a coherent collection of random statements regarding God, words and tunes

I've made a lot of mistakes...
I've made a lot of mistakes...
I've made a lot of mistakes...
I've made a lot of mistakes...

     ...but not this time.

     As promised this time last week, I'm gonna get into a (mostly) song-by-song analysis of my (and probably several others') pick for album of the year: Sufjan Stevens' Come On Feel the ILLINOISe. If you haven't heard it yet, yr loss. Heck, everyone's loss.

     Reading over last week's entry, I realized I threw the term "Christian music" around with wild abandon, so before anyone's unnecessarily alienated (and/or simply doesn't know what the heck I'm talking about) I think I'd better define my terms a little better. What it USUALLY means — but doesn't in this case — is that subgenre of "music" that sounds like bad copies of bad bands from 15 years earlier, and put forth as "hip" music for the (largely) evangelical set. Example: Take a bad imitation of R.E.M., do a bad imitation of the bad imitation, add the J-word in several strategic places, and voila! Jars of Clay! The kids will eat it up! (Until they finally something with an actual taste, anyway.)

     That's not what I'm after here. Back in the '90s when I was doing my little journal, Burning Light, my come-on to writers was, "We're looking for Christians who write, not 'Christian writing'." To unpack that a little: I was looking for writers whose Christianity informed and was woven into their being and writing, not ones who were trying to hit you in the face with THE MESSAGE. Everyone's got a worldview of some sort, whether or not they really understand and can articulate what it is in their own lives. Therefore, as Christians, if we believe that Jesus is real (and danged well oughta know that life is real), shouldn't that just come out in one's art as a Christian, rather than meeting some fabricated standard that talks some phony Christianese but turns a blind eye toward that real life we've supposedly been left here to transform?

    End soapbox, for now. Anyway, the problem I've seen over and over with the real "Christian" writers I've worked with and the musicians who really to me is that they're caught between worlds — they speak too much to real life to ever be sold by a Christian retailer (try finding, say, Pedro the Lion's Control in one of those stores — I dare you), and the palpability of their faith turns off the "secular" retailer/buyer. Thus, in the words of the late Mark Heard (arguably the greatest songwriter you've never, um, heard), those who are really producing viable art from a this perspective are in the "Christian ghetto." If they survive, it's for the love of what they're doing and for no other reason. (Which isn't a bad reason at all, mind you, but when the "secular" pop charts are dominated by Christine Aguilera, Britney, et al., and the "Christian" charts consider Rebecca St.  James or Michael W. Smith to be significant "artists".... I mean, 'cmon...)

     End soapbox for sure, this time. There's a few artists who have managed to keep both their artistic integrity and a permeating sense of faith, and still have some deserved success in the process. I can understand if that doesn't mean a lot to you, but it does mean a lot to me. And maybe, just maybe, Sufjan Stevens is about to pull off the same trick. So maybe I oughta just start talking about Illinois, huh?

    The thing really is a quite magical, 70-plus-minute song suite/transportational device, concerning the state of Illinois of all things/places, pulling from all sorts of state folklore well-known and obscure. The amazing thing is that it sounds truly absorbed rather than simply contrived, especially considering the very indie hey-look-I'm-doing-it-all-myself nature of this project. Which is to say, it's pretty quirky in places but always disarmingly effective. And when the songs get closer to the bone, the disarmingness is even more effective, and affecting.

     It all starts off with "Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois," a sweetly quiet thing that God help me, reminds me of the intro to a certain other Illinois epic, Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie... (Am I the only one hearing this?). The rather imagistic lyrics leave just enough to anyone's imagination: "Mysterious shade that took its form (or what it was!) / incarnation, three stars / delivering signs and dusting from their eyes."

    After the instrumental, "THE BLACK HAWK WAR, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself in the Morning, or, We Apologize for the Inconvenience but You're Going to Have to Leave Now, or, 'I have fought the Big Knives and will continue to fight them until they are off our lands!'" (yes, there's a lot of long titles here), we enter the two-part title song. "Part I: The World's Columbian Exposition" has been known to annoy my family to no end, but I like it.  But the album really kicks into gear with "Part II: Carl Sandburg Visits Me in a Dream," which starts with a great, danged near prog-rock, instrumental break, and closes with the appropriate question, "Are you writing from the heart? Are you writing from the heart?"

    A question which is promptly answered by the next song, "John Wayne Gacy Jr." If you've heard anything from the album, it's probably this, although I question whether you'll ever hear it piped into your local Lifeway or Bible Superstore. (Although I actually heard this played during the after-service music last Sunday — how cool was that? Then again, I go to one of them "emerging" churches these days. ) Truly gorgeous, yet terrifying, yet real. Over a lovely acoustic, practically Simon-and-Garfunkelish arrangement come the details that slowly bring you into a world you'd've just as soon avoided:

 "His father was a drinker
And his mother cried in bed
Folding John Wayne's T-shirts
When the swing set hit his head

The neighbors they adored him
For his humor and his coversation
Look underneath the house there,
Find the few living things rotting fast
in their sleep, oh the dead
Twenty-seven people, even more
They were boys, with their cars,
summer jobs, oh my God
Are you one of them?

He dressed up like a clown for them
With his face paint white and red
And on his best behavior
In a dark room, on the bed, he kissed them all
He'd kill ten thousand people
With the slight of his hand, running far,
running fast to the dead
He took off all their clothes for them
He put a cloth on their lips, quiet hands,
quiet kiss on the mouth"

     And just when you think you've heard it all, here comes the real punchline, a thought so "there but for the grace..." that you'll never hear it repeated by any of the financial gracemongers on TV:

"And in my best behavior
I am really just like him
Look beneath the floorboards
For the secrets I have hid."

    Thankfully, the album comes back up for air with the cool production number, "Jacksonville." I oughta say a lot more about it, but cool will have to suffice. (I need to come up for air too, you know.) 

    After "A Short Reprise for Mary Todd, Who Went Insane, but for Very Good Reasons," (a brief instrumental revisit to "Jacksonville" which takes almost as long to read) comes "Decatur," a sweetly goofy train song the theme of which is captured in its subtitle, "...or, Round of Applause for Your Stepmother!" Complete with cheers at the end (entitled, "One last "Whoo-hoo!" for the Pullman").

   Things kick back into serious mode with "Chicago," easily the greatest song Jeff Lynne never wrote. (And c'mon, all late-period ELO fluff aside, Jeff did write some good stuff.) It's as big and chugging and string-driven as you might imagine, as well as both celebratory and sad all at the same time, as the transitoriness of life passes on by: "You came to take us / All things go, all things go / To re-create us / All things grow, all things grow.... I was in love with a place / In my mind, in my mind.... If I was crying/ In the van, with my friend / From myself, and from the land / I made a lot of mistakes /I made a lot of mistakes/ I made a lot of mistakes/ I made a lot of mistakes...."

   The album peaks with the best song on it, "Casimir Pulaski Day," an incredibly sad song that captures the moment and gives me goosebumps just writing about it. Think Van Morrison's "T.B. Sheets" taking place at a prayer meeting, with none of the terrifying caterwauling and a bit more physical contact between the author and the protagonist. I'm quite serious, and it works:

"Goldenrod and the 4-H stone
The things I brought you
when I found out you had cancer of the bone...

In the morning, through the window shade
when the light pressed up
against your shoulder blade
I could see what you were reading
All the glory that the Lord has made
And the complications you could do without
When I kissed you on the mouth

Tuesday night at the Bible study
We lift our hands and pray over your body
But nothing ever happens...."

   And when that "nothing" finally comes to fruition, not a berating of God but a profoundly hard, " I just — don't — GET this..." that has brought me to tears on more than a few occasions:

"Sunday night when I clean the house
I find the card where you wrote it out
with the pictures of your mother
On the floor, at the great divide
With my shirt tucked in and my shoes untied
I am crying in the bathroom

In the morning when you finally go
And the nurse runs in with her head hung low
And the cardinal hits the window...
All the glory that the Lord has made
And the complications when I see His face
In the morning in the window

All the glory when He took our place
But He took my shoulders, and He shook my face,
and He takes and He takes and He takes."

     Think it might be time to lighten up again? Yeah, Sufjan did too. After another instrumental, "To The Workers of the Rock River Valley Region, I Have an Idea Concerning Your Predicament," comes "The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts," which alternates between the stompin'est moments of the album on behalf of the Man of Steel and quiet intervals that accentuate the writer's own weaknesses (which also turn out to be strengths) in comparison  — again, the whole celebration/sadness thing in tandem: "Only a steel man can be a lover / If he had hands to tremble all over / We celebrate our sense of each other /We have a lot to give one another."

     With "Prairie Fire That Wanders All About," Illinois wanders into the more experiemental territory that it stakes out for the most of the rest of the album. A Laurie Anderson-like arrangement and chorus chant-sings: "Peoria! Destroyia! / Infinity! Divinity! / For Lydia! Octavia! / And Jack-of-Trades! / The Cubs! Hooray!"

     Which gives way to one more sweet/sad and by the end literally glorious one, "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out To Get Us!," an ode to lost friendship that right in the middle bursts into near-Whitmanic praise:

"Oh great sights upon this state! Hallelu--
Wonders bright, and rivers, lake. Hallelu--
Trail of Tears and Horsehoe Lake. Hallelu--
trusting things beyond mistake. Hallelu--

We were in love. We were in love.
Palisades! Palisades! I can wait. I can wait.

Lamb of God, we sound the horn. Hallelujah!
To us your ghost is born. Hallelu--

I can't explain the state that I'm in
The state of my heart
he was my best friend...
My friend is gone,
he ran away. I can tell you,
I love him each day
Though we have sparred,
wrestled and raged
I can tell you,
I love him each day.
Terrible sting, terrible storm
I can tell you. "

    Which, of course, is followed by another song/chant, "They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!" A couple more instrumentals and we're up to "The Seer's Tower," which gets me flashing on Rush's "Temple of Syrinx" for reasons I can kinda understand lyrically but not musically, given its somber, dirgelike chorus, "In this tower / above the earth / We built it for / Emanuel / In the Powers of the earth, / we wait until it rails and rails.... Still I go to the deepest grave / where I go to sleep alone." Not quite sure what to make of it, though I have my theories.

     The last set of lyrics come with the two-part "The Tallest Man, the Broadest Shoulders," yet another combination of celebrating the glory of Illnois and the waste that has come in the wake of much of that glory, leading into the closing incantation, and the ray of hope that goes with it:

"Oh Great Fire of Great Disaster
Oh Great Heaven, oh Great Master
Oh Great Goat, the curse you gave us
Oh Great Ghost, protect and save us
Oh Great River, green with envy
Oh Jane Addams, spirit send thee
Oh Great Trumpet and the singers
Oh Great Goodman, King of Swingers
Oh Great Bears and Bulls, Joe Jackson
Oh Great Illinois

Given what you lost, are you better off?
Given what you had, has it made you mad?
Celebrate the few. Celebrate the new.
It can only start with you."

    The album closes with two more instrumentals, "Riffs and Variations on a Single Note for Jelly Roll, Earl Hines, Louis Armstron, Baby Dodds, and the King of Swing, to Name a Few," and the positively Steve Reich-ian "Out of Egypt, into the Great Laugh of Mankind, and I shake the dirt from my sandals as I run."

 

     Well, that's what I've got. Buy it or don't. But I'm sure glad I've got it.

     There'll probably a couple short entries during the week, to commemorate a couple different occasions. One you can figure out. Maybe the other one too (at least it'll make sense once you see it). Until then...

 

 

 

 

 

Posted by: burninglight at 18:05 | link | comments