Sufjan Stevens takes trip beyond folk-baroque at Academy of Music
A funny thing happened to Sufjan Stevens and his celebrated folk-baroque, American history-obsessed style of songwriting, on the way to the Academy of Music.
A funny thing happened to Sufjan Stevens and his celebrated folk-baroque, American history-obsessed style of songwriting, on the way to the Academy of Music.
He got tired of it.
Stevens, who put on a fascinating and fabulous two-hour-plus sold-out show Wednesday at the 153-year-old Broad Street opera house, built a sizable following largely on the strength of Illinois, the sparkling 2005 banjo-happy song cycle that was his second album focused entirely on one of the 50 states.
At the Academy, the Brooklyn-based singer and multi-instrumentalist, fronting a 14-piece ensemble, eventually rewarded fans with Illinois, through a soaring "Chicago" and a solo acoustic "John Wayne Gacy Jr." during a standing-ovation encore.
But those songs were delivered to an audience that had, in Stevens' words, first shown the "strength, fortitude and patience" to listen to a set devoted almost entirely to songs from his difficult new album, The Age of Adz, and its companion EP, All Delighted Peoples.
Stevens came on stage wearing feathered angel wings and went through several costume changes, including sporting a gorilla mask.
As he made clear in one of many spoken digressions, Adz differs radically from his previous work. Stevens said he began Adz with the intention of discarding geography and narrative "and even music itself." Instead, he planned to explore pure sound for its own sake, often manipulated through electronic means. That process, however, proved frustrating. "I spent a lot of time in the studio, and I didn't get a lot done," he said.
By connecting with the art of the late Louisianan folk artist Royal Robertson - whose drawings of alien spacecraft were seen throughout the show - Stevens said he was able to put his sonic explorations to use in music that, at its best, came off as experimental and joyful.
That was certainly true of the 25-minute set-closer "Impossible Soul," which Stevens, in silver pants, said was influenced by Descartes, Wittgenstein, and Lady Gaga. Its lyrics were personal and self-examining (though never self-pitying). And its tortuous and noisy musical passages (including some superbly discordant electric guitar soloing) resolved in celebration.
"Do you want to be alone?" Stevens asked himself repeatedly in the song's first part. At the end, the answer was in the negative, as he and his dancers and bandmates bounded around the stage (and sent beach balls flying around the cavernous Academy). They rejected isolation and came out in favor of communal catharsis, chanting: "Boy, we can do so much more together! It's not so impossible!"