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#27 - 'I Can't Even Lift My Head' (non-album track, 2001)

When the Lord casts down His fury on Judgement Day, where will you be? When the time comes for every man to stare straight into the eyes of God and reckon with a lifetime of pain, regret, transgression and lies, will you be brave enough to speak your case? Will you be bold and confident, knowing that your heart is true? Will you be tremulous, hoping that the best of your intentions will be able to cure the worst of your deeds? Or will the Lord find you hidden, lain prostrate on the cold, dead earth, weeping, unable to face the true gravity of your sin? We would all like to think we embody grace, truth and tenderness; but in that final hour, will we bet our eternities on it? Sufjan can only speak for himself. But in ‘I Can’t Even Lift My Head’, he arrives on his firm, tragic answer.

Or, alternatively –

‘The Upper Peninsula’ at home:

Musical archaeologists will get quite the kick out of this one. We have discussed how the period between A Sun Came and Michigan – Enjoy Your Rabbit notwithstanding – operated as a sort of creative sandbox for Sufjan. It was probably the single most important time of his entire career. The wild experiments of A Sun Came are still here, but they are fewer in number, largely replaced by embryonic songs in the style he would soon become famous for. ‘I Can’t Even Lift My Head’, however, is different. ‘I Can’t Even Lift My Head’ is not a song in the style he would soon become famous for – it is a song he would soon become famous for, more or less. Look at the relaxed tempo; look at the boomy, lightly-played drums; look at those intertwining helices of banjo and electric guitar; feel the feeling it inspires in you, that strangest mix of quivering intensity and panoramic wideness. This is ‘The Upper Peninsula’ in a different coat of paint.

It is likely that Sufjan slightly rewrote and updated this very song for the Michigan classic – many elements, like the drum part, are practically identical. Aiding this comparison is the fact that Sufjan’s vocal delivery on ‘I Can’t Even Lift My Head’ is indistinguishable to how it would soon be on Michigan, which is one of the few elements of Sufjan’s style that had not hitherto fallen into place. Pre-millennial Sufjan has a distinctly thin, strained affection to his voice, likely inspired by Elliott Smith and other classic folkies like Nick Drake who he was enamoured with. You can hear it most obviously on his earliest material, like ‘Julia’ or ‘Rake’. It took years for Sufjan to adopt the fuller sound that would lend his greatest songs their unrivalled intimacy, and for my money, 2001’s ‘I Can’t Even Lift My Head’ – released on an Asthmatic Kitty compilation that featured three other Sufjan songs – this is its first true instance. In hushed, buttery, closely mic-ed tones, Sufjan steps into the confessional booth and crumbles right in front of you.

Because not all of this song is 1:1 to ‘The Upper Peninsula’. Call it modesty or call it maturity, but as Sufjan aged, his subjects counterintuitively decreased in scope. ‘The Upper Peninsula’ is a very small-scale song that speaks of American ennui by way of one protagonist, one town, one story. ‘I Can’t Even Lift My Head’ tells one story too, in a way, but this one is staggeringly existential. It is just as American as ‘The Upper Peninsula’ insofar as the devastating Christian guilt on display here is the cornerstone of Western morality. In the country of capitalism and Jimmy Swaggart, every person sees themselves a sinner by nature. Guilt keeps people working; guilt keeps people spending; guilt keeps people praying. Guilt is American. No less so than the man who sees his wife at the K-Mart.

In ‘I Can’t Even Lift My Head’, Sufjan experiences a guilt nearly heavy enough to crush the song’s tender arrangement. He imagines himself coming quite literally face-to-face with God – clearly invoking a Revelations-like rapture – and suddenly feeling the entire weight of his sin in one great impact. ‘Oh, I can't even lift my head / To say a word / To say a word to you’, he repeats in refrain, trembling. Though few in number, the verses in this song carry a multiplicity of meanings. Here, Sufjan both acknowledges that he is not worthy of sharing the same space-time as God and implies that the extent of his sin is so great that it cannot be fully expressed in words. Wanting to explain his life’s choices away in the end times, Sufjan finds that he cannot give voice to them, and instead communicates something more true with a different type of language – he bows his head and resigns in shame. ‘I can't even recognize / What I did wrong’, similarly, is many things at once: genuine inability to qualify his sin, self-soothing by denying the existence of that sin (I cannot consider my mistakes lest I erode my perception of self) and an instinctual apology to his creator for all those bad things he observes in himself, plus the many more that he doesn’t.

The most crucial line in this song – the one that makes it the most explicitly Christian and the most inexplicably Sufjan – is ‘If I had seen the Father / What would his face do / What would his face to do me?’ This points to something very fundamental about this particular faith. Christianity derives some of its strange power from the notion that shame cannot be separated from punishment. An intrinsic sense of rightness and wrongness must be at least fortified (or, less charitably, replaced) by empirical consequence. In other words, it is not enough to believe that sinning is wrong – we must also believe that sinning will send away from God and into Hell. Does this not seem to disentangle divinity from sensory experience and let immediate sensations – the kind that make up, well, everything we experience on Earth – be reclaimed by the Devil? I dunno; take it up with the theologians, not me. It’s there in ‘I Can’t Even Lift My Head’ either way, wherein God appears on Judgement Day and Sufjan is quite literally faced with his condemnation. Asking ‘what would his face do to me?’ is a very understandable question from any sinner in the Apocalypse. How will He punish me? And perhaps worse, how will the disappointment on His face make me feel?

‘I Can’t Even Lift My Head’ is best read as yet another important stage in Sufjan’s artistic maturity. Smooth and considered though it may be, it is ultimately a reasonably sophisticated, very listenable trial run for a better composition. But at least there is a universality to this subject matter that isn’t as present in ‘The Upper Peninsula’. Not everyone can understand how it feels to struggle in America; everyone can absolutely understand what it means to feel guilt. Self-hating sinners, this one is for you.

#music #sufjan stevens #sufjan #folk music #christian music #judgement day #rapture #dated memes