Throughout this holiday season we’ll be looking at each of
the five albums in Sufjan Stevens’ latest Christmas compilation: Silver & Gold. If you missed the first entry: Vol. 6, Gloria, you can read it here. The Surfjohn Stevens Christmas
Sing-A-Long: Seasonal Affective Disorder Yuletide Disaster Pageant on Ice is
currently making its way across the country (see, Philadelphia, Oxford), (is
looking pretty reasonable!) and will be arriving in Buffalo on December 18.
The second installment in Silver & Gold is called I
Am Santa’s Helper and things have changed a bit since we’ve taken Gloria off the turntable. While Gloria did explore some of the darker
aspects of “the Christmas problem,” musically it remained relatively restrained
with tasteful versions of traditional carols and the Dessner brothers
overseeing the original material with the urgent, yet refined, dichotomy that
guides most National songs. Regardless, it did appear as though there was some
fairly serious Christmas tension lurking beneath the surface and that tension
has escaped and turned into a 23-song Christmas-nightmare-mania-train called I Am Santa’s Helper.
That’s the album artwork.
Up until this point, Stevens had been billing the Christmas
EPs as “Sufjan Stevens and Friends,” paying homage to the relatively
innocent-sounding sing-a-long fashion of the albums. We now get: “Sufjam (sic)
Stevens and his Unwitting Cohorts” presenting I Am Santa’s Helper, written in comic book typeface dripping with
(I guess it pretty much has to be) blood, with a creepy hand-drawn woman staring
off-screen and the seeming acknowledgment of the superfluity of “even more
songs for” Christmas. And “even more songs” there certainly are.
There are 23 songs on this album. Only two of them are over
three minutes long. Sixteen of them are under two minutes. It’s a frantic
whirlwind of notes, sounds, and singing that seems to have been born for no
other reason than to accomplish the opposite of the residents of Halloweentown
and “un-make” Christmas. As we saw on Gloria,
and as we can see all around us, the thing that Christmas has turned into can
be overwhelming and complicated. One way to get over this might be to strip
Christmas down to its individual parts and examine it, bare-boned, simplified
(and sometimes, rather ugly).
From 2006 to 2007, Stevens began to migrate away from the
folk-pop leanings of the Michigan-Illinois era and began working on the
experimental, classical composition, The
BQE. The songs on I Am Santa’s Helper
were written around the time that The BQE
was first performed and Stevens’ renewed interest in classical music is readily
apparent.
Thirteen of the 23 songs on the album are classical and traditional
songs, mostly from the 18th and 19th centuries, mostly by
English and German composers, and many of which are entirely instrumental. Most
of these songs are not even “Christmas carols,” but are hymns concerning
Christianity in general. As such, when these songs do include vocals they are
usually only simple church-choir refrains covering the usual church-choir
refrain territory (see: Jesus). Other
than a few pieces by Bach, there are only three songs that would likely even be
recognizable to listeners of average musical acumen: “Jingle Bells,” “We Wish
You a Merry Christmas,” and “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” (None of these
three standards are longer than two minutes, all appear to have been recorded
in one take, and all sound like they’re practically drowning in alcohol. These
might give you the best idea of what to expect during the “sing-a-long” portion
of the live show, however.)
Stevens does also play what seems to be “Maoz Tzur” (a
traditional Hanukkah song) on a piano for 42 seconds, which would be 42 seconds
longer than Stevens has devoted to any December-holiday other than Christmas in
his 99 other holiday recordings. There doesn’t seem to be any explanation for
this other than that the manic I Am
Santa’s Helper whirlwind grew to such breadth that it simply began sucking
in snippets of songs from nearby holidays.
In addition to these various covers, we have ten original
songs on the album. Five of these are instrumentals that are significantly
less conventional than the traditional fare on the album and have far more
Sufjan Stevens-esque titles. (“Mysteries of the Christmas Mist,” “Behold! The
Birth of Man, the Face of Glory,” “Make Haste to See the Baby,” “Eternal
Happiness or Woe,” [and my favorite] “Even the Earth Will Parish and the
Universe Will Give Way.”) This leaves us with five original songs, with lyrics,
that have the potential to describe what is actually happening here.
The second song on the album is “Christmas Woman.” It is the longest song here, by a good distance, the most fully realized, and as the song that more or less begins the album, perhaps gives us some indication of what to expect. As stated previously, it might be appropriate to look at I Am Santa’s Helper as Stevens attempts to deconstruct Christmas. In this sense, "Christmas Woman" happily buzzes and whirs with tooting horns and jingling bells, as if it’s the soundtrack to Santa’s workshop; until a minute and a half into the song, a chorus of elves chimes in to let you know that they’re not making toys, they’re taking them apart. “I know, for a century, we were scrambling to assemble what a man believes/ I know, for a time I’ve led, to believe that human kindness would prevail instead.” Four minutes in, the song retreats to percussion and Stevens finally enters the track with solo vocals, “oh I was thinking, by myself, I was remembering every moment, by the river, when it froze last night.” I’m really not sure what else to take away from this other than that the self-reflection Polar Express is ready to pull out of the station with Stevens as “Santa’s Helper,” conducting the train and tossing deconstructed two-minute gifts to listeners over the next half hour.
The remaining original songs on the album all follow the
pattern of reducing Christmas to its most absurd, broken down parts. “Happy
Family Christmas” starts out sounding relatively normal before descending into
lo-fi ramshackle drunkenness. “Ding-a-Ling-a-Ring-a-Ling” features a screeching
electric guitar and a children’s chorus that sings (I kid you not):
“Ring-a-ling-a-ling/ Ding-a-ling-a-ding-ling-a-ring-a-ling/ Baby Jesus is the
king, Jesus is the king-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling.”
“Mr. Frosty
Man” picks up the baton with abrasive guitars, a stilted rhythm section,
and the following lyrics: “It’s time to tango with the frisky frosty Frosty Man,” “He
likes ice cream and Yo La Tango with the jammin’ pants,” “He’s got a friend
called Coolio, Vanilla Ice, and Ice-Cube,” “Mr. Frosty, don’t be bossy,
winter’s coming soon, and when it snows again, frosty!” There’s really not much
more to say about this that the excellent Claymation video that was released
for this song cannot fully explain.
The album ends with “I Am Santa’s Helper,” and the Christmas Identity Crisis Express seemingly pulling back into the station with a chorus repeatedly singing, “I am Santa’s helper, you are Santa’s slave.” The idea seems to be that this strange dissection of Christmas music was actually necessary in order to “help” Christmas. Rather than blindly following Christmas with no self-awareness as to what it is that one’s doing and why, Stevens might have thought it necessary to break it down into simple, understandable parts, to trace its origins and render it absurd, in order to truly fathom and appreciate it. Then, maybe, Christmas can be put back together again: better, snowier, happier.
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