SUFJAN STEVENS

Alright, here's the thing: I'm tired now. Too tired for research and too tired to go through all of this guy's songs and albums. So if I'll speak out of my ass you'll just have to hold a lighter near by in case I make sense, if that makes sense.

I won't lie to you, I stole this guy from a trendy kid who works with me. She made the dumb ass mistake to share her iTunes library and I went shopping. But she only had three albums so I had to procure the other 5 all by myself. There was a little effort, you see.

I listened on shuffle. They say Illinoise is his best album. It is. Most of the songs that caught my attention were from it when I checked. But, this is weird: everything about this guy catches your attention. Everything is almost annoyingly inventive, fluttering, bouncy. Happy, fluorescent compositions mingle with melancholy ones, keyboards bump into banjos, it goes on and on, never a dull moment. And you kinda miss dull eventually. Maybe's just me, I'm tired. But no, this guy is good. He's good with song titles too. On Illinoise there are 22 songs and only 4 of them have regular, short names. Check out a couple of my favorites from the other 18:

"Riffs And Variations On A Single Note For Jelly Roll, Earl Hines, Louis Armstrong, Baby Dodds, And The King Of Swing, To Name A Few" and

"Let's Hear That String Part Again, Because I Don't Think They Heard It All the Way Out In Bushnell".

"Oh God, Where Are You Now? (In Pickeral Lake? Pigeon? Marquette? Mackinaw?)" from Greetings From Michigan is also one to remember.

As far as titles go, Enjoy Your Rabbit is also a fun read: it takes the Chinese horoscope head on, song by song and sign by sign: year of the rat, year of the horse, year of the snake, the lot of them. From all the animals, only the cat seems to have a little trouble, her song is called "Year of the Asthmatic Cat", but do not fear: the last song on the album is entitled "Year Of Our Lord", so the cat's gets saved or resurrected eventually.

You can't pick just one song from this guy. Like I said, I'm stuck with the feeling that, if you take one album, it's actually one song all the way through it patched up from different brilliant little songs. It's hard to describe. Also his joy is hard to describe. He's marching somewhere, there's probably a war somewhere between the color pink and some nasty dandelions or something, I don't know. But you like it. He's having fun putting sad lyrics on cheerleader music.

Anyway, I picked this song almost at random. I say almost because it did catch my attention one fragment of a crumb more than the others. It must be the contradiction between the subject and the treatment. John Wayne Gacy, as we all know, yes? was a serial killer, the clown killer. I did my research for this song approximately 15 years ago when I read a book about serial killers. It's a paradox. I like a good paradox, I am one.

Sufjan Stevens - John Wayne Gacy, Jr

Oh oh, I also like "Perpetual Self" from The Avalanche. The way he says "everything is lost" just makes you wanna pick flowers and choke a bunny with them. I'm too tired to upload it, though.
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30-something hours later:
Alright, here's "Perpetual Self":

Sufjan Stevens - Perpetual Self