The Retrographer, Issue 72 (November, 2 0 2 0)

Routine, Teenage Fanclub, Jeff Tweedy, Kevin Morby, Winston C.W., Ariana Grande, Megan Thee Stallion, JWords, Wild Pink, Bill Callahan, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Bill MacKay, Sufjan Stevens

The Retrographer, Issue 72

Bulletins

• I put out my debut album Sunday on November 13th. Listen to it everywhere here.

• I’m also pressing Sunday to vinyl – preorder your copy here.

Ten Songs for November, 2 0 2 0 | Listen to these songs on Spotify and YouTube

“Cady Road”, Routine (Spotify / YouTube) – Chastity Belt’s Annie Truscott and Jay Som’s Melina Duterte are so easy, so open here; the sweep of guitar and banjo, twiddling bass and thumping drums are like a drive down the highway with the windows down. 

“Home”, Teenage Fanclub (Spotify / YouTube) – The venerable Glaswegians have been doing it since 1989; here they sound like a blissed-out Alex Chilton, bopping lightly over deep breaths of organ and guitars.

“Gwendolyn”, Jeff Tweedy (Spotify / YouTube) – “The sun beating down like a big trombone, that’s when I start missing home. She holds my hand between her knees – it’s like a dream, I don’t know what it means.”

“Valley”, Kevin Morby (Spotify / YouTube) – This guy makes really good-sounding songs. He knows something about how to make drums smack, guitars jangle, and his voice squeeze like toothpaste out of a tube. When the stereo guitar solos come in, it’s like the rain coming down.

“Business”, Winston C.W. (Spotify / YouTube) – Kyle Wilson’s surrealistic stop-motion music video captures the strange, unearthly sadness of this song. It spans large spaces, all run-down and destroyed (“Pyramids and monoliths… the trappings of defeat”) and lovely places never to be accessed (“The pearly gates, I had no business being there”).

“my hair”, Ariana Grande (Spotify / YouTube) – I had to double check that Q-Tip hadn’t produced this, it was too akin to “Electric Relaxation” to not share some DNA. Ariana is a virtuoso; listen to how her voice threads the notes of this song’s harmony with “it got body and it’s smooth to touch, the same way as my skin – don’t you be scared.” You don’t even need to hear the chords behind her to follow the changes.

“Shots Fired”, Megan Thee Stallion (Spotify / YouTube) – There is a lot to love on Megan’s album, but it’s hard to get past the lurid mockery she opens the (otherwise jubilant and light) album (called “Good News” after all) with. She steps on her assailant’s face over Biggie’s “Who Shot Ya?” She doesn’t sound scared for a minute, and even folds it into macro issues: “Here we are, 2020, eight months later, and we still ain’t got no justice for Breanna Taylor.”

“Remedy”, JWords (Spotify / YouTube) – The drums sit amid the synths on this song like particles in suspension for a minute and a half before a signal comes through like a scrambled radio station in the night, and then dips into the mix like it’s submerged too.

“The Shining But Tropical”, Wild Pink (Spotify / YouTube) – John Ross and the boys dial up the Passion Pit 30% but keep their bucolic guitars and intimated vocals, never daring to rise behind an indoor voice all these records in.

“Deacon Blues”, Bill Callahan, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and Bill MacKay (Spotify / YouTube) – Steely Dan are derided, adored, memed, Tweeted: That’s about as relevant as a band that’s thought of themselves as burnt-out creeps for almost half a century can hope for. But a cover from three Drag City royals? This nocturne is transformed and still as sophisticated as it was.

One Album for November, 2 0 2 0  

“Seven Swans”, Sufjan Stevens (Sounds Familyre, 2004) (Spotify / YouTube)

A Michigander of Lithuanian and Greek stock was given an Armenian name by an Indonesian mystic. That mystic’s name was Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo, the founder of Subud. Subud is a meta-religious exercise: Its practitioners are Islamic, Jewish, Christian – from any creed. At its core is the practice of Latihan kejiwaan, Indonesian for “training of the spirit.” Men and women separate and, in large open spaces, are asked to relax and open up. With an inviting, neutral disposition, they are instructed to simply receive and accept “what arises from within”. There is no prayer, mantra, symbol, or liturgy; No text or word to share. Latihan is the simple openness to grace, a spiritual disposition that accepts godliness where it appears.

Latihan is necessary because God does not always feel present in life. “I have a practice that's very simple and based on Christian Orthodoxy,” Sufjan Stevens once described. “I love to go to church and sing songs and all that stuff every once in a while. But then there's moments where I'm just totally at a loss and feel like there is no sacred design to everything.”

Latihan is necessary because God is present nevertheless. “It’s not so much that faith influences us as it lives in us,” Stevens explained on another occasion. “In every circumstance (giving a speech or tying my shoes), I am living and moving and being. This absolves me from ever making the embarrassing effort to gratify God (and the church) by imposing religious content on anything I do.”

Latihan, therefore, is a reminder to be open to God, to resist the callous, protective impulse to pass through the world as if revelation can’t occur. On Sufjan Stevens’ 2004 album Seven Swans, his openness guides him through such revelation, as well as blinding confusion. As he sang on “He Woke Me Up Again”:

Stevens is a Christian animated by Subud. But any Christian fears God too. As he sang on the title track:

Seven Swans is Stevens’s fourth album. A musical prodigy, Stevens was credited with playing more than 20 instruments on his first, 1999’s A Sun Came. As a kid he studied at the renowned Interlochen Arts Academy, then later got an MFA at the New School. His first album established what would become his characteristic melange of folk and indie rock; His second was an entirely electronic production, a powerful expression of his facility. His third, Michigan, kicked off a “50 States Project” gimmick that purported a plan to make an album for every state in the country. Michigan captured the imagination of listeners and paid beautiful homage to its subject. Before long, Stevens was one of the faces of an ascendant indie rock scene that would become the final “alternative” movement before the internet fully atomized the mainstream that underground music existed in contrast to. He produced a blistering seven albums – from A Sun Came to 2006’s Songs For Christmas – and almost 150 songs in the first seven years of his career.

Michigan is urbane and intellectual, but never unsingable or inaccessible. Stevens loved making thorny time signatures sound perfectly natural in dense, interlocking piano, electric guitar, and banjo. His music felt arranged, like a classical work, and so he was just as often compared to indie artists his records were sold alongside, like Elliott Smith or Neutral Milk Hotel, as he was to 20th century classical composers like Steve Reich, Charles Ives, or Aaron Copland. He could be mathy, folksy, homespun, grand. He’d just as readily bend your brain with a latticed piano part as he would break your heart with a banjo folk elegy. His unstrained vocal delivery never tested dynamics or drama, but carried a quavering sheerness, like tracing paper carrying water that’s just about to tear through. Nobody had heard anything like it before.

Stevens released Seven Swans no more than eight months after Michigan, and he presented something again people hadn’t seen: His religiosity. Its 46 minutes made it by far the shortest of his albums so far, and would be his shortest work until 2009’s soundtrack The BQE, his shortest formal album until 2015’s spare and tragic Carrie & Lowell. It’s a brief break from the high art he injected into his work, to be marvelously resumed in the next year’s Illinois. It’s a quiet, intimate, luminous album, built on Stevens’s sylvan banjo, delicate fingerpicking, and layered harmonies. Unlike elsewhere in his oeuvre, he rarely invites drums into his arrangements here. He is quiet and still, so as not to draw unwanted attention; He’s open, exposed, vulnerable to the spirit. When drums do arrive, his music becomes churchly and transcendent. The towering “Sister” ascends to towering highs over scribbling electric guitar and pulsing organ like a lost track from Laughing Stock, another touchstone of divine eminence.

This openness to spiritual visitation is, for Stevens, religious and sexual. In his brief exploration of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, Stevens stated, “Generosity is spiritual made corporeal. Inverse sublimation. The bread and the body are strange citations, for they speak of the physical, the practical, defying cosmology. The definitive gift is of oneself, the gift of one’s time, the gift of one’s body. A mother gives her breast to the child. Lovers give the intimacy of their bodies to each other.” But Stevens’ work is not carnal or libidinous. Sex and religion are alike in Stevens’s music as expressions of intimacy, so close and private as to be confessional. And to him, Jesus’s sacrifices are the greatest, most romantic gestures ever made. He sings in “To Be Alone With You”:

And later:

The Subudic openness to God is itself like a sexual visitation:

And when this visitation finally occurs, it is eschatalogical. In the title song, seven swans appear like seven angels with seven horns, just like in the Book of Revelations, as the world is engulfed in apocalyptic conflagration. In the end, his father is burned into coal and his mother takes her purse of earthly treasures to her bed to hide. But there is no hiding. “I heard a voice in my mind,” Sufjan sings. "I am Lord, I am Lord, I am Lord. He will take you. If you run, he will chase you."

That the final consummation of Stevens’s entreatments to God result in immolation, destruction, and transcendence speaks to the delicateness with which he approaches his music. He sings tenderly over skeletal arpeggios about Abraham’s aborted sacrifice of Isaac on “Abraham”; He barely breathes through his visions of the afterlife on “We Won’t Need Legs To Stand”. The album’s final track, after the deliverance of “Seven Swans”, follows a similar quietude for almost two minutes, chugging banjos and light harmonies – until it breaks, the hi-hat comes in, and Stevens introduces a new melody: 

The next year, he would reuse the same melody on Illinois’s unforgettable “Chicago”, singing:

And like that, he was reborn.

The name Sufjan means "comes with a sword." The singer has laughed at the bellicose implication of his name in interviews (“It's one of those charming militaristic Muslim names. I guess my purpose in life is to kill and avenge.”), but Stevens sings again and again of biblical figures who came with power and laid down their arms, forfeited their defenses against the world and let the light in. Figures whose openness and vulnerability allowed for the power of God to take them.

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MONTHLY

#72 November, 2020 | Sufjan Stevens, “Seven Swans”

#71 October, 2020 | Common, “Resurrection”

#70 September, 2020 | Herbie Hancock, “Thrust”

#69 August, 2020 | Special Issue

#68 July, 2020 | Cam’ron, “Purple Haze”

#67 June, 2020 | Jorge Ben, “A Tabua de Esmeralda”

#66 May, 2020 | The Meters, “Rejuvenation”

#65 April, 2020 | Eddie Kendricks, “People… Hold On”

#64 March, 2020 | Thelonious Monk, “Solo Monk”

#63 February, 2020 | Cat Power, “Moon Pix”

#62 January, 2020 | Yusef Lateef, “Eastern Sounds”

#59 November, 2019 | Frank Sinatra, “In The Wee Small Hours”

#58 October, 2019 | Steely Dan, “Gaucho”

#57 September, 2019 | Bonnie Raitt, “Streetlights”

#56 August, 2019 | Daft Punk, “Alive 2007”

#55 July, 2019 | John Coltrane, “Interstellar Space”

#54 June, 2019 | Big Pun, “Capital Punishment”

#53 May, 2019 | Paul Simon, “Rhythm of the Saints”

#52 April, 2019 | Dirty Projectors, “Rise Above”

#51 March, 2019 | Kate Bush, “The Sensual World”

#50 February, 2019 | Sonny Rollins, “Next Album”

#49 January, 2019 | Sade, “Diamond Life”

#47 November, 2018 | Curtis Mayfield, “There’s No Place Like America Today”

#46 October, 2018 | The Blue Nile, “Hats”

#45 September, 2018 | Lucinda Williams, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road”

#44 August, 2018 | Aretha Franklin, “Amazing Grace”

#43 July, 2018 | Teddy Pendergrass, “TP”

#42 June, 2018 | Dennis Wilson, “Pacific Ocean Blue”

#41 May, 2018 | Bobby Brown, “Don’t Be Cruel”

#40 April, 2018 | Amy Winehouse, “Back to Black”

#39 March, 2018 | Q-Tip, “Kamaal the Abstract”

#38 February, 2018 | Miles Davis, “In a Silent Way”

#37 January, 2018 | Beck, “Sea Change”

#35 November, 2017 | Slum Village, “Fan-tas-tic Vol. 1”

#34 October, 2017 | Steely Dan, “Two Against Nature”

#33 September, 2017 | Baaba Maal and Mansour Seck, “Djam Leeli”

#32 August, 2017 | Billy Joel, “The Stranger”

#31 July, 2017 | Big Daddy Kane, “Long Live the Kane”

#30 June, 2017 | Janet Jackson, “Control”

#29 May, 2017 | Steely Dan, “Aja”

#28 April, 2017 | The O’Jays, “Back Stabbers”

#27 March, 2017 | Wire, “154”

#26 February, 2017 | Professor Longhair, “New Orleans Piano”

#25 January, 2017 | Elvis Costello, “Live at the El Mocambo”

#23 November, 2016 | Erykah Badu, “Mama’s Gun”

#22 October, 2016 | Donald Fagan, “The Nightfly”

#21 September, 2016 | Aretha Franklin, “Young, Gifted, and Black”

#20 August, 2016 | The Dave Matthews Band, “Under the Table and Dreaming”

#19 July, 2016 | Clams Casino, “Instrumental Mixtape II”

#18 June, 2016 | James Brown, “Love, Power, Peace”

#17 May, 2016 | Ali Farka Toure & Ry Cooder, “Talking Timbuktu”

#16 April, 2016 | RIP PRINCE

#15 March, 2016 | Prince, “Prince”

#14 February, 2016 | Big L, “Lifestyles Ov Da Poor & Dangerous”

#13 January, 2016 | Bill Evans, “Live at the Village Vanguard”

#11 November, 2015 | Donny Hathaway, “Live”

#10 October, 2015 | Paul McCartney, “McCartney”

#9 September, 2015 | Talk Talk, “Laughing Stock”

#8 August, 2015 | B.B. King, “Live at Cook County Jail”

#7 July, 2015 | Miles Davis, “Filles de Kilimanjaro”

#6 June, 2015 | Joni Mitchell, “Hejira”

#5 May, 2015 | Kanye West, “The College Dropout”

#4 April, 2015 | MF DOOM, “Operation: Doomsday”

#3 March, 2015 | Bruce Springsteen, “The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle”

#2 February, 2015 | Eric B. and Rakim, “Paid in Full”

#1 January, 2015 | Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers, “L.A.M.F.”

ANNUAL

#61 | 1 0 0 2 0 1 9

#48 | 1 0 0 2 0 1 8

#36 | 1 0 0 2 0 1 7

#24 | 1 0 0 2 0 1 6

#12 | 1 0 0 2 0 1 5

1 0 0 2 0 1 4 (+ Honorable Mentions)

1 0 0 2 0 1 3 (+ Honorable Mentions)

1 0 0 2 0 1 2

1 0 0 2 0 1 1

DECENNIAL

#60 | 1 0 0 2 0 1 X

THEMED

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