to be so unambitious and simple-minded. Granted, this is not usually an issue on Enjoy Your Rabbit. The rat and the ox, two animals that are surely just as unexciting as the sheep, get two remarkably thrilling depictions. But ‘Year of the Sheep’ gives us a glimpse into a world where Sufjan directly apportioned the complexity of his compositions according to the relative cultural stature of the animal he’s writing for. A seemingly indifferent song for a seemingly indifferent animal.

How, then, does ‘Year of the Sheep’ supposedly externalise that indifference? It does so by defying just about every compositional principle exhibited by Enjoy Your Rabbit to date, allowing itself next to no structural development and stripping itself back to a misty, interweaved ambience. As it does on numerous Enjoy Your Rabbit tracks, Sufjan’s voice takes centre stage here, its multiple wordless layers floating in and out of the mix in great glacial chord changes. Synthesiser and organ fatten up the mix. Roiling around the higher frequencies is a tortured… something? I usually relish articulating the things I hear in music, but here I struggle; it’s clearly an electronic sound, and it can probably be best described as glitching, but it isn’t nearly as abrasive as comparable elements in, say, ‘Monkey’, ‘Rat’ or ‘Ox’. I assume these noises are meant to represent a sheep’s bleat. The comparison is very far from perfect, though – to me these sound more like screams. Hm. Keep this in mind. 

After vaporously wafting along for a couple minutes, a sustained organ chord takes us into ‘Year of the Sheep’s outro, which, well, isn’t much of an outro at all – it’s one long sustained drone with occasional quiet taps and creaks. Is there an eerier moment on any pre-Planetarium Sufjan project? It seems unlikely, the only competition I can think of being ‘John Wayne Gacy, Jr.’ or perhaps ‘Year of the Asthmatic Cat’ from earlier in the tracklist, which makes ‘Sheep’ all the more of a historical curiosity. It’s 2026 as I write this, which makes Convocations, Sufjan’s sprawling, equally eerie five-part suite of ambient compositions, five years old; textural electronic drones are now well within Sufjan’s songwriting wheelhouse. This was not at all the case in 2001, and as such, ‘Year of the Sheep’ is a bold new direction for the then-twenty-six year old songwriter. None of the propulsive surface energy and structural momentum that defines most of Enjoy Your Rabbit can be found here, replaced as it is by unstructured wanderings. 

This feels easy to corroborate with the titular animal, no? If the sheep really is a placid, peaceful creature with no distinguishable traits of its own, then ‘Year of the Sheep’ seems to fit the animal perfectly, in a very literal sense. It’s not a song that firmly asserts itself to the listener, hence, indeed, why it has always been so easy for me to otherwise occupy myself whenever it comes on. Paradoxically, this dearth of assertiveness makes ‘Sheep’ stand out on a menagerie of an album where almost every track has to fight for attention, often with aggressive drums, ear-splitting glitches and heavily foregrounded melodies – it is the void, perhaps, left behind by the other songs on Enjoy Your Rabbit, all cavernous and cool. As a visceral listening experience, though, it is very easy for an ambient song sandwiched between ‘Snake’ and ‘Rooster’ to fail to captivate me. Of great historical interest, but pretty much just a stopgap in the context of the full record.

If I had written this piece just a week ago, it very well might have ended there. ‘Year of the Sheep’ never really gave me much to sink my teeth into, and so a writeup that read as a drawn-out shrug seemed appropriate. It was only once I relistened to it absent the rest of the album that I could take it for what it actually was. There are no two ways about it: ‘Year of the Sheep’ is… terrifying? In lieu of a bathroom or refreshment break, I was forced to listen to, for instance, the way the synth glitches seemed to cry out to me, begging desperately for salvation (listen to the uncomfortably human-sounding yelps starting at 0:33, no doubt some of the most distressing sounds he’s ever put on a record), or the way Sufjan’s wraith-like backing vocals float in and out of the mix, a vast ghostly choir mourning for a loss well beyond human comprehension. I was incorrect: ‘Year of the Sheep’ isn’t indifferent at all. It is, in fact, about as far from indifferent as an ambient song can be! I found myself quite haunted by it once I approached it with clean-slate curiosity – and, as a writer and two-bit music analyst, I found that my job had become very difficult now. Because I was now presented by Sufjan with an intimidating case: instead of justifying why a song about a sheep might be passive and demure, I was now forced to justify why a song about a sheep might be consumed by agony. 

The answer, as it often does in this man’s body of work, lies in theology.

We are sheep. All of us: you, me, your plumber, the president, the Pope. The Bible says as much. Consider Psalm 23, famously beginning with David’s declaration that ‘the LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want’; even the modern word ‘pastor’, referring to the administrator of the Scriptures in a Christian church, is loaned directly from the Latin pastor, meaning ‘shepherd’ (think ‘pastoral’ and similar derivatives). It’s a metaphor that casts us as the simple-minded, morally wayward flock of our creator, doomed to be lost without His spiritual guidance. A sheep without a shepherd lives a directionless existence and will die unfulfilled. But the shepherd cannot choose the sheep – the sheep must choose the shepherd. This is the issue. One Lord and a thousand false icons, and that same morally wayward sheep must discern which to enter into a covenant with, and which to spurn, to cast out from its mind. What a horrible responsibility to vest a lost soul with.

It wasn’t always this way. At the beginning of time, man lived in perfect communion with God, inhabitants of an idyllic land created by their Father for to keep them at His side forever. It was ultimately man’s hubris that severed this communion, but the serpent, if not Satan himself then certainly an embodiment of his will, facilitated Adam and Eve’s choice, and dragged us kicking and screaming into the world of pain, confusion, dust, and death. To be human – to be in the flock – is to suffer horribly, and to have faith (without empirical evidence) that at least the afterlife will bring you contentment.

The snake and the sheep are not sequenced back-to-back in the Chinese Zodiac; the horse separates them in the original scheme. Pairing them on Enjoy Your Rabbit was entirely Sufjan’s decision. And, well, you can’t help but wonder. 

To think I once judged ‘Year of the Sheep’ as the least ambitious full-length track on Enjoy Your Rabbit. If the theological reading holds any water, it might be more ambitious than any track on the album to date: the sound of humanity in a post-serpent, post-Edenic world, weeping balefully for all that was lost in the fire. This would place it in the grand tradition of Enjoy Your Rabbit songs, ‘Monkey’ and ‘Tiger’ among them, that use their animals as vehicles for broad commentary about the human condition – but it is the tragedy of this one that distinguishes it from the album’s more animated tracks. Leave it to Sufjan Stevens to chronologically retell the events of Genesis by way of the Chinese Zodiac calendar on the mid-album tracks of an instrumental minimalist IDM album; leave it to him, too, to allow the beats of that retelling (snake strikes, man falls, man suffers infinitely) to function just as well on their own terms, absent a Christian reading.

Not that one has to even take ‘Year of the Sheep’ as Christian, either; at least not if one extricates it from ‘Snake’. Both Hinduism and Buddhism, two faiths that are obviously inseparable from the same culture that birthed the Zodiac cycle, speak of dukkha, a concept – often butchered in Western retellings – that denotes the painfulness of a transient life, bookended as it is by birth and death. I have often said that Enjoy Your Rabbit would have benefited from more explicit connections to Eastern art and mythology: well, there you have it, if you so choose. ‘Year of the Sheep’ can really represent any sort of universal suffering endured by humans, whether it’s sin, whether it’s separation from a god, whether it’s imprisonment in a body of flesh. It’s a song not of temporary and acute pain, but of the quiet and enduring pain that clings to us like soot no matter where we go. When ‘Year of the Sheep’ finally fades into nothingness during its last seconds, it leaves us at an emotional nadir, one so deep that only a song as vibrant as ‘Rooster’ was deemed capable of dragging the listener back up. Skip the bathroom break – contemplate the agony of being alive.

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#41 - 'Year of the Snake' (Enjoy Your Rabbit, 2001)

They told one another that when the walking things were expelled from Eden it was you who mocked and jeered, and then one million billion years of darkness fell upon you – the shadows cast by boulders and caves, the hidden fissures in great forest oaks, the little burrows that pock-mark the sandy clay east of the Yangzi, where the sun He made for you could not possibly breach, where mildew weakens your skin and brittles your teeth – and you were left paralysed by another’s sin, the vibrations of nearing footsteps portending danger where they would once announce a friend, and now you ebb and slide, ebb and slide, ebb and slide, flex and contract, in and around the undergrowth, you, fearful to all, with no intent but the ceaseless drive to endure, like when a walking thing tramples your nest and you arch back and bare your fangs, and when it finally retreats back into the jungle you know you must leave everything behind because they will come back and there will be more of them and they will strike with all the pain and fury of two thousand years of unatoned sin, so you press on, gliding invisibly over fallen leaves, eating vermin wherever you can and stopping to sun your cool blood before an eagle takes you for food, you who have been cast out to the devil by your creator, you who has been raised by the soil and the moss, you who slithers through everything like water through a colander, you who will not go down without a fight.

—

What makes the snake – one of the most feared, revered, storied, exotic, intimidating, freakish, oddly proportioned, anatomically miraculous and widely geographically dispersed animals in the entire Zodiac – so symbolically potent to us, I think, is its size. Short of species like the anaconda or reticulated python (which are at any rate rarely found in Western countries), snakes do not have the sheer physical advantages that other predators high in the food chain tend to enjoy: even the most well-fed specimens barely clear a few inches tall. They cannot jump long distances, change directions rapidly or overpower prey with sheer brute force, like a boar or ram might. None of the basic principles of mobility and muscle that often typify Earth’s most dangerous creatures are present here… and yet here we are, terrified by them even at a hundred times their size.

Snakes are, for lack of a better word, baffling. They are utterly masterful survivalists, making use of every last weapon at their disposal – and yet they never seem scrappy or desperate; it is this lack of scrappiness, this pervasive sense of physical control, that sticks with us more than anything else. Their manner of locomotion is so far removed from our own that they may as well have originated on a different planet, a fluid, undulating glide, hovering over the ground like an ocean current. They can deploy extraordinarily rapid acts of aggression – watch slow-motion videos of snake attacks on YouTube if you want to never feel comfortable stepping outside ever again – and then trickle back into the undergrowth, out of view for as long as they choose. The impression here is of an incredibly dignified animal, but one that remains sort of unknowable to us, with all our clumsy bipedalling and flailing appendages. We couldn’t possibly imagine what it must be like to move in such a way, or to make ourselves invisible among clumps of leaves, or to fell creatures that could crush us with a single step. We look at a dense forest and think of the thousands of slithering creatures that we will never see, but that are watching us all the same. Terrifying.

The snake’s unknowability, combined with it being an anatomical marvel, lends it extremelywell to human mythology and symbolism. No animal in the Zodiac has as many different associations in different cultures as the snake does. In Ancient Greece it was renowned as a healer (as seen on the now-ubiquitous Rod of Asclepius); in China it is known for its intelligence; in English-speaking cultures it symbolises duplicity and cunning; in India and Ancient Egypt it was worshipped as a god. All that can be agreed upon is, ironically, how difficult it is to pin down – its elusiveness, its craftiness. This long, glossy lash of an animal can signify nearly anything we want it to, and it is this quality, or perhaps the empty canvas on which we might paint that quality, that ‘Year of the Snake’ captures so efficiently.

‘Year of the Snake’ is, appropriately, the most mysterious-sounding song on Enjoy Your Rabbit, and one in a series of mid-album tracks (sandwiched between ‘Tiger’ and ‘Sheep’) that functions as a cooldown period on a record that can often feel exhausting. Not that ‘Snake’ is by any means stripped back – this is still an Enjoy Your Rabbit tune, so you’ll hear layer upon layer of metallophones, flutes, synths and drums. But whereas many other songs here boldly announce their intent from minute one, this one is content with making you wait a little. At 6:48 in duration, it is the longest song in the tracklist since ‘Year of the Rat’, and it uses that time not to cycle through a series of discontinuous ideas (like ‘Rat’ does, the steady synth pulse excepted) but to carefully develop the chordal motif that kicks it off. Its patience makes it one of the less viscerally engaging sections of the album, but it certainly does justice to its namesake. Just like Earth’s most revered reptile, it is reserved, obscure, foggy, a song that only strikes when absolutely necessary.  

After a quiet vibraphone chime rings out to demarcate the end of ‘Tiger’, the first sounds you hear on ‘Year of the Snake’ are the baleful moans of a synthesiser – a beginning that almost mirrors that of the preceding song, but with less of the off-kilter rhythmic chopiness that foreshadows that song’s playfulness and childlike innocence. We immediately understand that ‘Snake’ is going to be a more meditative experience, perhaps even a distantly melancholic one, based on that introduction alone. It’s an atmosphere that remains intact once this free-form ambience gives way to the synthetic organ loop around which the rest of the song is based, composed of yearning, reaching chords shifting around a metronomic pulse. Night-time in the jungle, or the shade given by ground-dwelling plants – all navy blues and deep verdant greens. Credit to Sufjan for electing to render these chords in the warmest, most tonal synth patch you’ll find on Enjoy Your Rabbit, preventing them from feeling too clinical. There is mystery to them, but it’s a mystery worth exploring, one that draws you in rather than passing you by. 

What makes ‘Snake’ an especially impressive piece of songwriting for me lies in how it manipulates rhythm and texture to directly evoke the snake’s unusual movement. Listen, for instance, to the organ loop, and try to identify the meter it uses. 3/4, you say? Probably, but it is very far from obvious, and the way Sufjan fades notes in and out of the chords helps obscure any sense of a clear musical phrase. When different elements of the song finally assemble into something like a full-band climax at around the four minute mark, Sufjan, ever the trickster, waylays you once again, with a bizarre 3/4-4/4 motif that makes the composition feel as if it trips over itself every few seconds. We are very far from the chipper rhythmic regularity of ‘Year of the Ox’ here, but then the snake itself is very far from nearly any creature that roams the Earth. The very foundation of ‘Year of the Snake’ is, indeed, serpentine. It slithers and slips away from you even as you try desperately to grasp onto its secrets. You can very easily picture the creature slowly undulating to the beat of this song, cutting across the forest floor with an improbable ease. Quite a coup to represent that in music with such accuracy.

Think too of the occasional orchestral interjections that feature in the first half of the song. They are very abrupt, very brief, and very loud, announcing themselves confidently and then pulling away just as rapidly, leaving behind only the synth chords and whatever light glitching skitters on top of them. I wonder: what animal attacks like this? Striking with great ferocity, then recoiling just as quickly? Certainly not a rat, or a tiger, or an ox – none of them are agile enough, much less as graceful, as lithe and elegant as such an animal would need to be. It can only be the snake; unlike some of the other songs on this album (you could surely imagine a world where ‘Year of the Ox’ were instead titled after, say, the sheep, while still sounding like an appropriate representation), ‘Year of the Snake’ could only fit the animal it was dedicated to. Nowhere else is an animal’s behaviour transcribed with such lucidity and accuracy. Even if this isn’t your favourite Enjoy Your Rabbit track – it definitely isn’t mine – it’s undeniable that what you’re hearing here is the snake, in all its dark, recondite majesty.

‘Year of the Snake’ changes its tenor somewhat once it reaches its aforementioned final third, slowly piling on layers of percussion, bass and woodwinds to create something like a military march, akin to the one that closes ‘Year of the Monkey’ albeit less aggressive. We are even presented with a duo of lead melodies here: one, played on some sort of flute or whistle, exalts itself cheerfully at the front of the mix, while the other, a repetitive stepwise motif played on glockenspiel, chirps away underneath. This sound is very typical of Enjoy Your Rabbit post-’Ox’ and isn’t nearly as distinctive as ‘Snake’s first half. It’s not all bad news, though – the 3/4-4/4 creates plenty of musical interest, and there’s something vaguely medieval in how the orchestral elements are deployed, an aesthetic tirelessly honed during the production of A Sun Came (and refashioned for the state albums.) It also doesn’t overstay its welcome. The last minute of ‘Snake’ sees this section fade into an ambience more eerie than any other in the song, with droning, pellucid synths taking us back into the undergrowth, right where the composition began. A strangely unnerving conclusion for an altogether warm tune.

Is it really so strange, though? Because there’s an elephant (tiger? dragon?) in the room that this writeup has not yet addressed; no discussion of a Sufjan Stevens song about a snake would be anywhere near complete without mentioning it. On top of the multitudinous other traits that this creature is taken to represent – intelligence, godliness, health, duplicity – the snake must live with the catastrophic knowledge that its forefather condemned all of humanity. It is, of course, the snake that dutifully carried out Satan’s will in Eden, tempting Eve into feeding from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and rupturing man’s relationship with the God of Abraham. Snakes are inextricably linked with the events of Genesis in all Christian, and many non-Christian, societies and cultures – and here’s Sufjan, a man devout enough to write a song like ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’, forced to reckon with the creature responsible for all the pain in the (or, more properly, his) world.

Right. Big ask, isn’t it?

Perhaps this is why ‘Year of the Snake’ ends on such an ominous note, the tense whines of synthesisers wrangling us back into an existence forever tainted by sin. Perhaps we can reconsider the song’s unknowability in this light, the way it seems to lurk, insidiously, in shadowy corners and cobwebbed eaves. Perhaps the way we feel so charmed by these warm chords makes us no different to Eve, doomed to be the engineers of our own destruction. It is difficult to imagine that that subtext isn’t present at all; this is, after all, the album that closes itself out with ‘Year of Our Lord’, a song that reframes the Zodiac as an affirmation of God’s glory. Here, then, is the cunning of Satan, prowling beneath canopies of synth and flute, biding his time before the Last Judgement. 

But this meaning isn’t at all prescribed: the beauty of Enjoy Your Rabbit, it’s worth reiterating, is its commitment to entirely musical narratives, which allows its songs to be as spiritual or as secular as the listener wishes. As a secular listener myself, I appreciate ‘Year of the Snake’ for its fluidity, the way its first half slowly, tactfully unfurls. I couldn’t imagine reaching for this one outside of the full album context – the last third jars a little too much, the song maybe being too committed to the multi-act narrative structure when it could have centralised around its most creative ideas. But it is undeniably a welcome addition to the Enjoy Your Rabbit, and the way it tackles its chosen creature is admirable. The waters of fear and intrigue circling around an asp, its stature diminutive, its bite seducing all the world. 

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#40 - 'Year of the Tiger' (Enjoy Your Rabbit, 2001)

-and the battle begins. You tussle wildly in the clearing as the boarlets scamper into the forest, terrified. The boar is outmuscled here, but it is determined, and its agility is greater than you had accounted for, developed through a lifetime of hunting game of its own. Its teeth dig into your neck and you yelp in pain. You wrangle it onto its back and kick it with your hind legs, returning the favour. For several minutes you and it dance a primal ballet: kick and claw, wrestle, retreat a few steps, pounce. It’s a battle you would have won a long time ago were you not an emaciated, bony thing, starved of hearty game in these drier forest highlands. For months you have watched yourself waste away, subsisting only on mice and insects, and you wonder, What sort of life is this? You salivate at the very thought of catching a creature of this size; you’ve dreamt of it lustfully, knowing that just one could extend your lease on life by months. Today that dream is inches from reality, but the fight is longer, and more taxing, than you had hoped for.

The boar finds its footing and, finally realising its untenable situation, runs. You give chase. You trail it closely, hoping it will tire well before you do. Some thirty minutes of this pass, and then the two of you, as one, collapse of exhaustion, nestled against one another like quarrelling lovers. You sleep there all day. When you wake up, you look at the boar’s slumbering body and ready yourself to feast, but for some reason you don’t have the will to go through with it. The boar feels your warm breath on its face and jolts into consciousness. It, too, is docile now, and in the light of day it sees you as you really are – a hungry, tortured cat. It nuzzles its snout into your coat.

A year later, you and the boar are the best of friends. You have a litter of your own, and your kittens wrestle with the boar’s now-grown young and prowl the forest with them. The boar gives you belly rubs; in return, you hunt, in this denser jungle, and bring back all sorts of delightful spoils for your newfound family. At night you and the boar take turns scanning the undergrowth for threats while the other sleeps. It’s no easy task – this neck of the woods is Edenic for you, and, more concerningly, for creatures like you. But you don’t mind. You have a complement now, wearing coarse dirty fur and a sour face, and he will kill for you, and he will die for you. And that, in this inky, thrumming night, is all you could ever desire.

—

In 2014, Asthmatic Kitty Records finally pressed Enjoy Your Rabbit on vinyl following years of petitioning from fans. As part of the reissue’s promotional cycle, AKR commissioned filmmaker Geoffrey Hoskinson to produce a music video for a song of his choice from the album. Shirking the more lauded Enjoy Your Rabbit songs – ‘Rat’, ‘Ox’, ‘Dragon’, ‘Horse’ – Hoskinson instead animated a video for ‘Year of the Tiger’.

On paper this choice makes sense. If you’re not going to tackle one of the album’s overtly cinematic epics, tackling a song about a tiger feels like a logical alternative: the animal is kinetic, visually striking and personality-filled. It’s intimately associated with the Zodiac calendar, too, and is more broadly a cornerstone of Orientalist aesthetics - the tiger exclusively roams the forests of India and southeast Asia, whereas the other creatures of the Zodiac have a broad global dispersion, thereby accruing new, geographically-dependent associations. It’s the only (non-mythical) animal in the calendar to be a true apex predator. Everyone loves, or fears, the tiger. Sufjan’s Zodiac calendar has addressed the sickly kitten, monkey, rat, ox and boar so far, and his efforts to make secular gods out of the underloved underbelly of the earth have been largely successful, but the time for small fry is over. There’s no underdog narrative to work with here: the tiger is king, its status uncontested.

You’d think the formula for a music video dedicated to a tiger would be straightforward. Depict it as a hunter; show it stalking its prey; have it bolt through the forest; let it feast on its spoils; or some variation thereof. The fierceness of the tiger is widely recognised; nearly everyone understands what it is capable of, what seeing one in the wild most likely means for your chances of being alive in an hour. Entire societies worship it, for heaven’s sake! No added context is necessary when an animal holds this much cultural capital. Slam dunk, case closed, there’s your video.

Case open. This might have been the approach taken by ninety-nine percent of filmmakers for ninety-nine percent of songs about tigers, but not Hoskinson, and not for ‘Year of the Tiger’. Go ahead and search up the video yourself – it’s readily available on YouTube. The art direction is… a trip. Disembodied tiger heads bedecked by whirling patterns float serenely across a Day-Glo backdrop; elsewhere, striped sperm swim towards, and then fertilise, a bright yellow ovum, which begins to pulse wildly, finally mutating into a jagged-glass fetus. (That sentence alone would kill a Victorian child.) It’s perhaps a little harder to take seriously than the creator intended – the primitive flexing animation on the tigers’ eyes and noses isn’t quite Hollywood-grade – though the overall tone of the video is very far from dour anyway. The most fearsome animal in the jungle, attached to this goofy, psychedelic technicolour fever dream of a film.

In a short interview Hoskinson gave to Pitchfork, he explained the reasoning behind his choices:

‘What mainly drove the visuals for the video was the concept of birth… The vocal parts in “Year of the Tiger” sounded to me like a wordless lullaby for a baby. So in the video, I saw the tigers as spiritual beings who were calling a new soul into existence with their song.’

It was the correct approach. ‘Year of the Tiger’ is nothing like you’d expect it would be. It is, to put it mildly, a total delight.

In keeping with the grand tradition of Enjoy Your Rabbit songs that offer convention-defying takes on the animals of the Zodiac, ‘Year of the Tiger’ largely refuses to portray the tiger’s most superficial traits: ferociousness, fearlessness, agility, obdurate hunger. You’d perhaps expect this song to take on an aggressive, abrasive sound, similar to what ‘Year of the Monkey’ does four tracks prior, but ‘Year of the Tiger’ declines that opportunity, and does something far more interesting instead. If Sufjan’s tiger is to be one of the kings of the jungle, it is going to accept every last responsibility that accompanies that role. This is not a song about unilateral dominance over nature – it is a song of service, of duty, and of gentility, its relative softness imbuing the tiger with a dignity that feels, yes, very regal (and holy, too, if you’re that way inclined.) Its eponymous animal employs the massive strength at its disposal to care for those who don’t share those same privileges. What a shame that this sentiment feels so surprising to us.

In marked contrast to ‘Year of the Boar’, ‘Year of the Tiger’ does not sound as if its narrative is transpiring in an environment where death or disease might strike at any moment. The forest over which this tiger reigns is almost implausibly peaceful, an ideal place for the ‘wordless lullaby’ of Hoskinson’s video to be intoned – under the watchful eye of nature’s strongest soldier every creature can sleep in total serenity. You’ll encounter this serenity from the very moment the song begins: whereas some Enjoy Your Rabbit compositions announce themselves with brutal force in their very first seconds, ‘Year of the Tiger’ tumbles in on a bed of twinkling vibraphones ported from the end of ‘Boar’, and then proceeds to explore quietly textural organ lines for the better part of thirty seconds. It’s a smart choice to begin the song this way, especially given that it must follow up ‘Boar’, a production many times more jarring and animated than this one. All that tension melts away, like water trickling off a mountain.

The notion of the tiger as maternal or paternal figure enters full bloom once the main theme kicks in. This motif, which makes up the bulk of ‘Tiger’s runtime, is gorgeous and, impressively, not at all treacly – the trademark Enjoy Your Rabbit playfulness is never too obscured by sentimentality on this song. Soft, soothing human voices make their return for the first time since ‘Rat’, and in keeping with their presentation on the antecedent track, they are entirely wordless, folded into the mix like any other instrument. They are highly melodic here, though, much more so than on ‘Rat’: a female voice (Liz Janes, a long-time Asthmatic Kitty Records signee) provides a quivering soprano line that moves, unhurried, through a major scale and finally resolves to the root on its last note. Sufjan, loath to hog the spotlight on this one, quietly underscores Janes in a lower register. The coiling of their voices around this long-form, almost operatic motif represents something new for Enjoy Your Rabbit, an album that consistently employs chopped-up snippets of melody in keeping with its minimalist influences (and intended to lend its compositions more surface energy, I’m assuming.) ‘Year of the Tiger’ – at least until its last minute or so – is in absolutely no rush to get anywhere, making it a welcome reprieve from the white-knuckle urgency of the songs up til this point.

The melody of ‘Year of the Tiger’, probably the most consistent – and consistently foregrounded – melody on the album, feels east Asian in character to me. I don’t have anything concrete to back that up; perhaps there are some modal movements at play here that I lack the music theory smarts to identify. Perhaps it’s the delicate manner in which the vocals are enunciated, or the graceful, bell-like chimes that move around underneath them, or the tin whistles and flutes that poke through occasionally. Regardless of how that aesthetic is conveyed, its presence is undeniable for me – ‘Year of the Tiger’ feels like a song more of the temple or monastery and less of the church, an ambience far more common in Sufjan’s early career than it would be from Michigan onwards (albeit still exceedingly rare even at its peak.) 

If any song on Enjoy Your Rabbit should sound that way, a song dedicated to a tiger is a pretty good choice, considering how prominent the fearsome animal is in some Asian mythologies and iconographies. Perhaps it ought to have committed even more intently to those ideas. Enjoy Your Rabbit’s most significant shortcoming, I would contend, lies in how it co-opts ideas from Chinese culture while failing to pay anything beyond the most token of lip service to them in the music proper. That’s likely, in part, the point: the album seems far more interested in the animals themselves than it does in the scheme that collects them, striving as it does to make non-denominational gods out of creatures whose reputations transcend cultural borders. I suspect there was an (admirable) attempt to avoid exoticisation here, on both conceptual and ethical grounds. 

But this music is far from trans-cultural. Its main influences are mid-century minimalism, gonzo noise pioneers like Stockhausen and Xenakis, and contemporary-to-2001 European IDM artists; this is, undeniably, a very WASPy lineup. Sufjan, by the turn of the millennium, was a talented and highly connected composer living in a multicultural New York neighborhood – it’s hard to imagine that he did not have the resources to create an inclusive sound that could bridge the gaps otherwise antagonised by Enjoy Your Rabbit’s dialectic. The occasional inclusion of Chinese speech on some tracks here feels, quite literally, like little more than lip service, an ex post facto attempt at a corroboration not achieved in the music proper. Whether or not you wish to delve into the murky ethical waters of appropriation and cultural property, it’s hard to deny that most of Enjoy Your Rabbit inhabits an awkward sort of ontological middle ground: too anxious to have an erhu or guqin, too assured in how it shallowly mines the Chinese language for passing aesthetic value. Few are made happy this way.

The sound displayed in ‘Year of the Tiger’ at least goes some of the distance that Enjoy Your Rabbit theoretically could in that regard, even if no explicit reference is made. This is much appreciated. The soft power of the music here – the unmistakable feeling that all will be well, even if danger might still lurk at a distance (note the unpredictable glitches that gather steam as this section bears on) – is in keeping with the spiritual bent of the project, but in a manner that dares to connote ways of seeing outside the Occident. A utopian animal is this tiger, and a collectivist one, too; both immensely powerful and compelled to protect those below it; Mother Earth herself, maybe. Does this feel like a Western conception of power to you? Would it have felt like one for Sufjan in 2001 (Enjoy Your Rabbit was recorded around the circus of the 2000 presidential election, and released September 17, 2001, a mere six days after the world irrevocably changed course)? 

No region, whether geographical, cultural or political, is a monolith. Eastern cultures can be ruled by demagogues, Western countries can prize family and tribe. Given the recent (as of 2026) stratospheric rise of totalitarianism in those Western countries, though, it’s tempting to seek out alternatives. What if the tiger used its fearsomeness for the good of its community? Even if we cannot see it around us, through songs like ‘Year of the Tiger’, we might at least feel it a little.

‘Year of the Tiger’s final minute sees the song briefly and dramatically pivoting toward a faster, more aggressive sound. Pounding four-on-the-floor drums are emphasised by organ charges that never stray from the downbeat, while rapid-fire woodwind lines further amp up the urgency. I understand why Sufjan would wish to include a section like this, even if it feels at odds with the rest of the song – it would be wilfully obtuse to act like the tiger isn’tone of the jungle’s most capable hunters, and in any case, peace is only as resolute as its enforcers are. Said passage, importantly, does not cross a line into outright abrasiveness. The tiger can be fierce if it so chooses, and sometimes it must be, for the good of itself and its children, but it isn’t a monkey; it will never confuse its objective with the methods used to achieve it. Thus we return to the main theme at the very end, a sentiment with which ‘Year of the Tiger’ finally leaves its listener.

Though not quite as musically profound or as painstakingly arranged as certain songs preceding it on Enjoy Your Rabbit, ‘Year of the Tiger’ accesses niches otherwise untouched on this album, a considered, mostly restrained lullaby for an animal who could have easily warranted a song as grandiose as ‘Rat’ or as aggressive as ‘Monkey’. Such a subversive approach, of course, is precedented on an album that shirks boilerplate observations about the Zodiac – one eventually learns to expect the unexpected on this one – though perhaps Enjoy Your Rabbit would have better stood the test of time if the rest of its songs were as reliably thoughtful as this. It’s no surprise that Hoskinson singled out ‘Tiger’ to be represented visually, nor is it a surprise that his reading of the song is so deliciously quirky. Something about ‘Year of the Tiger’ sticks with you long after your first listen: its comforts, its worldliness, the strength of its hand, holding you firmly, quietly. The sort of creature you’d very much like to be.

[extraordinaryhistories]

#39 - 'Year of the Boar' (Enjoy Your Rabbit, 2001)

You lie there on your pile of branches. You’d like to sleep, of course, but the boarlets need it more. This quiet little nook of the forest is about as much security as the earth could provide for something like you – and it has served you well, and now you have young of your own, and they are fat and happy – but it’s never quite enough for you to rest easy. The glassy stillness of the night, punctured only by the chirps and clicks of wandering vermin, would have you imagining a peace that isn’t there. You know it’s a lie; you’ve seen it. You’ve seen those stalking golden eyes glint through the leaves. You’ve seen your family’s carcasses ripening in the sun. You’ve seen things so your young don’t have to. Around these parts you stalk more than you are stalked. It doesn’t matter – only the forest knows when she’ll deliver her end. So you’ll recline there, eyes open, probing, and maybe you’ll doze off once the morning comes and the boarlets stir.

In the stillest corner of the night, just before dawn, you hear two crunches from your rear – chk, chk. Your head erupts upwards and your eyes dart over your shoulder. In this forest you co-exist with all sorts of moving things, but those things normally walk gaily, unapologetically. These crunches were halting. Their maker did not want to be heard.

You jump to your feet and snort loudly. Your young awake with a start. They are bleary-eyed, but their instincts are strong. You snort again, showing force, but you know it won’t be enough of a deterrent. More crunches now, in fits and spurts. Your young whinny in fear and collect behind you. You take a slow, silent step forward. A cluster of branches begins to yield to your foe. It is big. Bigger than you and all your young. When you see its claws, it is as if some deep-rooted genetic memory unlocks within you. You’ve never seen one of these things and it doesn’t matter. You know to be afraid. Your pulse quickens. Its black-and-orange face glowers through the leaves. It pauses. Its eyes pierce right through yours. Silence descends back over the forest. A pink-ish light muddies the sky. You lock one another in place. Someone will be the first to move, and if it’s you, you certainly won’t be moving to flee – not yet; this territory is yours alone; you are not going to cede it so easily.

To fight is to prove your honour to heaven. The tiger leaps forward-

–

‘Year of the Boar’, Enjoy Your Rabbit’s fifth track, is (to me) the first song in this mammoth song cycle that can be called anything even close to slight. This was in a sense inevitable: by having three of your first four tracks be ‘Monkey’, ‘Rat’ and ‘Ox’ (and rounding them out with ‘Asthmatic Cat’, an intrinsically meaningful self-insert), you broaden the perceived scope of your album astronomically. Each of those songs boldly carves out such a deep musical niche – grinding drone, panic-inducing glitch, grandiose minimalism (not, apparently, an oxymoron!) and hip hop-flecked IDM – that the first track to lack comparable ambition will probably seem underwhelming by comparison. Following a massively idiosyncratic start, Enjoy Your Rabbit begins to settle into a replicable sound, with the remaining songs usually representing different permutations of the ideas suggested by that start. A little glitch here, a little repetition there, maybe a little less of an IDM sound on this song and a little more pop accessibility on that one. 

Nothing intrinsically wrong with that, of course, especially if you’re an Enjoy Your Rabbit devotee on principle, like many are. (Lord knows I’m not going to dock ‘Size Too Small’ points for sounding like a Seven Swans song!) It is worth noting in a writeup about ‘Year of the Boar’, though, because you’d be hard-pressed to find a song that more succinctly and accurately captures this album’s multitude of approaches without bringing ideas of its own to the fore. This one really does it all: it kicks off with a drone, slams into a manic minimalist passage chock full of looping pulses, diverts course for some rhythmic electronica, returns to the pulse (but now more palatably and with a soaring, climactic guitar progression), and ends with a short glitchy section. If any of those sounds feel familiar to you, it’s because they should be – you can find variations of them in Enjoy Your Rabbit’s first four tracks, and you’ll be finding them again and again in the tracks to come. ‘Boar’ can gain or lose points depending on how impressed you are by its microcosmic structure, but fiercely independent it is not, which raises the risk of it being forgotten. It’s Enjoy Your Rabbit’s red-headed stepchild: not the most catchy, the most abrasive, the most melodic, the most glitchy, the longest, the shortest, the most guitar-forward, the most synth-forward – not the most anything, really. Much like, I guess, the boar.

That’s a more appropriate analytical thread to pursue if we’re looking to assess this song’s relative successes or failures: does ‘Year of the Boar’ effectively capture something of the animal to which it is dedicated? Or if that is too ambitious a task for any song to fulfil, does it at least make a coherent case for what that animal could or should represent, even if that case is highly unconventional?

Yes and no. What Sufjan is playing with here, I think, are the few real trans-cultural traits that we assign the boar: its aggression, and, relatedly, its connection to the hunt. Boars are fiercely territorial and are known to violently resist predators; they are the first animal in Enjoy Your Rabbit’s Zodiac to attack humans with any degree of frequency, occasionally even emerging victorious in those encounters (as Adonis would tell you.) Because humans have cause to predate on them – they make for truly fantastic eating – multiple cultures define the boar by its determination in battle, with its slaughter considered a feat worthy of a great warrior. Consider Hercules’ capture of the boar of Erymanthos, or the animal’s presence on old European military regalia. Any faithful exploration of the boar’s place in human culture probably should account for these perceptions, since it otherwise does not feature much in modern discourse – certainly not in the way that the monkey or rat does. The pig? A different story altogether. But its undomesticated cousin hasn’t seen relevance in the West for centuries.

Credit to Sufjan, then, for his attempt to rectify that, even if the result is a little scattershot. The headstrong fury of the boar is best conveyed during the opening section, a feverish heap of music that builds on the minimalist ideas explored on ‘Year of the Rat’ by sounding like Steve Reich on ten cubic feet of cocaine. The pulse is back, and it is pissed. Guitars, synths and vibraphones bash out an ugly syncopated melody that cycles through a series of even uglier chords, with little regard for safe harmonic movement (is anything ever safe in nature?); it’s an incredibly anxiety-inducing sound, only made more suffocating by the martial regularity of the rhythms here. Underpinning it all is some sort of sequenced percussion part, panicked and sputtering, boring into the track like a jackhammer. Accurately boarish – irate, yes, but still fearful through it all, outgunned. Like the footsteps of a thousand hunters as they chase you through the forest.

This section reaches the end of its chord progression after about a minute and a half, and following a dramatic, theatrical downturn, we move into a more electronic space, featuring a characteristically-for-Enjoy Your Rabbit mangled beat and another ugly melody reminiscent of certain sections of ‘Year of the Ox’. On that song the unpleasantness of those passages was tempered by the overall joie de vivre of the composition, but here there is no such luck – ‘Boar’, for the most part, flatly abrades. The second half maintains that abrasion with the addition of some enjoyable, marginally more easy-going melodies, the highlight of which is a tiny passage of guitar and drums just prior to the closing movement that reads as nearly triumphant; the successful completion of the hunt, perhaps? Or maybe the boar has fled to safety. It’s far from comforting in any case, given the extremely heavy distortion applied to the (seemingly acoustic) drums, and it does not cohere with the first half of the song. An earworm is never unwelcome, though.

By the time ‘Year of the Boar’ moves into its climactic section, which grafts the hurried pulsing from the intro onto a sunnier chord progression, the song’s ambitions begin to feel a little unclear. ‘Rat’, for all its baroque arrangements and sprawling runtime, is remarkably focused in its aims – the emotions it tracks through passages of darkness and light feel like logical extensions of the composition’s opening stretch. Not every song has to evolve incrementally from an origin point; it can certainly help, though, especially if there are no lyrics with which to hold the listener’s hand. ‘Boar’ effectively (and unpleasantly, though that seems to be the intent) assumes the character of the song’s irascible namesake in its first couple minutes, and then proceeds down musical avenues that don’t build upon that foundation – left turns rather than parallel lanes. It’s a structure that would be more compelling if it entered territory not precedented elsewhere on Enjoy Your Rabbit, but it doesn’t do that either. I struggle to find many good reasons to return to this one, even though, at a runtime of 3:55, it is a very low-commitment listen. 

‘Slight’ is fair here. ‘Year of the Boar’ is far from Sufjan’s worst, but it isn’t nearly as striking as the songs preceding it on Enjoy Your Rabbit (admittedly a high bar to clear.) Given that it reads like an abbreviated compilation of Enjoy Your Rabbit’s many styles without truly excelling at any of them, it’s bound to get lost in the shuffle. Nearly every track from here on out presents a musical or conceptual vision that feels far more interesting to talk about than ‘Boar’ could ever be – just look at the friendly tiger over there, beckoning you sweetly. You can’t help but wish it remained unapologetically furious throughout, just as ‘Asthmatic Cat’ remains asthmatic, ‘Monkey’ remains terrifying, ‘Rat’ remains awed, and ‘Ox’ remains jolly.

A solid summary, but not much more.

[extraordinaryhistories]

#38 - 'Year of the Ox' (Enjoy Your Rabbit, 2001)

An ox. Ox is good. Ox is strong. Ox travel cart with man and woman. Ox has yoke and is strong. Ox bring visitor across field. Ox pair with ox and work happy. Ox eat and feel good. Ox march through rice paddy. Ox know order. Ox haul plough for hours until weary. Ox go in circles. Ox is proud and prudent ox. Ox carry food to market. Ox happy when free. Ox eat green grass ox is full. Ox never blue. Ox only pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and pull – and make you so rich.

—

Cattle occupy an interesting space in the Western consciousness. Most of the animals in the Chinese Zodiac have long since transcended their material forms and become symbols, their characters defined by traits we usually assign to humans: the cheeky monkey, the treacherous snake, the gluttonous pig. Cattle, conversely, are rarely afforded that luxury in the West. Clear your mind for a moment and then try to think of the personality of an ox. Not its behaviours – its personality. If the ox is too archaic for you to attach strong associations to it – fine, fair play: think instead of a cow. What character does a cow have? Most or all of us have encountered one before – why do they so forcefully resist being anthropomorphised? 

Perhaps the calculus is different with the cow’s male counterpart. Bulls certainly mean something to us; they are stubborn, irate, easily provoked. But to be the ox – which is, to be clear, not a species unto itself, everything that sets it apart being the direct result of human intervention – is to have all those traits written out of your character. Oxen are typically castrated at less than six months of age, and then spend the entirety of their adulthood as working animals, on farms, homesteads and forests the world ‘round. Deprived of hormonal development, oxen become docile, stripped of the aggression they would have otherwise exhibited. We cannot imagine the personality of the ox precisely because we design the ox not to have one – this is, we think, an asset, but only insofar as it can be leveraged to our advantage. Even the few personality traits we might ascribe to the ox – obedience, dutifulness, suggestibility – take the ox’s lack of independent action as a basic premise. 

Truthfully, we are no less cruel against the ox than we are against the rat. We mutilate it, browbeat it, saddle it with our labours, and then, only after all this is achieved, we excise it from our culture. Most unfair is that the labours we saddle it with are… well, there sure are a lot of them, aren’t there? Human civilisation would not exist in anywhere near its current form without the aid of cattle. Their versatility is miraculous: strong and hardy and work-ready while also making for incredibly good eating once their so-called useful life has expired. Their ability to haul great weights over long distances has guaranteed the survival of thousands of communities, who might not have had the labour base for large-scale agriculture otherwise. They aided us in reaching the top of the food chain and we repaid them with our ignorance. Surely they deserve much, much better? It might well be by design; if we began to empathise with the animal whose abuse and slaughter keeps our society humming along merrily, maybe the horror would keep us awake at night. The animals we assign personalities to are, with scarce exceptions, never livestock – seeing anything of ourselves in them would give us the moral imperative to divert course.

Not every corner of the Earth is this heartless. Some Asian religions venerate the cow. Oughtn’t everyone else to do the same?

On Enjoy Your Rabbit, Sufjan is looking to atone. For every beloved creature that makes up the Zodiac, there is a creature of far humbler character, one targeted alternately by our indifference or our scorn. It is no mistake that Sufjan’s album-length reimagining of the framework kicks off not with the tiger, horse, dog or dragon, but with – in order – the asthmatic cat, monkey, rat, ox and boar: by sequencing the album in this way, he grants them the empathy and attention that they have been denied over millennia of human storytelling. In my ‘Year of the Rat’ writeup I discussed how Enjoy Your Rabbit’s objective masterpiece teaches us to love the rodent by showing us the world through its eyes; ‘Year of the Ox’, Enjoy Your Rabbit’s subjective highlight as far as I’m concerned, amplifies our few existing perceptions of the ox in an attempt to fashion something like a folk hero out of the lumbering beast. Duty, brute strength, reliability, honesty, level-headedness – every decidedly unsexy trait that characterises our bovine friend is rendered here with grace and (most crucially) humour. No other song on Enjoy Your Rabbit is as fun, or funny, as ‘Year of the Ox’. One hell of a win for the cattle fans among us!

‘Year of the Ox’ is short – one of the three shortest compositions on the album, ‘Asthmatic Cat’ notwithstanding. At just over four minutes long, it doesn’t have the luxury of the palatial canvas that ‘Rat’ or (later) ‘Dragon’ paints on. It compensates for this by being, unusually for an Enjoy Your Rabbit song, extremely direct. ‘Year of the Ox’ has a hook! A beat! It has chord progressions! And multiple melodies that can easily get stuck in your head for days on end! There are plenty of sections here, each with a different instrumental palette (and level of abrasiveness), but none of them feel as if they stray too far from the song’s origin point, and that opening hook is referenced throughout, a glue that allows this rag-tag team of musical ideas to achieve something like coherence. It’s an ideal blend of the ideas that characterise Sufjan’s most popular music – catchy melodies, playful arrangements, a martial rigidity – with Enjoy Your Rabbit’s more uncommon traits – harshness, scrambled structures, an intense instrumental focus. Minute for minute, pound for pound, ‘Year of the Ox’ might be the most nutrient-rich song on the album. Not a minute is wasted.

In keeping with that aforementioned concision, ‘Ox’ begins with four run-throughs of the hook that sets the template for the rest of the song. This motif is an absolute delight. It’s a stomping, insistent thing, a series of ascending organ chords intoned polyrhythmically over a four-on-the-floor electronic pattern, continually reaching the summit and then plunging right back down. It’s notable how sturdy this sound is considering how effete – or, in the case of ‘Year of the Monkey’, chaotic – much of Enjoy Your Rabbit is; just like the eponymous animal, nothing about ‘Year of the Ox’ is at all uncertain. It plods on, tirelessly and cheerfully, its beat such an effective anchor that one almost feels beckoned to dance to it. This, I think, is intended to capture the industriousness of the ox, its propensity to press on without complaint; you can almost picture the animal turning back, and forth, and back, and forth, as it plows Farmer Dan’s bare field, not a single care lingering behind its eyes. There’s a jolliness to this passage that feels far more straightforward in tone than the more complex positivity of ‘Year of the Rat’. The ox has no need for existential angst – Sisyphus is working, and he is happy.

This section is one of many on ‘Year of the Ox’ that betrays Sufjan’s burgeoning interest in hip hop, a fascination that would reach full bloom in the early 2010s. There is a tremendous groove and swagger to many drum parts on ‘Ox’; considering that ‘groove’ and ‘swagger’ are typically so alien to Sufjan’s music that they may as well inhabit another galaxy, it’s a pretty impressive feat. Especially funky moments include the passage immediately following the four-on-the-floor opening, guitars and synths chirping away over a heavily syncopated beat that employs a swathe of different drum patches, like a boom-bap loop left to curdle in the sun. This beat, or a variation thereof, plays underneath most of the quirky melodic experiments in the first half, a reliable anchor that endures no matter how gnarly the top-line elements become. A clever choice, I say, and essential to ‘Year of the Ox’s casual listenability. Invites toe tappin’.

Not all of ‘Year of the Ox’ is so palatable, of course. At multiple points in the composition – especially in its second half – Sufjan takes pains to remind you that yes, this is an Enjoy Your Rabbit song, and you won’t be let off that easily. In comes a brutally mangled version of the hip hop beat earlier in the song, slathered in distortion and bitcrushed to oblivion, occasionally paired with shreds of trebley glitch. The enduring presence of some of the original groove’s swagger makes these sections not quite as challenging as the worst of ‘Monkey’, but on a purely sonic level – frequencies and dynamics – ‘Ox’ can be a real doozy. Undeniably effective, though, especially in the song’s climax, where white noise gradually creeps up on the beat and momentarily threatens to subsume it altogether. The handoff from one cataclysmic element to another here is enough to make your hair stand on end. What relevance is this to the ox? Doesn’t there seem to be some tonal discontinuity between the quirkiness of much of the song and the claustrophobia-inducing conclusion? Definitely arguable, and try as I might, I can’t square the more terrifying moments in ‘Ox’ with the animal they are paired with. Oxen have bad days too, I guess.

I turn my attention instead to the remainder of the song, to its utterly infectious enthusiasm and good spirits. To its dynamism and rhythm. To its humour, which I will look to reiterate again and again in this discussion. ‘Year of the Ox’ is funny! It is! Humour is everywhere here, from the deeply absurd Merzbow beat portions to the wah-wah-laden synthesiser lines in the first half. The playful Dadaist of A Sun Came has matured into a songwriter who allows his silliness to emerge in controlled, tasteful bursts, almost always letting the goof be accessory to the core of the song rather than the core itself (I say ‘almost’ because, well, ‘Bushwick Junkie’ exists. And some of the later Christmas stuff, too, but he gets a pass there.) Who would have thought, though, that we’d get humour of any sort on a song dedicated to the ox? The most humourless creature in the Zodiac? The one we’ve studiously neglected for centuries?

It works, though. You wouldn’t expect it, but it works. It’s like a British comedy: the most dreary topics imaginable, when viewed through the right lens, can be an absolute riot. The ox is not trying to be funny; it’s not trying to be anything, really – no complex desires pass through its head, other than to work, to work, and to work some more. This muscular beast, with gnarled horns and legs that could kick a hole right through you, and yet with the innocence of a tiny little baby! Sufjan was not planning to miss the comedy in that. And by making that observation – by making ‘Year of the Ox’ this album’s main source of comic relief – Sufjan ends up granting the ox the cultural significance that we have withheld from it for all of Western civilisation. ‘Year of the Ox’ could very easily have been a slog to listen to, but through the pen of Sufjan Stevens, it’s just about the most fun you’ll have on Enjoy Your Rabbit.

Sufjan’s personal fondness for this song is evident from his choice to release a demo version on 8.21 A Blue Bunny Compilation, released a year before Enjoy Your Rabbit (and covered previously as part of this project.) Doubtless the rest of the album was in active development by this point, but something about ‘Year of the Ox’ was, for Sufjan, worth unveiling early. Maybe it was nearer completion than its compatriots – the demo version is very close to the final take. Maybe Sufjan thought it was his finest composition in the project, or, certainly, its most immediate, tied closely to accessible melodic principles. Whatever the reasoning, ‘Year of the Ox’ is the most prized animal in the stable, as far as its owner is concerned. 

I agree with Sufjan: ‘Year of the Ox’ absolutely deserves that status. It compensates for every bit of the neglect that its long-suffering, hard-working, never-tiring namesake has endured over its many years of keeping our societies afloat. It acknowledges the tireless labour that the ox performs, but it never once feels excessively preachy or reflective. Its good cheer – blended, of course, with young Sufjan’s acerbic wit – tickles you pink. Most importantly, its endless hooks will embed the ox in your memory, never to be forgotten again. It’s that damn organ progression! God, it’s so moreish. It pulls – and pulls  and pulls – and pulls – and pulls – and pulls – and captures the ox as, I think, it would like to be captured: the most carefree animal of them all. 

[extraordinaryhistories]

#37 - 'Year of the Rat' (Enjoy Your Rabbit, 2001)

It’s no easy life. The squeals of Chevrolets bouncing through gutters and off sewer walls. The much, the mire, the grease, the moss. You will eat the shorn-off detritus of bigger things while the predators feast. Exterminators with your blood as their delight. Twenty-headed beasts bound together at the tail. Every house a minefield of snapping traps and your fallen kin. If it slithers, you are going to die. If it meows, you are going to die. If it squawks, you are going to die, but at least you’ll die soaring. Each day a fight for your life. Humidity. Poisons that taste like manna. “I smell a rat.” 

It’s a good life. The teaming masses of your brothers and sisters. Always a shoulder to lean on and a friend to chase. The way the vastness of the world comes down on you like an avalanche. The way city streets look like galactic fault lines. The way you duck and weave between hardened feet, as if the world set up infinite multivariate race-tracks just for you. Some infinities are larger than others, and yours is the largest of all. You run up the mansion’s rainwater pipes and perch yourself in front of the city skyline and imagine how sad it must be to live in a place you’ve already conquered. No: if the tiger gobbles you up tomorrow, at least you’ll die seeing the world the way it truly is, God’s disciple, delighted ‘til the end.

–

Size fails you.

Many years ago I had the privilege of standing in front of Michelangelo’s David. I’ve been a tragic for the visual arts nigh-on my entire life, and as anyone with similar interests can impart, there are certain times where one stands in front of an artwork and finds themselves unable to tear themself away from it for so long that by the time the work has become even marginally less dazzling, minutes or hours have passed, and the comprehensive museum visit you had planned has been rendered infeasible. I’ve heard people describe this experience with Rothkos, Pollocks, The Starry Night, The Garden of Earthly Delights, and though all of those works are exceptional, David was the one to first grant me that experience. If you ever want to get a (massively, monstrously diluted) sense of how insignificant you are in the grand scheme of the universe, buy a ticket to see David. You will feel like a mote of dust falling before a god. 

That particular cocktail of emotions I felt seeing David – fear being in there, of course, the sort of existential dread felt by someone encountering something totally unknowable; but also awe, curiosity, a childlike wonder derived from that same inscrutability – felt familiar to me, but it took me a while to figure out why. As I left the Accademia and assimilated back into the rat race of Florentine tourists, it hit me: my grandparents’ house, four or five years old. My growth spurt started pretty young (and it didn’t stop until I hit 6’5”), but in those halcyon days, when my neurons were at their most plastic and the world felt as enormous as it’d ever be, my grandparents’ house was just as inscrutable as David. I remember wandering down its halls, toeing across the thresholds of rooms I didn’t really know, and feeling intimidated by all of it – the size of the bedframe, the grandfather clock, the kitchen table, the upright piano. You figure out your own home pretty quickly at that age, but other people’s homes were like alien planets, and their scale became dizzying. Even the bathroom felt like a grand porcelain cathedral. It was thrilling. Danger and adventure ‘round every corner.

Sufjan dedicating Enjoy Your Rabbit’s centrepiece and most beloved track to Earth’s single most despised creature might seem counterintuitive. It certainly did for me, for a long time. So many animals in the Zodiac – the tiger! the horse! the dragon! – so effortlessly connote majesty that their coronation with a song as beautiful, sweeping and grandiose as this one would be an entirely logical decision. Two of those three animals do receive this treatment later in the album. Why would Sufjan ever include the rat in that elusive club? This tiny, snivelling little vermin, phlegmy and bottom-feeding, for whose extermination humans have createdentire industries? What could he possibly see in it that the rest of us cannot? 

Only after that final question was asked did an answer hit me. Think of the existential awe you feel standing in front of a colossal statue or building; think of the existential awe you felt when you were five, intrigued and intimidated by the rooms of a house you didn’t know. Think of that, and then think of the rat. Think of how five-year-old you would appear to the rat. Think of the rat standing before David! Hell, think of the rat standing before anything that seems quaint to us: a maple tree, a child’s playhouse, an old Toyota. If David was a god-made-marble to me, think of how many gods the rat must encounter every single day of its life, in places we would scarcely even think to look. Think of how astonishing it must be to race through a city and see the sunset coat those stone canyons in gold, or to happen upon an oceanside cave large enough to house one hundred generations of your family.

It’d be a scary world. The same things that astonish you are just as likely to kill you. Perhaps, with any pretences of dominating the Earth dashed from the moment you were born, you really wouldn’t mind.

At the cogent and empathetic hands of Sufjan Stevens, ‘Year of the Rat’ becomes a song less concerned with how we perceive the rat and more concerned with how the rat perceives us. It is a song that conveys the wonder of being a tiny creature on a planet of giants, totally dwarfed by the things that humans take for granted. It’s a song that forces us to take the perspective of an animal that we tend to execrate, a song that encourages us to wonder, even if momentarily, whether the world might be more beautiful seen through those beady little eyes. In some sense, it’s also directly a song about us: a song that looks to convey how small we must be in the eyes of David, of the planets, of the galaxies, and of God, certainly far smaller than the rat is to the human. Like Enjoy Your Rabbit often manages to achieve at its best, ‘Year of the Rat’ finds wisdom and spiritual transcendence in the unassuming confines of a damp, furry, malproportioned rodent – this, surely, is one of the most impressive coups Sufjan has ever pulled off.

If objectivity can be at all applied to art, ‘Year of the Rat’ must be the most successful song on Enjoy Your Rabbit; it’s a shame, then, that it does not receive more acclaim within one of the more welcoming fanbases in indie music. Its placement on the biggest stylistic outlier in Sufjan’s entire catalogue can’t help in that regard, and neither can its being placed behind ‘Year of the Monkey’, a song many times harsher than its vermin cousin. If ‘Year of the Rat’ were instead slapped with a cheerfully Midwestern title and placed near the beginning of Michigan, it’d surely be regarded as an album highlight. Instead it is saddled with all the baggage and invisibility of being on this mettle test of a project.

The Michigan hypothetical is less preposterous than it might sound, because on top of being a song about the wonder, terror, euphoria, overwhelm and innate existential knowledge that accompanies being nary a foot tall, ‘Year of the Rat’ is a song about details. Rats can look at the small things that humans ignore and see a network of microscopic elements – there is no beach if not for the trillions of grains of sand it contains. ‘Year of the Rat’ accounts for this by being extraordinarily intricate, to a degree comparable to any of Sufjan’s later baroque opera. It throws acoustic instruments – guitars, drums, pianos, vibraphones – up against metronomic digital elements – synthesisers, arpeggiators, glitched-out percussion – in a way that Sufjan would never really attempt again, not even on an album like The Age of Adz, which commits nearly unilaterally to electronica. 

There is no sense of a melting pot here, no third way between the two poles: acoustic and electronic elements stay discrete in the mix. But there are a lot of each, and they are made to dance around the same rhythms and harmonic foundations, and that dance makes ‘Year of the Rat’ sound exceptionally meticulous, as if it would fractalise endlessly if you could zoom in. This, I would contend, is more representative of Enjoy Your Rabbit’s overall character than ‘Asthmatic Cat’ or ‘Monkey’ are. Perhaps the rest of the record isn’t as unabashedly pretty as ‘Rat’ (not, at least, until the closer), but the flat abrasion of the album’s opening punches is misleading – not all the world is quite so gruesome.

Enjoy Your Rabbit derives influence from a myriad of sources, but none of those sources are as obvious, oft-discussed and crucial to the album’s soundscape as Steve Reich. This is not the last time you will hear about Reich in this project, because Enjoy Your Rabbit is not the last time Sufjan would draw from him. (‘Out of Egypt’ is still four years away, both in the Sufjan release schedule and (at this rate) in the Extraordinary Histories writeup schedule.) It is not an exaggeration to say that Sufjan Stevens the artistic persona would not exist without the set of musical structures that Reich pioneered – he is, along with Neil Young, Elliott Smith and R.E.M., foundational to Sufjan’s compositional voice. One could even contend that Enjoy Your Rabbit is a direct attempt to wrangle Reich’s music into the digital age; such is the quantity of Aphex and Autechre influence in here that I wouldn’t be so ambitious as to make that argument, but it even being arguable in the first place is telling. And on an album dripping with Reichisms, ‘Year of the Rat’ is the minimalist’s most faithful devotee.

‘Year of the Rat’s musical foundation is a single blinking synthesiser pulse, lightly subdivided into triple meter, and looped ceaselessly from the moment the song begins to the moment the song ends (nearly, anyway – the pulse finally fades out with fifteen seconds left on the track, blasted away by loud shreds of glitch.) No matter what transpires – no matter what melodies, harmonies and textures are folded into the mix – the pulse keeps steady, a restless, effete, kinetic bedrock over which the high drama of the composition soars. Creating pointillist arrangements out of thousands of tiny repeating harmonic specks is a technique that Sufjan heavily explores on Enjoy Your Rabbit, refines on Michigan, and masters on Illinois – it is nearly as recognisably Sufjan as the fingerpicked folk ballad, and it is on ‘Year of the Rat’ where it first blooms.

Yet for as much as pulsing arrangements are recognisably Sufjan, they are all but synonymous with Steve Reich. I would wager that no single composition has influenced Sufjan more than Music for 18 Musicians, Reich’s most well-known piece and the first exposure for many alternative musicians to the tenets of minimalism. ‘Year of the Rat’ plays out like Music for 18 Musicians in miniature: its various melodies and motifs are introduced glacially over the course of an extended runtime, with a relentless pulse running underneath it all. Reich’s piece is usually rendered with analogue instruments, so the tribute that Sufjan performs here is far from orthodox, but ‘Year of the Rat’ certainly captures the spirit of Music for 18 Musicians faithfully, and its single-note synth ostinato in particular is directly ported from the elder composition. Enjoy Your Rabbit will continue to employ Reich’s techniques to differing extents on the remaining eleven songs; with ‘Year of the Rat’, however, his influence reaches an early peak.

There are far worse musical idols to have. I would argue, actually, that porting elements of Reich is especially appropriate for the aims of Enjoy Your Rabbit. Beyond Reich’s music being exceptionally intricate by nature (and thus its facsimile on ‘Year of the Rat’ feeling appropriately rat-like), it possesses a mantric, even transcendent quality on account of its long-form repetition. Given Reich’s Jewish faith, and his extensive exploration of Abrahamic musical techniques in his compositions, that transcendent effect is one that the composer clearly and intentionally embraces. Think of how many faiths seek to access the divine by way of tireless vocal repetition: Hinduism’s Om, Judaism’s cantillation, Hare Krishna.By committing to the pulse, ‘Year of the Rat’ shares many of these aims. Enjoy Your Rabbit is a deeply faith-based project, after all, one that fashions spiritual essences out of earthly creatures and structures itself around the supernatural cycle that collects them. It already has conceptual links to the divine, but on songs like ‘Year of the Rat’, Sufjan wants Enjoy Your Rabbit to feel divine. Perhaps this is how the rat sees all the world?

I could devote an entire second writeup to describing the musical narrative that ‘Year of the Rat’ tells, but I’ll refrain; this writeup is already my longest to date, and this particular song is probably better off experienced, rather than granularly analysed. Besides, I’d have to make the difficult selection of which elements to cover and which to omit, should I attempt to do any of them any justice at all. Do I cover the suspiciously rat-like electronic glitches at the beginning? Do I cover the way the pulse evolves in timbre and colour over the course of the track? Do I cover the rigid, indifferent drumming? The regal chord changes? The stately melody? The triumphant, roaring guitar that tears through the song like an avalanche? The fidgeting polyrhythms that it smothers? The abrupt dismissal of that section? The determined one-chord drone in the middle portion? The delightful way it melts away into washes of vocal and cymbal? The cascading vibraphones as the pulse becomes louder, more urgent? The peacefulness of this outro getting pummelled by explosions of noise, because, yes, it’s no easy life? What’s not worth talking about here???

A note on the aforementioned vocals, though. Calling Enjoy Your Rabbit an instrumental album is, I would argue, simultaneously a) misleading and b) conceptually accurate. Sufjan’s vocals do appear on certain tracks here, and on ‘Year of the Rat’ they get an especially gorgeous showing, his breathy hums wafting like a vapour over the second half. What distinguishes them here is that those vocals are in a sense instrumental: they are deployed for entirely textural ends, uncommonly (for Sufjan) stripped of the need to tell a narrative. It’s a technique that he would return to upon his re-entry into electronic music nine years later, and it works especially well on his more ethereal, sublime-evoking songs. Sufjan’s lack of confidence in his own vocal ability is palpable on his pre-Michigan works; the whispered, lightly tonal incanting on ‘Year of the Rat’ does not point to a singer who wishes to draw attention to himself. 

On this track, though, it is entirely appropriate for the creator to disappear into the music. Enjoy Your Rabbit, atypical opener and closer excepted, is one of Sufjan’s most selfless projects in a very literal sense. For a man who would come to embody the endurance of the personal in the historical on his state albums, Sufjan’s slavish devotion to the non-human perspective on Enjoy Your Rabbit is a real delight to witness – and all the more so because it points to the worldviews that we humans, with our malapportioned bodies and our overgrown brains and our indefatigable egos, will never be able to access. ‘Year of the Rat’ does not feel sorry for the Zodiac’s most hated creature, an approach that many other songwriters would surely take. It instead imagines a world in which the creature might feel sorry for us. What a cool little vivarium this song is.

And it is, of course, damn strong musically. ‘Year of the Rat’ has become a recent favourite for me when running or working out – the first half especially is full of burning intensity. I have friends that consider it among their absolute favourite Sufjan songs of all time, and for precisely zero highfalutin conceptual reasons; they love the melodies and are smitten by the journey it maps. It hasn’t quite managed to get there for me – I prefer ‘Year of the Ox’, a song many times less detailed and conceptually dense – but it is absolutely a song worthy of any of the superlatives you see attached to Sufjan’s later work. I listen to ‘Year of the Rat’ and I am suddenly five again, in strange bedrooms, gorging on terror and awe. That, for my money, is a pretty great thing.

[extraordinaryhistories]

#36 - 'Year of the Monkey' (Enjoy Your Rabbit, 2001)

The monkey was a circus monkey and sat, grinning dutifully, behind the bars of a freak show cage. He had applied to the freak show three months prior with a fully-formed character in mind: Quixote the Monkey-Genius, the sophisticate, who knew Hobbes and spoke Latin and could outclass even the canniest human in Socratic debate. The freak show owner, a right Paper Collar Joe with his purple waistcoat and his sweaty face, hired the monkey and put him straight into a cage. As it turned out, all anyone wanted him to do was throw shit.

Watch him! Watch him fling his food onto the concrete!!! Watch him swing around like a dolt!!! See the savagery of the wild and rowdy East!!!

One Labour Day evening, with the rest of the fairgrounds fast asleep, the monkey slipped through the bars of his cage and ran away. Chancing upon an army barracks, he called all units to the training field and instructed them in the finer points of guerilla warfare. The monkey and his army approached the city walls with a fifty page list of demands and demanded to see their leader, but the citizens would not even dignify the monkey with a single emissary. He ransacked the city and relieved them of their riches. He absorbed their army into his own. Over the next ten years, the monkey ran a complex military campaign focused on highly targeted sieges of city-states increasingly distant from his own, quickly establishing land, aerial and naval dominance over major regional powers. At the seven year mark the monkey invaded Europe, then South America, Asia, Africa, and (most difficultly) Australia. He emerged victorious in every clash.

Then he ordered the permanent closure of the freak show, and now our planet is run by a muriqui. 

–

We can’t say it didn’t warn us.

After an atonal and vaguely foreboding introductory track, Enjoy Your Rabbit begins the Zodiac calendar with perhaps the single most abrasive song that Sufjan has ever recorded. It is not without competition – ‘In the Words of the Governor’ and ‘Satan’s Saxophones’ would no doubt like a word, to say nothing of the darker recesses of his Christmas material – but ‘Year of the Monkey’ certainly takes that title as far as mainline studio album tracks go. Whereas other Sufjan albums tend to meet you at the door with hearty melodies and a cup of warm cocoa, Enjoy Your Rabbit slugs you across the face, takes your wallet, and leaves you for dead. This opening salvo is, for lack of a better word, utterly relentless.

‘Year of the Monkey’ being the way it is invites a question: why on God’s green earth would Sufjan sequence this steamroller of a song as the first full-length track on Enjoy Your Rabbit? If the Zodiac calendar began with the titular primate, we might be more understanding; historical accuracy took precedence. It doesn’t, though. It is the ninth in the sequence. The calendar begins with the Rat, for whom a song is included directly after ‘Monkey’ in the tracklist. Nothing and nobody forced this choice. Sufjan broke with millennia of tradition in order to begin his album with 20,000 volts of raw fury, for reasons that will remain lost to time. 

We can speculate, though. It is possible, as with ‘Year of the Asthmatic Cat’, that Sufjan saw some humour in this placement. I have long held that fans and the media tend to take Sufjan a little too seriously - most of his work is earnest and deserves serious appraisal, and this is holistically true of Enjoy Your Rabbit, but what of ‘SuperSexyWoman’, and ‘Satan’s Saxophones’, and ‘Siamese Twins’? Young Sufjan loved occasionally making musical decisions based on nothing but their comedic potential, and was no stranger to making sequencing decisions for that same reason (think of ‘Belly Button’ into ‘Rice Pudding’, a match forged in the deepest depths of hell.) It could just be that beginning his second full-length album, a sweeping, complex, endlessly layered opus, with ‘Asthmatic Cat’ into ‘Monkey’ was a hilarious prospect to him. There is something rather self-sabotaging, even masochistic, to it: I am going to take this work that I’ve toiled over ceaselessly and convince my listeners to not even give it a chance. How many first impressions did this song spoil? How many would-be ‘Year of the Rat’ fans were dead on arrival because of that damn ape?

I suspect this was part of the calculus, but not all. I find it likely that Sufjan wanted the opening punches of Enjoy Your Rabbit to be totally unapologetic, boldly committing to a sound that might have been alien to Sufjan’s followers at the time. It is easy to overlook that Sufjan had flirted with electronica well before 2001, but it is equally easy to overlook how obscure those flirtations were - the overwhelming majority of A Sun Came was composed for guitars, woodwinds and drums, with only ‘Jason’ and ‘The Oracle Said Wander’ betraying any electronic influence at all; a fan in 2000 would have to dig through niche various artists compilations to find a properly synthetic Sufjan Stevens song. For all intents and purposes, Enjoy Your Rabbit introduced this Sufjan to his fans, and ‘Year of the Monkey’ makes absolutely no overtures for him. There is no ambiguity here, no compromise, no sense of logical evolution from A Sun Came – you are not going to get another ‘Rake’. Enjoy Your Rabbit is going to offer something new, that new thing is going to be difficult, and, well, that’s that. You are welcome not to like it, but if you manage to weather the storm, you might just be rewarded on the other side.

And it’s not as if ‘Year of the Monkey’ is in any way poorly executed. This song is only humorous insofar as its placement on Enjoy Your Rabbit is absurdly, obscenely alienating. Regardless of how enjoyable a listen it is, ‘Year of the Monkey’delivers unreservedly on Sufjan’s intent for the compositions on Enjoy Your Rabbit: to commit the spirit of each of the twelve Zodiac animals to tape in a manner innately perceptible to the album’s listeners. I actually find ‘Year of the Monkey’ to be the most successful song on the album in that regard. There is absolutely no denying it: this is monkey music on a very deep level.

I am not a zoologist, and neither, I suspect, are most Sufjan fans. I can’t claim to know how monkeys really behave, if they can even be said to ‘really’ behave any way at all. I can only speak for what folklore, popular media and conversational metaphor (“monkeying around”, “monkey business”, “monkey on your back”) has taught me about monkeys, and to the layman like me, a monkey is an agent of chaos. For a monkey, there is no selectionary filter separating thought and action – there is only action, and with that action comes violence, destruction, disarray. You cannot expect to reason with a monkey, because the monkey understands that reason can only slow our collapse into entropy, never stop it. It is for this reason the monkey often adopts rogue-like roles in human media, as it is the only animal with the capacity to disrupt fragile or untested hierarchies. Throw that rock; break that camera; tear that banana limb from limb – there’s never anything better to do.

Every word of that description is captured in ‘Year of the Monkey’ for me. Every last one. Hell, they’re all captured in the first ten seconds alone, a quasi-random eruption of glitch that includes one of the most destructive kick drums you’ll hear this side of a Merzbow album. Sufjan would pull a similar trick in the introduction to ‘Too Much’ nine years later, but by then he was comfortable making some concessions to listenability, choosing well-balanced drum patches and smothering them in trippy effects; on ‘Year of the Monkey’ there is no such luxury, with blown-out low ends and aggressive trebles dominating the mix from the beginning. Even when the song begins roughly hewing a rhythm out of various splinters of glitch, there is nothing approaching comfort or security here, only the sense of imminent catastrophe.

To emphasise, the first portion of ‘Year of the Monkey’ is shocking no matter which era of Sufjan you set it against. There are very few moments in his oeuvre where you can say that a song sounds ‘nothing like Sufjan’ and have that be accurate – he is far too versatile for a sweeping statement of that kind – but the commitment to straight-ahead glitch in this intro is unparalleled. The introduction of some twinkling vibraphones to contribute the first melodic element of the song feels for a brief moment like coming up for air (“finally, the Sufjan I know!”); the introduction of sputtering, out-of-key horn slams soon after feels like being pulled back under the surface. Vibraphones and horns are familiar Sufjan tropes, but not in the ways they’re presented here. The queasy melodies they carry have none of the balm-like effects that Sufjan melodies often do. You are in a zoo and there is a monkey and the monkey is pelting rocks at you.

An eerie silence. Dark drones whirr ominously. Then: attack.

Occasionally in my listening to Enjoy Your Rabbit I have wondered whether Sufjan intended to capture something of humanity on ‘Year of the Monkey’. We share ancestry with every animal in the Zodiac, but we are practically cousins of the monkey, and countless of its behaviours are reflected in our own. Monkeys (depending on the particular species; the term ‘monkey’ really refers to a host of mammals with a variety of different traits, a fact that is obvious to most and that I’ve therefore omitted for brevity) can love, empathise, use tools, appreciate beauty, form complex social dynamics, and, most importantly, fight. The capacity of the primate to go to war – to lust forearthly things so intensely that they become worth going to war for – is ultimately the creature’s downfall. Monkeys (and their lanky hairless cousins) are the only creatures of the Zodiac capable of smiting all the others off the face of the Earth.

Perhaps that’s why the second half of ‘Year of the Monkey’ sounds like it does. You would be hard-pressed to find a more terrifying passage of music on any other Sufjan album. The destructive crush of the song up to that point remains, but the chaos is replaced with something far more regimented and, in the classical sense of the word, martial. The bursts of noise are compressed into an absolutely hideous downward progression played by a troop of horns that have no desire to keep in key – a gruesome, apocalyptic military march that would almost have a transcendent quality were it not so determined to rip you to shreds. It’s that combination of extreme violence and soul-crushing monotony that sounds more human than monkey to me. Humans don’t fight with rocks or sticks: they fight with helicopters, drones and surface-to-air missiles, and they will couch it in the respectability and pomp of a royal procession. ‘Year of the Monkey’ begins as the uncoordinated monkey and ends as the Machiavellian human. The evolution is wildly off-putting, but then you would hope so, if this song really does hold up a mirror to even a tenth of the damage that we do to the Earth, and to each other.

You may not have the same interpretation of ‘Year of the Monkey’ that I do. That’s fine; it’s beautiful, even. It’s also more probable for Enjoy Your Rabbit tracks than it is for any given track on, say, Seven Swans or The Age of Adz. Instrumental music invites the listener to contribute some piece of themselves with an urgency far exceeding that of vocal music, where intrinsic meanings are usually suggested (or even dictated.) ‘John Wayne Gacy Jr.’ is probably about John Wayne Gacy Jr., not about apartheid South Africa or the synthesis of carbon tetrachloride – you are welcome to read it some other way, but killing the author can only get you so far, and the visceral emotion of the melody and chords will not vanish so easily. A song like ‘Year of the Monkey’, on the other hand, eliminates any impository language (title notwithstanding) and leaves a sandbox in which the listener can play. Take it from Sufjan himself:

“Many people say the same thing: that they inevitably end up visualizing a place or a picture when listening (carefully) to the album. Maybe this is the purpose of instrumental music in the first place. There are no lyrics (or narrative) to encourage the listener. Therefore you are free to imagine what you like.”

The composer finds other ways to impose themself, though. Young, old, black, white, gay, straight, American, Egyptian, Surinamese: no person on Earth can hear ‘Year of the Monkey’ and not sense danger. The nature of that danger is up to your interpretation, but it is totally unavoidable. Enjoy Your Rabbit’s first substantial composition sees the monkey and thinks of barbarity, destruction and pain – an unfair charge for the animal, perhaps, but it makes for a listen that cannot soon be forgotten. 

This is by far the bitterest pill that Enjoy Your Rabbit will ask you to swallow. Congratulations! You made it through. The rat will now usher you into the light.

[extraordinaryhistories]

#35 - 'Year of the Asthmatic Cat' (Enjoy Your Rabbit, 2001)

The kitten developed pneumonia and passed three weeks later. On her way to Heaven, she was startled to find her company was not the lions, the vultures, the killer whales – those kings among beasts, whose lot in life appeared as if a divine gift, their spoils unending. It seemed that they were the Lord’s eldest children, nearest Him in life as in death; and yet the milky road to paradise that day was flocked with vermin, pests, and innumerable crawling things! No creature stood more than a few hands tall here, and most were absent limbs or organs, mauled as they were by predators. A mouse with a missing leg nuzzled up in the kitten’s fur as they approached the threshold of forever. 

Up there, the kitten excused herself from her play to commune with God. She was delighted to receive an eternity of her creator’s love, but the impression that she was undeserving of it crept up on her like a pox. Why could she take an audience with God and not the lions, the vultures, the killer whales? She, a tiny coughing little thing with a drooping eyelid and skinny legs, and they, before whom all of nature lay subjugated? God – jolly and aged, bedecked in purple suspenders, the bald spot on his head glinting with white light – gazed over at a caterpillar playing fetch with a gnat. He then turned his head to the kitten and smiled.

‘It is just as I designed. For them I accord Earth, and for you I accord Heaven.’ 

—

By 2001, Sufjan Stevens seemed poised to become Sufjan Stevens. If the non-album tracks he recorded and released between 1999-2001 are anything to go by, Sufjan was ready to divert course from the winking experimentation of his earliest material and commit instead to firmer, more tested principles: melody, harmony, theme-and-variations. It wasn’t that the exploratory drive had disappeared entirely from his work, even if you listen to a song like ‘Bushwick Junkie’ and wish that maybe it had – it is better instead to say that this drive was now carefully laced into the songs rather than boisterously drawing attention to itself. ‘Far Physician’s Son’ casts its monastic vocal around a 5/4 skeleton; ‘I Can’t Even Lift My Head’ melds coiling Midwestern guitars to a straightforward downcast melody; even ‘The First Full Moon’, admittedly ‘boisterous’ in every sense of the term, is more or less a digitised variation of a conventional indie rock tune. Michigan was still a couple years away, but by 2001 its arrival more or less felt fated, the climax of a trajectory already set in motion.

And yet squarely in the middle of that trajectory sits Enjoy Your Rabbit: a sprawling, largely electronic, fourteen-track wordless song cycle with lofty philosophical ambitions and a commitment to exploring texture, timbre and rhythm over the songwriting qualities that Sufjan would soon become renowned for. Even in his early career Sufjan was no stranger to projects as ambitious as this one – he had by then recorded concept albums on (so he has revealed in blog posts) the apostles, the days of the week, and the solar system, ultimately choosing to leave them unreleased. Neither was Enjoy Your Rabbit at all stylistically unprecedented in 2001. The electronic ‘All Delighted People’ saw public release in 2000, and early tracks only made available in later years, like ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’ and the second demo of ‘Love Yourself’, indicate the depths of Sufjan’s synthesiser experiments following A Sun Came and his move to New York. It was more that Enjoy Your Rabbit felt alien to this particular moment, a craggy island puncturing the surface of a surging river.

What, then, drove Sufjan to produce Enjoy Your Rabbit just as he seemed to be finding a voice? Not the voice – Sufjan’s versatility is as renowned as his melodies are, and The Age of Adz really isn’t so far away – but certainly a songwriting mode that he was exceptional in, and that he was weaponizing to gradually increase his profile. Perhaps he wished to close the book definitively on his rigidly structured song cycles of yore. Perhaps he needed a full-length project to sustain his career momentum between A Sun Came and an as-yet amorphous project that would become Michigan. Perhaps he believed this music was exceptional. Was he right? Over the course of the forthcoming fourteen essays, we will look for an answer, and emerge just as puzzled as we once were.

We certainly owe it to Sufjan to take Enjoy Your Rabbit as seriously as he evidently once took it. This is an earnest album with an earnest intent: to create wordless music that vividly captures something of each of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac, but then to also capture the why of it all – why an antiquated, trivialised and much-fetishized framework has been, and can still be, so spiritually moving in a culture so riddled with cynicism. The zodiac calendar is simultaneously rooted in bare materiality (the animals it includes can be found in our homes, yards and farms) and in high-concept determinism (your animal is said to influence your characteristics and preferred behaviours). Enjoy Your Rabbit, through its mantric, hypnotic compositions, dares you to imagine that it were all true, that these twelve animals have an impermeable spirit to which you were dyadically linked at birth, and that in this notion one – Christian, Jew, Hindu, Muslim or atheist alike – can find a sort of metaphysical belonging. What would it mean if this were all so? What would it mean to be a horse, a tiger, a rat? What might we learn about ourselves, and about our year-kin?

Truthfully, this does all feel like shadowplay. Though there was an immense quantity of effort invested into Enjoy Your Rabbit on multiple levels, from the music (you don’t produce multiple versions of songs like ‘Year of the Ox’ if you aren’t earnestly committed to their success) to the thought exercise that underpins it, Sufjan seems to routinely downplay its significance. It was, in his words, a “funny little project that won’t die”; he has described “rolling his eyes” when director Justin Peck requested permission to adapt Enjoy Your Rabbit into a ballet, befuddled as to why a project like this deserved re-examination at all. It is clear that Sufjan himself now perceives Enjoy Your Rabbit as slight, unserious, a tangential stopgap between weightier projects.

All this might be so, but it might also be a sentiment coloured (for Sufjan) by the failure of this album to accrue any real popularity. Enjoy Your Rabbit was met with minor critical attention (a supportive Pitchfork review, back when the publication was still nascent, is a notable exception) and few listeners; Sufjan was by then staking a claim as a folk singer anyway; life moved on. But Enjoy Your Rabbit was, for a brief, shining moment, the subject of Sufjan’s unwavering care, attention and effort, the career-defining magnum opus that never was. One of my aims with these writeups will be to call foul on the notion that Enjoy Your Rabbit was in any way half-baked. Hell, take it from Sufjan himself:

“I tweaked and manipulated live tracks, wrote whole songs (with contrapuntal riffs, seven part harmonies, trumpet flourishes and tom-toms) that later became samples for a subsequent song. I amassed hours (months, years) of raw material, rending it in all directions, amending, mixing, extracting, abridging — until I was left with the most minute sample of something (a bravado hum, a digital hiss, a nuance of vibrato) which might somehow, in some abstract way, resemble an ox, or a rooster, or a horse.”

Enjoy Your Rabbit is owed a sincere, high-concept appraisal, and I will do my best not to abandon that duty.

This leads us naturally into ‘Year of the Asthmatic Cat’, a deeply unserious song that deserves little (albeit not zero!) critical thought. Sufjan choosing to place ‘Year of the Asthmatic Cat’ as the opening track on Enjoy Your Rabbit perhaps accounts for his less-than-positive retrospection on this project as a whole. It is one of two compositions here that bear no relation at all to the Zodiac calendar; on its face it seems to pay a wry tribute to Asthmatic Kitty Records, Sufjan’s then-obscure record label, founded by he and Lowell to distribute music created by the Holland, MI underground, of which Sufjan was a member. Making reference to AKR on an album dedicated to the animal kingdom must have been an opportunity too valuable to pass up, and I can’t blame him for taking it. Never deny yourself free promotion! Think of the bottom line!

If nothing else, the music here certainly justifies its title. ‘Year of the Asthmatic Cat’ consists of twenty-four seconds of what I assume represents the belaboured breathing of the pneumatically-challenged feline. AKR’s namesake(s) is/are entirely real: Lowell’s two cats at the time, Sara and Tabby, suffered from chronic asthma, only recovering once Lowell moved to the much drier Wyoming. I can imagine the wheezing of Lowell’s cats was a sound intimately familiar to Sufjan, and it is certainly rendered accurately here, a disquieting whine with the timbre of two sheets of metal grinding against one another. I am grateful for the truncated track length; any more of this would feel like too much.

If we can read ‘Year of the Asthmatic Cat’ as just as much a tribute to the family pets as it is to the record label named after them, then this song begins to feel really rather poignant. To insert your own beloved critter into this millennia-old calendar, one that sees all of existence in the fauna around us; to do so despite, or even because of, the ailments and complications and weaknesses that the cat grapples with; to imagine it sitting at the right hand of God next to the dragons and tigers – that’s love. That’s validation. That’s a paean that can go toe-to-toe with ‘Wordsworth’s Ridge (For Fran Fike)’ or ‘Jamila’. It might even be – if I may make an ambitious point – spiritually Christian, indicative of a Christ that accepts and loves our flaws and asks us only to spread His joy in return. I am sure Sara and Tabby were adorable little furballs, but ‘Year of the Asthmatic Cat’ is not cute in any way. It explores, with good humour, their ugliest characteristic, and makes no apologies for it, for they are still God’s children.

This joy exists in ‘Year of the Asthmatic Cat’ regardless of whether Sufjan conceived of it in so many words. Perhaps this song, unlike most others on Enjoy Your Rabbit, was intended as nothing more than a simple joke. There is certainly a charming, eccentric humour to the last few seconds here: after the sheet-metal grinding concludes, a voice credited as Mannar Wong (who was, a Museum of Chinese in America interview tells me, a resident of the Manhattan Chinatown neighbourhood and presumably a friend of Sufjan’s) delivers a line of Chinese in a deadpan, dispassionate inflection. I am no Cantonese speaker, but a friend who is translates it, roughly, as follows:

         “The cat cannot breathe, it needs to drink milk.”

It is nice to have at least some Chinese show up on an album about the Zodiac; a thin atmosphere of authenticity is established on track one, and Enjoy Your Rabbit will henceforth remain wordless. Otherwise this is little but a good example of Sufjan’s early dry-as-a-desert humour. Don’t give a suffocating cat milk, everyone! Take it to a veterinarian.

In some ways ‘Year of the Asthmatic Cat’ is a good tone-setter for Enjoy Your Rabbit; in other ways it feels wildly inappropriate in that position. It primes the listener for an album dedicated to “somehow, in some abstract way” capturing the spirit of twelve Zodiac animals, one pet and one god (although the connection between animal and composition will become increasingly opaque from here.) It anticipates the highly textural and often abrasive nature of the album, a marked contrast from Sufjan’s then-recent material. It suggests intellectual commentary, albeit only subtly. On the other hand, it points to a far more lighthearted album than Enjoy Your Rabbit ends up being. This is a record of elephantine proportions, filled to the brim with grand, sweeping, precipitously evolving barrages of electronica, drawing from Reich, Rachmaninoff and Aphex Twin with po-faced sincerity, none of which is foretold by this thin little scrap of a song. The asthmatic kitten may be going to heaven, but here on Earth, how could it ever possibly compete?

[extraordinaryhistories]

please do more these were pretty cool

hehe... don't worry – i'm not gone just yet

[extraordinaryhistories]

#34 - 'Year of the Ox' (early version) (non-album track, 2000)

A baby ox is called a calf. The little calf enters into the world very nearly as proud, sturdy and muscular as its elder. To the untrained eye, in fact, there might be no apparent difference at all; see how it heaves forward with the might of ten men, or more! The infant beast has many of the same features as its superior: the complexion of its hide and its face, the muscular kick of its legs, those big, spiky horns that have been known to gore many a careless shepherd. And neither is it the favourite critter of many. In those respects, it may as well be identical.

But do not be fooled, young zoo-keeper! ‘May as well’ is a dangerous term. The calf does, in fact, differ from its elder in tiny ways. They are as follows:

The elder and the younger are in different keys. The elder is in C# Major; the younger, with its fresh-faced energy, is in the slightly higher D Major.

The elder has a slightly clearer mix. Certain elements, especially the drums, are punchier and more foregrounded.

The elder is very slightly faster than the younger. One would, of course, expect this from an ox who has become fit and vigorous in the fields.

The elder features a brief, blown out drum break at 0:51 not present anywhere in the younger.

A glitchy industrial section begins at 1:30 in the elder, which is absent in the younger and is replaced with the early introduction of a distorted keyboard line that first appears at 2:27 in the elder.

Another bitcrushed drum break is present in the elder at 2:04, quickly followed by another small, glitchy section. Neither of these are present in the younger, which instead returns to the electric guitar line that was first introduced earlier in the song.

At the very end, the younger briefly returns to its main theme and then peters out into a mangled vibraphone outro. The elder also returns to the main theme, but swiftly cuts into a synthesiser fugue and then one final churning drum break to close itself out.

Easy as a bundle of hay, right?

Another thing you should know about the calf is that it is a real pain in the ass (the human variety, mind) to find. It is one of the most obscure little animals in the whole wide wilderness, only released in 2000 on 8.21 A Blue Bunny Compilation, which also featured the decidedly non-animal ‘Woman at the Well’ and ‘Far Physician’s Son’. You will have to track down a copy of the CD or download this poor animal from the internet to hear its multitudinous grunts and groans. Many will question whether it is worth it at all – you could see bigger, grander, more impressive creatures just about anywhere at your local zoo.

But do consider it. The elder ox gets all the love anyway. Give the poor calf a chance and listen to it calf bellow; I daresay you could hardly tell the difference, even if you tried.

[extraordinaryhistories]

#33 - 'All Delighted People' (early version) (non-album track, 2000)

Much like ‘love yourself’, the phrase ‘all delighted people’ was evergreen for Sufjan. We do not have the scores of demos to examine that are available for Sufjan’s most famous self-care anthem, but we do know that he first attached music to that phrase all the way back in the late nineties. That was to be all for a while – but some ideas simply refuse to die. At some point in the late 2000s, Sufjan decided to revisit those three words and construct around them a colossal, dizzying, earth-shattering monument to the apocalypse that announced to the world a dramatic change in style. But for a time, their significance was much smaller, and sweeter; their existence was only known to a handful of the most dedicated of Sufjan acolytes. And around them sat a veritable wrecking ball of synthesisers.

This right here is a proper deep cut. The release of the 2010 extended play All Delighted People condemned the 2000 song ‘All Delighted People’, released on the Eye of the Beholder various artists compilation, to the dustiest regions of Sufjan’s back catalogue. The fact that the dramatically updated and rewritten EP version of the song had its roots in a much smaller, hugely divergent embryo was not mentioned at all in Asthmatic Kitty’s press release for the song and went routinely unnoticed in contemporary reviews. 2000’s ‘All Delighted People’ was superseded and thus eventually forgotten. It was somewhat well-known among Sufjan obsessives during the 2000s, but was nearly entirely written out of history thereafter.

It is, in a sense, understandable. The final release of ‘All Delighted People’ is bigger, bolder, brasher, broader, more confident, more specific and more intentional. It is also only barely similar to its forefather. There is the lyric ‘All delighted people raise their hands’, which carries over unchanged, and there is the melody attached to that lyric, which is very similar in cadence and pitch to the final version and was clearly tweaked slightly for a new arrangement. Otherwise, though, there is not much else. It really is difficult to compare the sprawling, seemingly everlasting verses of 2010’s ‘All Delighted People’ to a song with a total of eight unique lines, one of which consists only of the words ‘all delighted’. For the most part, we must approach the first ‘All Delighted People’ as a work entirely unto itself.

The specifics are dramatically altered, but I would be remiss not to acknowledge that some of the broad thematic strokes stay the same. Most importantly, both songs stay committed to maximalist arrangements. One deduces that Sufjan saw a sort of spiritual and existential gravity in the line ‘All delighted people raise their hands’, and was resolute that whatever music eventually fell into place around it needed to be as dense as a neutron star. The final version would see Sufjan achieving that density with massive washes of orchestration; here he opts for synthesiser upon synthesiser upon synthesiser.

2000’s ‘All Delighted People’ likely originated from Sufjan’s experiments with the Roland VS880 EX digital workstation during his earliest days in New York City, which produced equally synthetic songs like the 1999 ‘Love Yourself’ and ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’. The approach here is not much different to those productions – we have squawking, abrasive keyboard melodies, malformed drum samples, and tiny explosions of energy at odd points in the song (the piercing break before the final refrain, which ends not      fifteen seconds later.) Sufjan seemed to view the synthesiser as a tool of cyclonic destruction at this point in his career; destruction certainly abounds on ‘All Delighted People’, often to the detriment of its listenability. It even has a cute little glitched-out coda that exists for no reason beyond itself. He could, and he did, without much thought to whether he should – and that, to be clear, is perfectly valid for a young, tenacious musical inventor. It just doesn’t make for palatable relistens, especially compared to better-executed excursions like ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’ or ‘The First Full Moon’ (or, hell, most of Enjoy Your Rabbit.)

Harmonically, melodrama abounds. We are presented with a simple four-chord loop over which floats one of the most sullen melodies that Sufjan has ever produced. There is not much light or hope in the songwriting here – it has a nearly operatic sadness to it, and it’s a sadness that shirks all ambiguity. Some of Sufjan’s best melodies have a paradoxical blend of simple harmony and a deceptively rich emotional profile, but on 2000’s ‘All Delighted People’ there is only forlornness to reckon with. You do not even have to pay attention to the lyrics to understand the atmosphere that Sufjan is establishing here. The effect is only compounded by a quivering vocal delivery that sounds as if it could be blown away by a strong gust of wind. In sharp contrast to the chaotic instrumental, here lies a tender, emotive, unapologetically downcast song.

I say you need not pay attention to the lyrics, but even if you did, you would register much the same emotions. The first six lines of 2000’s ‘All Delighted People’ speak of a society totally overcome by isolation and a pervasive, all-encompassing shame. Interestingly, the song begins on a variation of the title phrase: ‘All the lonely people put their hands / In the personal crocheted Afghan’ (‘Afghan’ in this instance referring to an Afghan blanket, made with a heavily textured crochet pattern.) Clunkiness of the phrase ‘personal crocheted Afghan’ aside, we have a solid evocation here of the behaviours that isolation forces us into. The more alone one feels, the more steps one takes to make that isolation imperishable – thus the covering of the body in this song, the locating of ‘a place / Where their hair cannot reveal their face’, under the assumption that to hide away is better than to hope, or to hurt. An ancient, but accurate, trope.

The song’s second verse – all two lines of it – focuses in on a single unnamed figure amidst the other ‘lonely people’: someone who ‘has happened to have pains’ (a line that, like much other early Sufjan writing, seems to overextend itself just to reach a syllabic quota), and who ‘will know enough to ache’. It is not unreasonable to interpret this song as an explicit psalm for Jesus after hearing these lines. The song’s themes fit such a reading precisely: God assuming the form of one of the ‘lonely people’ on Earth to bring about their collective salvation, a man who bears the weight of humanity’s trials, misdeeds and pains and will eventually die a righteous, but lonely, death. One might imagine the ‘delighted people [who] raise their hands’ at the end of the song to be the same lonely people at its start – this Messiah, this son of God, has cleansed them of their suffering. Free of sin, they now raise their hands in prayer.

‘All Delighted People’ beginning life as an overtly Christian song would not at all be unexpected, considering how dominated Sufjan’s early music was by his faith. It’s not as if the 2010 version was unabashedly secular, either. But the religion of the final ‘All Delighted People’ is complex, non-specific and surprisingly interpersonal; the religion of the first ‘All Delighted People’, if this interpretation does indeed hold water, is a simple invocation of Christ-the-Messiah. It is nothing that we have not seen from this songwriter before. The novelty of the 2000 ‘All Delighted People’ comes in its depiction of a world without Jesus. The presence of the Lord, but in silhouette; the misery we encounter in his absence.

God is never directly mentioned in the early ‘All Delighted People’, though. We are free to take it at face value if we wish: a sad song about the tribulations of loneliness. Maximalist though the arrangement is, it certainly sounds sad – you cannot escape the dourness of that melody, or those chords. Perhaps the electronic chaos is a little too suffocating for a melody this one-dimensional. But even though there may be no serious argument for calling 2000’s ‘All Delighted People’ a more impressive achievement than its successor, it is a vital baby step towards one of his career’s most lauded monoliths and a perfectly enjoyable listen on a miserable stormy day. Consider it another valid entry in the canon of Sufjan electronica.

Besides, the experience of making this must have been invaluable. That aforementioned electronica canon? With Sufjan’s second full-length project, it was to become a whole lot bigger.

[extraordinaryhistories]

#32 - 'Love Yourself' (1999 version) (non-album track)

It was not so easily escapable, unfortunately. ‘Love yourself / You are the one thing I needed’ – there was something about those lyrics, that message, that required closer inspection. How foolish that nobody had thought of it before – so simple, yet so, so important. He had to do it proper justice, and the seventy-six seconds of guitar and vocals that he had wrestled together in 1996 wasn’t going to cut it.

As with all of life’s greatest problems, an answer (though in the end not the answer) came via the synthesiser.

The 1999 treatment of ‘Love Yourself’, a song which was at that time a scrap of melody written three years ago during his earliest musical experiments, shows an element of Sufjan’s character that would prove to be utterly key to his success: instinct. You don’t return to an idea that you attempted, and then abandoned, three years prior, without a preternatural instinct: no, there really was something there. Of course, his instincts were totally vindicated – the eventual 7” release of ‘Love Yourself’ became one of only two Sufjan singles to chart in the United States. Some creative traits are only cultivated with time, but Sufjan’s ability to discern which songs are worth pursuing for major release is downright prodigious, and seemingly has been since the beginning of his career. Instinct is what gave us a wide release of ‘Love Yourself’ and not, say, ‘In the Words of the Governor’. You may scoff, but when you look at all your songs as scruffy little extensions of yourself, it’s a damn hard choice.

Okay. Instinct led Sufjan’s mind back to ‘Love Yourself’ – what to do now? His eventual decision to pursue the icy, glitchy trappings that would constitute the 1999 version (and all future ones) was assuredly a product of this time in Sufjan’s life. The turn of the millennium marked an explosion of creative interest from Sufjan in the synthesiser, out of which came ‘The First Full Moon’, ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’, the early versions of ‘All Delighted People’ and ‘Year of the Ox’, and then, as culmination, the entirety of Enjoy Your Rabbit. This man is nothing if not a quick learner – synthesisers went from total exclusion from his instrumental repertoire (not a single synthesiser was used on A Sun Came per the album’s credits) to, for a brief period, dominating it. One wonders if the difficulties that accompanied moving to New York – new neighbours, a cramped apartment, minimal recording setup – led him to digital instruments partly by necessity. But his creativity and drive were durable, and the music that bled out of his first salvo with electronics was, given his inexperience, convincing. Mostly.

The instinct that ‘Love Yourself’ might have a future as a warped bit of electronica was evidently a correct one. But this second iteration of ‘Love Yourself’, the earliest complete electronic song we have from Sufjan, exists in a weird no man’s land between a fleshing-out of the 1996 take and a degeneration of it. Sufjan does not seem to be one to do things by halves – like ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’, its closest analogue, this is a properly synthetic song, with squawking drum machines, chopped-up fragments of noise and stuttering vocal effects. The few elements here of acoustic origin, most notably a small drum part under the first verse and a polyrhythmic glockenspiel loop reminiscent of ‘Tahquamenon Falls’, are merely rhythmic foundations for the electronic top-line elements. There are all sorts of attempts at all sorts of sounds here, sounds that pop in seemingly at will and disappear just as quickly. Many of them are quite unlike anything else in Sufjan’s oeuvre – there is a strangely compelling instrumental break at 1:20 featuring a quasi-acid house synth arpeggio that would fit just fine on a Shpongle song, as out-of-place as it seems here.

As with other early Sufjan electronica, it is clear from the outset that a lot of work and care went into this one. Tracks like these are not so much recorded as they are constructed, and this one is a veritable mosaic of instrumental sections with just about everything possible thrown at the wall: a dancefloor-ready drum machine design here, a hip hop break there, a dissonant loop or two to send us off in the outro. Where the 1999 ‘Love Yourself’ differs from ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’ is that its maximalism is more structural and less everything-all-of-the-time. Individual sections, though many in number, are actually texturally sparse. The focus remains on the vocal melody, the lyrics, and a mellow, tonal synth ostinato that probably evolved into the one on the 2018 version. These elements – the message – persist, even in the face of hostility.

Songwriting-wise, not much has changed from the 1996 version. We’re in 4/4 now, and it’s a careful, relaxed 4/4, slower than its older siblings. Sufjan’s voice carries the verses, which are few in number and very similar to the first version (minus, sadly, the ‘Change yourself / Love yourself’ section), in the same thin, breathy tone that dominates this era. The melody remains unchanged, except in the second and second-to-last verses, which see Sufjan singing the same line in a higher octave and under heavy effects. Everything is normal, everything is standard, everything is fine. And then the bizarre bridge section, exclusively created for this version (and no other), comes in like a left hook and annihilates the peace.

Out of a sense of dutiful writerly diligence, I made an attempt at a transcription for this bridge since none exists online – and understandably so, given how heavily treated it is. After dozens of close, methodical listens, the best I could come up with is this:

‘When you try to [elongate/allocate?] all things,

we always knew you

always knew your things

we try to [advocate?]’

Doesn’t much help, does it? It is quite a jarring moment, and one that was eliminated in all future versions for understandable reasons. Sufjan really strains to sing the melody here, but cannot do so with any reasonable competence, and ends the section on probably the most painful flat note you will hear on any of his recordings. For a man who so often produces clean, methodical music, it is remarkably messy.

And so is nearly everything else here. This is a messy, messy version of ‘Love Yourself’ that feels in some senses like a step backward for the song, even if it ends up being bigger, bolder and brasher than the 1996 demo. There’s a part of me that wants to intellectualise those characteristics – love and loving oneself can be a difficult, confusing process – but I really do not detect intentionality on Sufjan’s part there. It is easier to just conclude that 1999’s ‘Love Yourself’ is a very valid experiment that correctly identified the need for a lateral shift towards electronic music, but ultimately did not amount to the arrangement the song needed. Sufjan himself must have come to much the same conclusion: this version remained unreleased until a surprise blog post in 2013, and the song itself was seemingly not revisited for over a decade. It was not to be gone forever though. ‘Love yourself / You are the one thing I needed’ – yes, there really is something there...

[extraordinaryhistories]

#31 - 'Love Yourself (1996 demo)' (Love Yourself single, 2019)

The 1996 demo of the song that would later become the stately, endlessly tasteful ‘Love Yourself’ is the earliest recording that we know to exist from Sufjan Stevens. Before Javelin, before ‘Mystery of Love’, before Carrie and Lowell, before ‘Impossible Soul’ and ‘All Delighted People’ and Illinois and ‘Romulus’, before even ‘Rake’ or ‘Happy Birthday’ or ‘Julia’, there was 1996’s ‘Love Yourself’, this chipped, scuffed, rain-beaten and wind-worn minute and sixteen seconds of pure, unmolested song. Welcome, everyone, to the ur-text of Sufjan’s catalogue. Make yourself at home.

If you’re ever hosting a Sufjan trivia night, here’s a fun question for you: excluding live performances and external remixes, which Sufjan Stevens song has the most released versions? Has to be ‘Chicago’, right? Original studio cut, of course, and then the acoustic, adult contemporary and ‘Multiple Personality’ versions on The Avalanche; coupled with the demo version released in 2016, that makes five. If you guessed ‘Chicago’, you’d be right, but only sort of. ‘Chicago’ is tied only with, of all songs, ‘Love Yourself’. Sufjan released three separate demos of ‘Love Yourself’, all developed before the finished song finally escaped his clutches in 2018: one recorded in 1996, one in 1999, and one in 2011(!), around the last leg of the Age of Adz tour. A fifth version, an instrumental reprise of the song on the official 7” single, rounds out the total. No Sufjan song has had such a prolonged gestational period as ‘Love Yourself’. He knew he had something of worth here, and spent over two decades trying – and, until 2018, failing – to make it work.

Most of his solutions to the ‘problem’ of ‘Love Yourself’ were electronic. Taken together, the various versions of ‘Love Yourself’ almost make for an excellent stylistic map of Sufjan’s career, from its earliest folky stages to its older, wizened, electronica-flecked apex (I say ‘almost’ because no versions have been released from his orchestral period in the mid-2000s, if any existed in the first place.) But before that apex could reached – before Sufjan found that most platonically perfect expression of ‘Love Yourself’ in 2018 – there was a college-aged kid, with a guitar and a tape recorder, covering the walls of his dorm room with cushions so his neighbours couldn’t hear him. To show this (no other word for it) insane development of musicianship and personality, Sufjan placed the song’s very first attempt right next to its very last attempt on the official single release. Perhaps the intent was to show continuity (of melody, of lyricism, of instinct), but the overall impression – charmingly, to be clear – is one of a cold, hard rip in time.

One cannot really overemphasise how archaeologically fascinating the existence of this version is. Sufjan, a long-suffering oboist in his youth, first began to learn guitar during his time at Hope College. He became good at it quite quickly, and by his final semester in 1998, Sufjan was ready to record an entire guitar-driven full length debut. 1996, though? The Sufjan of 1996 would have been in his second or third year at Hope and still a newcomer not just to acoustic guitar, but to songwriting, period. Given how much of this era remains unreleased, ‘Love Yourself (1996 Demo)’ is as close as we might ever get to hearing what Sufjan’s truest origins sound like. Every mighty tree was once a sapling; the 1996 four-track version of ‘Love Yourself’ is little more than a newly-sprouted seed. It may very well be one of the first songs he ever wrote.

The element of this version that betrays the most inexperience is the main guitar figure. Far from the busy electronics of later versions, the 1996 demo is centred on an endlessly-looping guitar vamp that breaks only for a small middle-eight. The perpetual swaying motion of the riff, with clearly audible slides up and down the guitar neck, feels harmonically neutral but rhythmically colourful and evocative of a waltz (one of the most significant differences between the initial and final versions of this song is the metre – 2018’s ‘Love Yourself’ is in a martial 4/4, whereas 1996’s ‘Love Yourself’ is in 6/8.) Considering that this riff was probably borne out of necessity – one imagines that a later take on this same arrangement would have included more chords – it is a surprisingly unique figure, one that effectively conveys warmth and soft golden light. Small guitar overdubs add texture, including one left-channel overdub at around fifteen seconds in that glides along with a genuinely pretty counterpoint. Do not confuse youthful simplicity with a bankrupt composition! It’s a song that could not have come from Sufjan at any other point in his life (quite like ‘Jamila’ in that sense.)

Most of the other pieces that would later make up 2018’s ‘Love Yourself’ are here, albeit in a truncated form. The melodic refrain, although sung in a weedy register and modified slightly to fit the 6/8 metre, is nearly identical to future iterations. Its lyrics likewise have the same general thrust, except there are less of them, and they are more repetitive. ‘Love yourself / You are the one thing I needed’ was clearly perfect enough as a mission statement to carry through, unaltered, all the way to 2018. That right there is the main take-away; the rest is noise.

But ‘Love Yourself (1996 Demo)’ has one clear rhetorical difference to the final version. It is a subtle one, but it’s there, and there is an argument to be made that it gives this demo a lyrical edge. There is an urgency of message to the 1996 version that isn’t replicated elsewhere – more insistence, more of a genuine sense of concern and care. Fewer lyrics exist here, but the ones that do are direct and mantra-like: ‘Love yourself,’ ‘Hold yourself’, ‘Change yourself’, ‘Make a shelf’, and, finally, ‘Love myself.’ It is as if Sufjan is legitimising the main message through repetition of structure. He knows it’s a hard conceit to stomach, so he’ll keep saying it until the words begin to sound true. Sincerity through simplicity – with 1990s Sufjan, it’s the name of the game.

There are two moments in particular here that stand out as tangibly different to the final version. The first: ‘Change yourself / Love yourself.’ Obviously the change in question might just be the act of transmuting one’s self-hatred into self-care; richer ways to read the song’s middle eight exist, though. The notion that changing parts of the self is ultimately not possible, and if itis then it’s tantamount to conceding defeat, is a myth. There is something liberating in admitting that certain portions of the tapestry of your character – ego, arrogance, envy, self-consciousness – are not what you want to contain within you. Changing yourself can very well be a path to loving yourself (or, expressed differently, making yourself more loveable.) It’s a surprisingly mature and worldly conclusion for a young man like Sufjan to reach, and seeing it in this early version of ‘Love Yourself’ is a real pleasure. Its omission from the final cut is a tragedy.

The second big difference: the ending. ‘Love Yourself (1996 Demo)’ has a narrative structure that is simple, effective, and not present in the 2018 song. Future versions of ‘Love Yourself’ have their gaze directed entirely outward: this song is an anthem for you, the listener, and nobody else. The 1996 demo is the only rendition to turn that gaze inward, and it does so in the very last lines of the song: ‘Love myself / I am the one thing I needed’. I am a very big fan of this sentiment as the rhetorical climax of the song and am perplexed as to why Sufjan thought to remove it in future versions. The change of address is a classically strong, satisfying narrative moment; it gives the illusion of a defined narrator with their own hopes, fears and need for affirmation. Suddenly the sentiments in ‘Love Yourself’ feel less platitudinous, more personal. Irrespective of all that, ‘Love myself / I am the one thing I needed’ is just a good and true message. We can get so easily caught up in the desire to affirm others that we forget to affirm ourselves. If you believe in everybody’s fundamental goodness and then recuse yourself from that same belief, what’s the use in that? It can only start with you, remember.

There are a good number of Sufjan fans who prefer this tiny, embryonic seed of a ‘Love Yourself’ to the giant, assertive redwood that it would eventually become. I do not consider myself among that group, but I absolutely understand their argument. Every other version of ‘Love Yourself’ feels like a massive (and massively impersonal) rah-rah anthem. It fits the song, to be sure, but embiggening the sound naturally causes the little things to get lost – things like the hug of a good friend, say, or the pleasure of making a small, attainable goal. All those things are contained in ‘Love Yourself (1996 Demo)’, a thoroughly earnest vehicle for sentiments that speak less to the world and more to you. And if that’s what it takes to get the message through, this is the version for you.

Back in a time before Javelin, before ‘Mystery of Love’, before Carrie and Lowell, before ‘Impossible Soul’ and ‘All Delighted People’ and Illinois and ‘Romulus’, before even ‘Rake’ or ‘Happy Birthday’ or ‘Julia’, when the only Sufjan fans were his family and his friends and himself, the phrase ‘love yourself’ might not have meant more – but it certainly meant something different. Something smaller. Something just for you.

[extraordinaryhistories]

CHECKPOINT: The Extraordinary Histories roadmap

…so how are we doing this?

Like, really?

With ‘Sofia’s Song’ marking song number 30 on Extraordinary Histories and the last original song of the A Sun Came era  I thought it best that I use this as a mini-checkpoint, take a step back, and explain exactly how I’m planning to go about the mammoth task of writing companions to every single Sufjan Stevens song ever. 

I’ll let you all in on a little secret: when I started Extraordinary Histories I didn’t have a plan. Not a real one, anyway. My thinking was that I would start with A Sun Came and then just… work it out from there. Whatever would come next (Enjoy Your Rabbit? The bonus tracks? The loose tracks from the era?) was tomorrow’s problem; at that stage, all I needed to do was focus on working out the approach my writeups would take. It was more than enough work! But I discovered that approach quickly enough, and pretty much overnight, I found myself at the end of A Sun Came and well into the loose tracks– and bereft of a true plan of attack. I’m glad in retrospect that I started with ‘A Winner Needs a Wand’ instead of a track like ‘Jamila’ that probably technically preceded it. It was already a big ask getting people to be interested in Sufjan’s chronically under-listened debut album; starting with something even more obscure would have totally eliminated momentum.

But once that was all done, I realised I had questions to ask myself:

Which songs were I to include in this project? Should I be including his covers? His demos of later fully fleshed out songs, like ‘Love Yourself’? Remixes of his songs by other artists? What about collaborations? Or live-only tracks, a group which includes some of his all-time best songs like ‘Wild Horses’ and ‘Majesty Snowbird’?

In what order should I be tackling these songs? Should I be going by their date of release, even if it meant absurdities like covering ‘Jamila’ and ‘Julia’ during the Age of Adz era? Or should I be going by their approximate recording dates, even if it meant absurdities like covering certain albums, like Planetarium, well before their official release date – and partaking in a whole lot of guesswork?

I thought I’d use this post as a way of answering those questions. Maybe you had them too or maybe you didn’t – either way, at least now you’ll know what to expect.

Regarding the ‘which songs?’ question, I decided that casting a wider net was better than casting an exclusive one and missing out on many important points in Sufjan’s artistic journey. As a general principle, I have decided I will be covering every single original song written by and credited to Sufjan Stevens – and every version of those songs, so long as those versions were created by him. To wit, I will be employing the following rules:

No covers. This might be disappointing to some, and in many senses it’s disappointing to me – I really wanted to write about ‘I Saw Three Ships’, dammit! If we’re exploring the development of Sufjan as a songwriter, though, it would be difficult and somewhat irrelevant (albeit interesting) to talk about his version of ‘Pink Moon’ or ‘Good King Wenceslas’. The biggest impact this will have is on the Christmas songs, which will be reduced to only the originals. If and when I get to the end of this behemoth of a project, I’d be interested in exploring the covers as part of a follow-up series, but that’s a bridge we can cross when we come to it. One exception: I will be covering his version of ‘There’s a World’ by Neil Young, mostly because it’s the closing track of a core studio album. Consistency? I hardly knew ‘er.

No live performances at all – including of unreleased material. Lots of cool alternate live arrangements of ‘Chicago’ out there, and I’ve been thinking of covering his live shows as part of another hypothetical future project. But they won’t be included in Extraordinary Histories; neither will the Carrie and Lowell Live tracks; neither will ‘Majesty Snowbird’, tragically.

No remixes of Sufjan songs by other artists. Sorry, Jon Galaxy remix of ‘Chicago’ fans, and Doveman remix of ‘Futile Devices’ fans.

No songs that aren’t officially released to the public. This was a tough call to make: do I cover Stalker, Astral Inter Planet Space Captain Christmas Infinity Voyage, both, or neither? I settled on ‘neither’, largely for ethical reasons. The artist didn’t want us to hear these, and I will respect the artist’s wishes.

As for the question of order, I decided that I needed to make an absolute call in one direction or the other. Ultimately I judged that jumping back and forth between 1998 and 2008 would be absurd, so I will be covering his discography in order of rough recording chronology. For Sufjan, this is not the same as his release chronology. Albums like Planetarium, for instance, were recorded all the way back in 2013 and only released in 2017, after the Carrie and Lowell era was complete. There are many other cases that are similar to this one – if there were only one or two I might have gone for the simpler route of release chronology, but alas. Once again: Extraordinary Histories is meant to cover Sufjan’s discography both as a collection of songs and as a linear process of artistic growth and redefinition. Its writeups are meant to work both individually and in tandem with one another. There’s a real narrative momentum to Sufjan’s career that would be kneecapped if I had to bounce between different eras.

Time for the big reveal. Here’s the complete list of songs I will be covering for Extraordinary Histories: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P6tUPAX0dlHRIWZxGlwtZkhE_sWH3lOKXxKKcqqlX0k/edit?usp=sharing

They are listed in the order in which I will be covering them. I had to make some educated guesses as to when some of these were recorded. You’ll notice some fun details that I discovered in the process, like that ‘My Rajneesh’ was almost certainly recorded during the Carrie and Lowell sessions.

Finally: why am I sharing all this info only now? Partly it’s because I’ve figured it out only now. But it’s partly also because this is a logical cut-off point. We’ve covered everything from A Sun Came and nearly all the tracks from the era. The only ones left before Enjoy Your Rabbit are a quartet of demos of later, more well-known tracks, and seeing as I’d run through the tracks from this period in no particular order, I thought it best to finish off the originals and then tackle these demos in one big non-chronological batch. After those four are done, we’ll jump into Enjoy Your Rabbit, and then ride out his career from there.

See you all very soon.

-Samuel

[extraordinaryhistories]

#30 - 'Sofia's Song' (non-album track, 1998)

It’s hard to know what defines us. Consider this: you die. Instead of passing through to the afterlife, your spirit enters the gangly, hunched body of a New York Times obituary writer. That body’s boss storms into the room. Quick! She – you – just passed. No time to waste or the grubby mitts over at WaPo will get the jump on the announcement. You have five minutes to bash out the final word on your own life. No time to think too hard. Do you write that you were:

‘...a visionary director, screenwriter and actor, known for her explorations of liminality and the pains that characterise the human experience. Her sophomore film, 2003’s Lost in Translation, propelled her to critical and commercial stardom; well-received follow-ups including The Beguiled (2017) and Priscilla (2023) further cemented her status as a prodigy of modern cinema. Revered by her friends, family and peers, she is survived by her two children and a lifetime of filmic excellence.’

or do you write that you were:

‘a visionary director, screenwriter and actor, whose single greatest achievement was that Sufjan Stevens wrote a song for her.’

You would pick the first option, of course. And you’d be wrong. That was the wrong option. Coward.

‘Sofia’s Song’, the third of three extant ‘name songs’ that Sufjan produced during his time at Hope College, is much closer in voice and narrative to ‘Julia’ than it is to the more intimate ‘Jamila’. This is the second song from this era dedicated to a famous woman that Sufjan can only view from afar. In ‘Julia’ the barrier was time; in ‘Sofia’s Song’ the barrier is fame. We can only presume that Sufjan does not, in fact, know Sofia Carmina Coppola personally, just as he does not know Julia Prinsep Jackson. The odd thing about ‘Sofia’s Song’, though, and the thing that differentiates it the most from ‘Julia’, is that here he doesn’t quite care. ‘Sofia’s Song’ is a song of revelry: it dances in the living light of absurdity, of the irrationality that comes with writing a song for somebody who will never hear it, and it therefore strangely emerges as one of his most overtly self-aware pieces of songwriting. ‘Julia’ yearns for the impossible; ‘Sofia’s Song’ yearns for impossibility. There is a difference! Subtle, but it’s there.

We will get there in due time. First, however, cast one eye to the musical elements at play here. Play ‘Sofia’s Song’ right after the other two ‘name songs’ and something will become apparent: the production quality is remarkably strong. So strong, in fact, that one wonders whether ‘Sofia’s Song’ was developed for possible inclusion on a then-hypothetical full length debut. When Sufjan released this song online in 2009, he confirmed its provenance as one of many completed tracks from his final years at Hope College; ‘Sofia’s Song’, however, even beats contemporaneous gems like ‘Happy Birthday’ and ‘A Winner Needs a Wand’ as far as clarity, fullness and percussive crispness go. This is not a very difficult tune to put to tape, granted. We have one banjo and a handful of vocal overdubs to contend with here. But listen to how plucky that banjo figure sounds! Or how full-bodied Sufjan’s vocals are! There is nary a hint of tape hiss, nor a false start or an instrumental flub in any part of the composition. As far as 1990s Sufjan is concerned, it’s a level of care only afforded to the orchestrated centrepieces on A Sun Came, and beyond that, transitional songs like ‘Damascus’ and ‘Woman at the Well’.

I belabour this point because it offers one key insight: ‘Sofia’s Song’ is far more than an initial sketch or recording demo, and that suggests to the astute observer that Sufjan liked this one. He may not have known exactly where or how to release it, but there was something worth carefully preserving here. Even the complex, climactic melody that accompanies the ‘I don’t care what you say!’ lyric, replete with broad vocal harmonies, feels very closely considered – more so, at least, than any moment in ‘Julia’ or ‘Jamila’. This does not necessarily make ‘Sofia’s Song’ a better song than that aforementioned pair, but it really does seem that Sufjan was of that opinion. It was even the first song he publicly released from his ‘name song’ era. Why? What makes ‘Sofia’s Song’ special?

Is it because of the music? Unlikely. Which is not to call it bad – the vocal line has a habit of lodging itself in your head for days on end – but it is, generously, rather standard. The arrangement is sparse and straightforward, a single banjo plucking out arpeggios that do not amount to much more than a chordal accompaniment. This leaves the melody to do the heavy lifting, and it is infused with the same sort of major key naïveté that one can find across much of his early work. Simplicity is the name of the game with this one – and so it is with ‘Chicago’ and ‘Mystery of Love’, among many other Sufjan songs, but those ones feel like the end result of a decades-long search for perfection, whereas ‘Sofia’s Song’ feels like a by-product of that search. Nothing about its musical character is exceptional.

And the strangest thing? This ‘song for Sofia’ is not a song for Sofia. It’s not even a song about Sofia – not really. This one is even more of an offender in that department than ‘Julia’ is: there are no references, even in passing, to Coppola’s life, work or character. Like most of his generation, Sufjan would have discovered Coppola through 1999’s The Virgin Suicides, an excellent (but totally aghast) film that deals with teenage angst, parental dysfunction, and the difficulties of siblinghood. All three themes must have resonated with Sufjan for reasons familiar to anyone acquainted with his life story –  but none are represented in ‘Sofia’s Song’ to any extent. These lyrics are nothing if not deeply optimistic, and to draw parallels between them and The Virgin Suicides would be to either try to make an uplifting interpretation of the film (an endeavour for which the idiom ‘getting blood from a stone’ was invented) or to assume the lyrics are tongue-in-cheek. It is hard to justify taking either interpretative route. Murky waters here; we must retreat.

There are plenty of songs, of course, that manage to be for a subject without really being about them. ‘Julia’ is one such song – listening to it teaches you nothing about Julia Jackson, but plenty about how Sufjan feels for her. This is not the case for ‘Sofia’s Song’. Four verses are contained here, and three of those four are based around the exact same structural motif. Coppola’s name is only invoked in the simple, declarative ‘this is the song for Sofia’ lyric that bookends the song; the remainder of verses one, two and four consist of Sufjan directly addressing the listener. This is something very rare: a Sufjan song largely written from a second-person perspective. All he does with it, though, is impel us to spread the good word about his song. ‘Tell it to your friends / Tell it to your father / And tell it to your sister, too,’ and so we shall, even if there’s not that much to tell. ‘Sofia’s Song’ is about as basic of an ode as one can imagine – it declares itself to be about a subject, and then spends the rest of its time commanding us to share that being-about.

Most of that time, anyway. The heart of ‘Sofia’s Song’, and the section that I assume made this song important for Sufjan, is its third verse. Totally breaking from the structure laid out in previous verses, Sufjan commands: ‘And I had the first of a few great ideas / Celebrate the day by putting things away / By putting things where they don’t belong’. These three lines strike straight at the thematic centre of a song that can at times feel maddeningly obtuse – it is one of the most creative sentiments that you will find in his early work.

There is a very valid reason that ‘Sofia’s Song’ ought to be the last of the Sufjan Stevens ‘name songs’ that one listens to. Sofia Coppola herself emerges as a secondary concern in her own song, in service of commentary on the very idea of writing about her. ‘Sofia’s Song’ reveals itself, in its third verse, to be a song about embracing the absurd – a song that is as brutally anti-cynical as they come. We are a jaded people; many of us see a song like this, ostensibly a tribute to a woman much more famous, wealthy and accomplished than late-nineties Sufjan, and we cannot help but snicker somewhat. We cannot. (Either/both senses.) There is certainly valid precedent for this instinct, given the ever-present trope of one-sided pining quickly turning into obsession. With ‘Sofia’s Song’, Sufjan dares us to imagine a world where this trope does not exist.

Yes – with ‘Sofia’s Song’, Sufjan makes a provocative proposition: perhaps the highest form of appreciation is the one that we understand will never be requited. Perhaps we should be writing songs or poems or stories or scripts or scrawls or what-the-fuck-ever like this more often. ‘Celebrate the day by putting things away / By putting things where they don’t belong’. Listen to him! The idea of order, the idea of one’s station in life, is really, really dull, and the only way to combat this stagnation is to find glory in absurd emotions. Express your affection for those who won’t ever hear it, and do it just because. Writing a song for renowned The Virgin Suicides director Sofia Coppola would be quite like putting things – putting your heart – where they don’t belong, and that is beautiful, and good, because it shows that you are capable of loving beyond yourself. It is a love that is impossible, but impossibility, just this once, fails to make it any less real.

Just like that, ‘Sofia’s Song’ makes all the sense in the world. It’s why, for instance, he ends the second verse by ordering the listening to ‘tell it to yourself in the mirror’ – ‘it’ being the fact that Sufjan means no wrong, he guarantees ya. Why would he have to say so if a stigma did not exist? Why do we live in a world where showing love is an inherently loaded proposition? He cannot, and does not, have an answer for you, but he’ll tell you to show love all the same. And he’ll make sure that you’ll be proud when you do it. Tell it to your friends, your father, your sister, your neighbour, the world, and finally, to yourself – it’s the only way to produce change. Strangely enough, in this tiny, quaint little song from Sufjan’s college days, we have a contented, mature thesis on what it means to affirm the lives of others. Like a parallel universe where the narrator of ‘Futile Devices’ ended up happy after all – who could possibly resist?

This is not the last time Sufjan would write about someone he’d never have a hope of knowing. More than that – he has built an entire wing of his discography around said conceit. ‘Sofia’s Song’ is the starting gun for a race that would only end with ‘Tonya Harding’ some twenty years later, and between those mile-stones he would pen ‘John Wayne Gacy Jr.’, ‘Saul Bellow’, ‘My Rajneesh’ and multiple other iconic pieces of art. Among these giants of his oeuvre (all much better songs, to be sure), however, ‘Sofia’s Song’ stands alone as the only one to operate entirely meta-textually. Choosing to entirely ignore its own subject – itself a deeply absurd and beautiful action, by the way – ‘Sofia’s Song’ instead sees Sufjan justifying the very artistic trope that it portends to represent and laying the groundwork for a whole career of ruminations on those people who we cannot access, but mean the world to us all the same.

And it is only in this last paragraph, sitting here at my desk at eleven-ten on a Thursday night, that the most obvious parallel hits me in the face like a Randy Johnson yakker. Here I am, feverishly dissecting the life and art of Sufjan Stevens, a man who performed at the Oscars and headlined Outside Lands, while my greatest achievements to date were first prizes at a few high school writing competitions. He hasn’t met me, he doesn’t know me, he doesn’t love me, and there’s a pretty good chance he never will.

I sure do love him, though.

And if that line made you cringe, I’ve got a song for you to check out.

[extraordinaryhistories]

#29 - 'Julia' (non-album track, 1998)

‘Julia’ is the second of three songs Sufjan has released that we know for certain to be written during his name-based songwriting blitz. It is the only of the three to have been explicitly labelled a demo by Sufjan, though really it does not sound so different to ‘Jamila’, and it may have even come from the same tape: the tape hiss is similarly abundant, the acoustic guitar tone is similarly lifeless, and both songs even come complete with false starts. ‘Jamila’ and ‘Julia’, though, are very – very – different songs. Whereas ‘Jamila’ is bright and clear, ‘Julia’ is a song of fog and murk – a Gothic ode to the lover that Sufjan could never have.

‘Julia’, by Sufjan’s admission, is inspired by a real historical figure, but said historical figure never really crosses over from inspiration into active subject here. This is a pre-millennial Sufjan song, so the sentiment here isn’t terribly complex, but there is a sort of carnal longing on display in ‘Julia’ that nearly every listener can relate to. Each verse is segmented into two halves, with the latter halves consisting of basic repeated yearnings: ‘oh to watch you’, ‘oh to kiss you’ and ‘oh to touch you’. (This song is so archaic even among Sufjan obsessives that there exist no lyrical transcriptions online, so this writer had to make his best approximation – if I make an obvious error, feel free to tell me I’m a fool online!) It is a song that very much exists in the physical space, albeit never directly acknowledging sexuality and thus being in a sort of narrative limbo space that (to me) suggests childhood. Sufjan would have been no older than twenty-three when he recorded this demo, so one cannot be too surprised by this. Indeed, it tracks with the other material he wrote around this time, with songs like ‘Rake’, ‘Dumb I Sound’ and even ‘Rice Pudding’ conveying that same sort of doe-eyed puppy love. Perhaps he had gotten the crude sexuality of his songwriting system with the Stalker project and was ready to return to a more childlike eros.

The other thing about children is that they are very good at unrequited pining. ‘Rake’ is not the most apt comparison for this one on account of how few emotional congruencies it has beyond love. We can point to the phrasing of the ‘oh to touch you’ refrains as evidence of one-sidedness, but to do so would be to paint an incomplete picture; consider instead the lines contained in the second and the fifth verses. ‘Are you other / Would I know you?’, Sufjan asks, and the implication of distance between narrator and subject becomes very clear. Not quite a standard he-loves-her-she-loves-him-not situation, though. ‘Other’ is a revealing word in this context. Not only is Sufjan not loved by Julia, he does not know Julia, and could not know Julia. Whether metaphorically or literally, the target of his affections exists in a reality separate to his – this pining could never actually be requited.

With a lot of Sufjan songs, we might at this point shrug our shoulders, mutter ‘he’s a poet, that one!’, and concede that we might never know the song’s intended meaning. Not so with this one. As it turns out, the extra-temporality is quite literal. In the blog post that accompanied the release of this song, Sufjan wrote the following:

"My collegiate infatuation w/ Julia Prinsep Jackson (photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron). Prose poems, pencil drawings and songs on 4-track cassette (“Julia” demo probably from 1998 or 1999?). Unearthed last week in an Adidas shoe box (with postcards from the Guggenheim Museum, mostly abstractions by Paul Klee, who also made puppets). The world is abundant."

Given what we know about young Sufjan – he of mythological obsessions and college English studies – this is far from surprising. His preoccupation with the literary canon, especially the Romantics, manifests also in songs like ‘Wordsworth’s Ridge (For Fran Fike)’. Julia Jackson, known later as Julia Stephen through her marriage, is an altogether more obscure subject to the general public than Wordsworth – to English historians she is known as the writer, model, socialite and philanthropist who mothered Virginia Woolf. She was by all accounts a breathtakingly beautiful woman, and this beauty comes across in the extant photographs we have of her. But she was far more than that, and in some strange way she emerges as a tragic figure. It’s not that she was stripped of her potential via the standards of her time – her rap sheet of achievements suggests, quite contrarily, that she found success in spite of them. The demands of her many faces led her to illness, and lacking modern treatments, she died of rheumatic fever at age 49.

Many, many answers here. Sufjan, in ‘Julia’, is enamoured by a woman whose internal and external beauty captivates the capital-R Romantic in him. He could never express any of this to Jackson directly – they missed one another by some hundred and fifty years – so he must play pretend. Who could blame him? Julia Stephen was remarkable. So remarkable that it feels almost cruel for her not to live forever. Sufjan tries to grant to her the little bit of eternal life that, through song, he also granted Djamilah; he is realistic, though, and knows that there is only so much he can do. ‘Oh, to touch you.’ Oh, if only I could breathe the same air as you, forever and ever. Suddenly, this love song becomes strangely, serenely sad.

The beauty of context! We now have answers to guide us through why this song both reads and sounds the way it does. ‘Julia’ is in a minor key, and takes great pains to remind you of that fact – the chord progression is intensely moody, almost Gothic in character, which was no doubt an intentional artistic choice from Sufjan given the subject (consider also the medieval clarinet and recorder parts.) The melody that springs therefrom has that same darkly misty character, and is particularly evocative on the ‘oh, to touch you’ lines. Just as the lyrics of ‘Julia’ are made obscure through the passage of time, so too does a fog descend over its music. I think he rather succeeds at executing that element of ‘Julia’, personally. A distant, sepia-toned arrangement for a distant, sepia-toned subject.

One would be remiss not to mention the fact that this song is both in 5/4 and, less commonly, is good at being in 5/4. Though when is a 5/4 Sufjan song not? His command of unconventional rhythm was one of the few aspects of his artistry that was fully developed at this early stage of his career, and we can hear it on ‘Far Physician’s Son’, on ‘A Winner Needs a Wand’ (a song that sounds suspiciously similar to this one), and on ‘Julia’. As with those songs, ‘Julia’ makes 5/4 sound no less natural than any time signature on the pop charts today. The 3-3-2-2 subdivision just flows. No need to overcomplicate things.

It's yet another method of reinforcing this song’s themes, in a way. The 5/4 here sounds no less natural than 4/4, but it does sound different – it snakes, ducks and weaves around the pulse, with a syncopation powerful enough to make any dancer wrong-footed. It feels, in fact, as elusive as reaching back in time to serenade a nineteenth-century lover. We may all feel at times that we were born in the wrong generation; it’s only natural to look at what’s around you and find the past to be firmer, fibrous, more exotic. The feeling is totally illusory, but we sure do like to pretend, don’t we? Julia Stephens is never going to send her love forward through time to Sufjan, but that clearly did not make the experience of writing this song any less fulfilling for him. Yes – we find pieces of our heart in times that we never were around to witness, and if we’re lucky, those pieces can add light and colour to the more visceral present.

Wishing is okay. Wishing is invigorating. And wishing is, oddly, one of the most productive emotions. Especially if you’re a sensitive English major from Michigan.

[extraordinaryhistories]

#28 - 'Jamila' (non-album track, 1998)

If you love someone, write a song about them. It’s real easy! Pick up a guitar, buy a tape recorder, learn three chords, scrape your fingers over the strings a few times, and sing about how you feel. It matters not whether you have the voice of Pavarotti or of Florence Foster Jenkins – all that matters is the intent. People are mortal, but art will endure long after we pass on; to record and release a song for someone is to let them experience a sliver of eternity. And if you happen to be Sufjan Stevens, twenty-something Australians from the opposite side of the globe will analyse your song decades later.

‘Jamila’ is not the first song that Sufjan wrote about a named individual, and it will certainly not be the last. It is, however, a rare unearthed document of a period in Sufjan’s career where writing about named individuals was just about all he did. ‘Jamila’ was recorded around 1998, which was a transformative year for Sufjan: the final stretch of his time at Hope College coincided with a torrent of musical productivity. To channel that productivity into tangible, skill-based gains, he decided to restrict himself for weeks at a time to writing songs concerning very specific themes. Sufjan has left the overwhelming majority of his work from this era unreleased – understandably so, given how limited his means of recording were back in the four-track days – and as such we are only privy to two of these themes. One was serial killers. The other was, less helpfully, names. Names of family, names of friends, names of strangers who, in an alternate universe, might have been either.

Strike one for the ‘family’ subcategory. The name ‘Jamila’ is an anglicised rendering of Djamilah, one of Sufjan’s sisters. Even ignoring interviews and Tumblr posts, there is plenty of evidence to demonstrate the life-long closeness of the Stevens siblings; observe songs like ‘Sister’ and ‘Djohariah’, or hear their voices wheedle their way through your speakers on ‘Godzukie’. These songs – their tenderness, affections and candour – reveal everything about this difficult family dynamic that Stevens’ biography could, or more. In the face of endless transience and a mother (their mother) who would be in, and out, and in, and out, and in, and out of their lives, it is no wonder that they share between them a bond worthy of encasing in song. Sufjan loves, and loves loving, his sisters. Can you really blame him?

‘Jamila’, unearthed and released by Sufjan in 2013 for his sister’s birthday, is a very simple song. It is short – clocking in at a hair over two minutes – and betrays its shoddy four-track recording in nearly every second; once you notice those astringent slides up and down the strings every time Sufjan changes chords you will never be able to un-notice them. The melody is sunny and endlessly cheerful, its highlights coming in the moments where Sufjan deviates from the main phrase (especially that jazzy little run at 1:45, a carnally satisfying moment). The vocal inflections are hugely indebted to Sufjan’s influences, notably Elliott Smith, in their mixture of nasally highs and obscured whispers. And to underscore all of this, the recording begins with an extended false start that feels less like a deliberate ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’-esque artistic choice and more like a genuine inability to hit that first chord change on Sufjan’s one-and-only take of the song.

The thing about a song like this is that you would not have it any other way. ‘Jamila’ thrives in its clear-eyed earnestness. It is one of Sufjan’s most honest pieces of music, back in the days when his biggest artistic concerns were remembering chord shapes and figuring out whether ‘sister’ could rhyme with ‘missed her’. The total lack of pretention on display here lends itself so well to a simple, celebratory outpouring of familial love, a folk singer’s ode to one of his life’s greatest joys. Even the violent way that Sufjan rips those chords out of his guitar feels ripe with genuine enthusiasm. Messy, but about the truest possible representation of a young man’s love. Look here, Djamilah, see what I can do!

Neither do the lyrics hide much in the way of subtext. These are adorable couplets that capture real feelings. A couple lines are clouded by odd rhymes (‘Eleven, like heaven’ is a lyric that remains more or less indecipherable), but there is no need to interpret ‘My sister, I missed her / She's always a good friend of mine’ or ‘Write her a letter, a letter / To tell her that I am just fine’. Real affection, delivered sincerely. The song’s cutest moment, though, is ‘My sister, my sister / She'll keep me from liquor and crime’ – both because the notion of sibling-as-moral anchor is beautiful and pretty much the platonic ideal of sisterhood, but also because of the implication that ‘liquor and crime’ are the worst evils that Sufjan can imagine. Absolutely not beating the ‘flower child’ allegations there.

By the time Sufjan finally released ‘Jamila’ – post-Age of Adz, pre-Carrie and Lowell – his art had long since matured. Heartbreak, sex, illness and death had now crept their way into his songs, and his images and turns of phrase had become fractally nuanced. He had become a better writer. But I don’t think he could have put together a song like ‘Jamila’ in 2013 – not with that same sort of innocent love spilling out of every lyric. Growing up necessitates certain corners of the self fading away, and as such, I’m glad Sufjan thought to immortalise Djamilah in song at the moment he did. Youth isn’t always wasted on the young, you know.