A week ago, I had a dilemma.
My girl had work to do on a freelance project, but I’d belatedly realised that Sufjan Stevens was playing at the Festival Centre. I was’t a huge fan, but I liked most of Seven Swans and had enjoyed Illinoise, and knew of Stevens’ reputation for putting on a mean live show.
At the time, I knew he’d put out a lengthy EP and a new album of somewhat electronically-tinged material. It had been out for a few months, but I hadn’t gotten around to much more than a quick preview of a track that I quickly abandoned for some pressing matters at hand.
My girl insisted that she didn’t mind if I went to the show, and I rationalised that she’d be able to get more done with me out of her hair. It wasn’t easy though, because we do everything together, especially going to shows. It would be odd having this experience without her.
So somewhat reluctantly I opted to purchase a single ticket to see Sufjan from the far upper deck of the Adelaide Festival Theatre on the day before the show. One bonus of going alone was that I was able to get a seat in the second row of the upper deck; when I was still entertaining the notion that Emily could somehow postpone her work, we’d have been relegated to the second to last row.
It was a bit of a miracle of fortunately accumulated circumstances that allowed me to experience this show without preview or preconception. In the time since, I’ve tried to communicate what I encountered, but assorted YouTubes fail to appropriately capture the visual feast, and the music that was showcased, while outstanding, doesn’t communicate the spectacle that accompanied it, much less the overall effect of the live performance.
Long story short, Sufjan Stevens blew my mind. I expected brilliant musicianship, but did not anticipate the three-dimensional projections, extensive light show, ghetto-Tron wardrobe, choreography, ten-piece band, or (most importantly) the deeply personal and passionately delivered material.
People who have seen the show are probably nodding their heads and those who didn’t probably won’t have much of an understanding based on this, but my main goal isn’t to rehash the show so much as to track the mental journey that ensued in its wake in an attempt to do justice to the overall effect it’s had on me in the week since.
In that time, I’ve listened to my own iPhone audio of the show several times, along with the EP and album that provided the material for all but two of the songs performed, and have begun to draw some conclusions as to exactly what The Age of Adz is and what it means to me.
To hear Sufjan Stevens tell it, he made two records worth of material simultaneously following a rather unsettling bout of mystery auto-immune illness which eventually vanished, seemingly of its own accord. One of them, which would be called The Age of Adz, was informed by the art of Royal Robertson, a self-proclaimed prophet and painter who used out-of-body experiences to inspire his work, which was dominated by apocalyptic imagery and UFO’s. Stevens has admitted to identifying a bit with Robertson, who suffered from schizophrenia and lived out his last years almost entirely within the confines of his creative imagination.
What Sufjan communicated to me with The Age of Adz is the experience of being an artist. It is not an easy listen. Filled with distracting synthesized jolts and echoes of delay pedals, The Age of Adz is a kitchen sink affair, forcing the listener to accept its decidedly abrasive psychedelic aesthetic as the price of entry, after which one can start to appreciate the memorable songs, outsized arrangements, and musical compositions that owe as much to Bach as Bob Dylan.
I’ve since read an interview where Stevens explains that the Adz of the title is a tool for shaping wood, but that he also intended it as a double-entendre for odds, with which it shares its pronunciation. The title track repeatedly tells us that, “This is the Age of Adz, eternal living,” but also reminds us that, “When it dies, it rots,” and, “When it lives, it gives it all it gots.”
Recently the teacher who taught me to interpret poetry passed after a long life of belting adolescent male minds into some sort of intellectual shape. He would have asked how a song could talk about eternal living and death and rot in the same breath, and would have waited all period, if necessary, for someone to put together a coherent explanation.
I thought of him when it occurred to me that the song, and a lot of the album, is a metaphor for the creative process and an examination of everything that goes with it.
Being an artist, Stevens is consumed with the weight of expectations, both his own and those of his fanbase. Fraught with illness and the daunting task of topping himself, he faced mortality and his own insecurities in a personal age of odds: of difficulty/Adz: the craft of that which stands the test of time and defies human death, lasting art and legacy.
So he’s examining the gulf between artist and art, between mortality and immortality, between that which we are and that which we leave behind for others to judge us by.
That realisation unlocked layers of meaning in the record for me in a way that I found deeply inspiring, nearly as much as the moments after Sufjan and his band finished the 25-minute Impossible Soul, prompting a standing ovation and a few tears from the audience, myself included.
Each song discusses personal vulnerability and often takes aim at the frustration inherent in the human condition, which also happens to be the bread and butter of a successful artist, from following the muse no matter where it leads (Vesuvius), descent into madness (Get Real Get Right), lovelorn suicide (I Walked), heartbreak, recovery, and reflection (Impossible Soul).
It’s become clear to me that Sufjan Stevens has thrown down the gauntlet to himself, crafting an album overflowing with musical ideas, executed with maximum sonic overkill, and paired it with a stage show that forsakes the pretense of a rock concert for outright performance art. For every moment on the correlating records, the show provides a projection, a light sequence, choreography, and musical theatre, all in service to a loose narrative that values art above the artist, who reluctantly chooses a painful existence in the hope of simply creating something to be proud of.
Now my dilemma is that I don’t know whether to give it all I’ve got or accept that musical art has been won and pack it in. I know what Sufjan Stevens would do.