Since November began on a Thursday this year, that means
Thanksgiving occurred on the earliest date possible, meaning that “Black
Friday” is presently occurring on the earliest date possible, meaning that the
“Christmas season” will be as long as calendarically possible this year. (A
full 33 days, up to and including Christmas, a phenomenon that has not occurred
since 2007. Next year, with November starting on a Friday, for example, we will
have the shortest Christmas season possible – 27 days.)
I’m not sure if there is a name for the years when the
calendar lines up to give us the longest stretch of time possible between
Thanksgiving and Christmas, thus, giving us that much more time to shop,
decorate, anticipate, dread, and be inundated with Christmas carols and
commercials where people are inexplicably buying each other entire vehicles for
Christmas. (Gluttony of Christmas? Embarrassment of Christmas Riches? Christmas
Til you Drop?) Or, most appropriately, maybe, A Very Sufjan Stevens Christmas.
It seems like nobody may appreciate more than Stevens the
concept of having as many days as humanly possible to revel in the bewildering,
inherent contradictions that seem to exist between the origins of Christmas,
the traditions that have developed around it and its present-day treatment as a
holiday that has been commercialized into a parody of what we previously
thought a commercialized Christmas might even look like. (See: Black Friday.)
The 33-day Christmas season not only gives us the most
amount of time possible to reflect on the Sufjan Stevens Christmas philosophy,
it also, conveniently, gives him the longest amount of time possible to conduct
a Christmas-themed tour, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, that starts
tonight in Philadelphia and finishes on December 22 in New York. (As you may know,
Sufjan Claus will be coming to town on December 18.) As a tribute to it being A
Very Sufjan Stevens Christmas year, and in anticipation of his upcoming trip to
Buffalo, we’ll be taking a look at Stevens’ ideas about Christmas via his new
album, Silver & Gold.
Silver & Gold is
a quintuple-Christmas-album containing 58 songs recorded between 2006 and 2012.
It’s the follow-up to his first quintuple-Christmas-album, called Songs for Christmas, released in 2006.
Thus, these latest five albums are actually volumes 6-10 in the Stevens
Christmas pantheon. Given the breadth of material to work with here, and the
aptness of spreading this narrative about the Christmas season out over the
Christmas season itself, we’ll be looking at these albums one-by-one each
Friday from now until the holiday.
The schedule will, thus, (hopefully) be as follows: November
23: Vol. 6 – Gloria, November 30: Vol. 7 – I Am Santa’s Helper,
December 7: Vol. 8 – Christmas Infinity Voyage, December 14: Vol. 9 – Let it Snow, December 21: Vol. 10 – Christmas Unicorn.
Volume 6, Gloria,
is the earliest material here. It was recorded shortly after the latest
material on Songs for Christmas
(2006-2007) and, thus, has much in common with Volume 5 of that album. This
means that the work here is also more reflective of Stevens’ pre-electric phase
and that the songs are generally performed with the more traditional folk
instrumentation found on Illinois and
The Avalanche. “Gloria” probably
intends to make reference to “Gloria in excelsis Deo,” Latin for “Glory to God
in the highest,” on at least some level, a popular sentiment in Christianity
around its most ubiquitous holiday. On another, slightly less reverent level, this
is also likely a send-up of the idea of praising the “glory” of God at all when
the present seasonal culture has so clearly adopted a different set of
priorities. Stevens’ struggles with the religious/secular and
traditional/contemporary are well represented in the eight songs on the album.
I’ve always thought of Christmas songs as generally falling
into two categories. First, there’s the more recent, non-religious fare,
generally written during and after the World War era of the 20th
century and focusing on either Santa Claus or the winter season in general. For
some reason, I’ve always felt like “Santa Clause is Coming to Town” is the de
facto “king” of these secular songs and I tend to see them in my head in shades
of red and white. On the other side are the older, more traditional, often
religious, songs that hail from the 19th century and beyond. Again,
in my own mind, I’ve always seen “Silent Night” as the leader of these songs
that appear to me in hues of blues and blacks. “Santa Clause is Coming to Town”
and “Silent Night” sit on either side of my brain like the final two
contestants in a tournament bracket: droves of songs behind them, cheering them
on (like a musical version of the South Park, Spirit of Christmas - Jesus vs. Santa short.) This seems to be a
conflict Stevens appreciates as well.
On Gloria we have
four traditional songs from the “Silent Night bracket” and four original songs
that Stevens penned with Aaron and Bryce Dessner from The National.
The album starts with the aforementioned “Silent Night,” a
song that Stevens teased as the first song on Songs for Christmas, but never gave a full rendering. Written by two Austrians in the early 19th
century, it’s a quietly powerful song that covers all the angles on the
traditional birth-of-the-savior narrative and simply sounds like a song not to be challenged. Stevens treats it fairly
reverently with acoustic guitar and piano but undercuts it with an ascending
chorus of voices that toward the end of the song seems to morph into a slightly
inhuman choir of Whoville residents.
Stevens also chooses to dredge up what may very well be one of the most bone-chillingly severe “Christmas songs” ever written. If Silent Night is the king of traditional Christmas music, “Coventry Carol” would be its headsman. Coventry Carol is an English song from the 16th century that describes the biblical “Massacre of the Innocents” when King Herod ordered every male infant under the age of two to be killed because: Merry Christmas. The haunting Whoville chorus returns along with what I can only think to describe as a “singing saw murdering a Christmas tree.”
Stevens also covers the instrumental English Renaissance
song “Go Nightly Cares,” credited to John Dowland, and ends the album with a
relatively upbeat take on Auld Lang Syne (cue: return of Christmas saw here.)
These traditional carols are then juxtaposed with the four
original songs written with the Dessners, starting with “Lumberjack
Christmas/No One Can Save You From Christmases Past.” The song starts as an
upbeat folk song with a sing-a-along of carolers (descending into a chorus of
ho-ho-ho’s), festive fiddles and personal, slightly silly, lyrics balancing a
jovial atmosphere with the tension lurking beneath the surface (“if drinking
makes it easy/ the music’s kind of cheesy/the specials on the TV”). Halfway
though, however, the song slows into an echo of voices singing that “no one can
save you from Christmases past” while a “Christmas Theremin” seems to ring out
a distress call and the lyric slyly changes to “no one can save you from
Christmas” right before the song ends.
“The Midnight Clear” and “Carol of St. Benjamin the Bearded
One” are two original songs that invoke traditional songs, “Upon a Midnight
Clear” and “Carol of the Bells,” respectively, to further explore the clashing
ideas of belief and doubt that seem inseparable from Stevens’ attempts to “understand”
Christmas.” In “The Midnight Clear”
Stevens sings in the first verse: “I resign to petty things, like angels
bending on their knees” before changing the lyric from petty to “glorious” things in the
second verse. It’s a constant struggle between the head and the heart in
determining whether any of the trappings of Christmas are actually significant,
or if we just want them to be. Stevens pulls a similar trick in “Carol of St.
Benjamin” when he starts with “In my heart and in my spirit, I concede, the
things you want in life you have to really need” before changing the line in
the second verse to “In my heart and in my spirit, I believe, the draft beneath
the doorframe comes to challenge me.” There seems to be no easy answer to
reconciling the common sense idea that none of this is really “necessary” with
the inescapable feeling that we want to believe in this ephemeral,
larger-than-life “spirit” of Christmas.
The last original song here is “Barcarola (You Must Be a Christmas Tree)” where if he hasn’t made it explicit yet, Stevens immediately lays out the problem in its clearest terms: “oh, no one else is happily, recklessly, asking for more than what they need/ I can’t say what I need…” Stevens goes on to speak to a second person, whose identity is not exactly clear, but seems to be a friend/love interest that the narrator has driven away, probably though greed and the personal struggles identified in this and other songs on the album. The song builds to a soaring conclusion with Sufjan and friends singing “you won’t be back again/ you said you needed me/ but I know you needed yourself to be cleaned of me.”
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