Happy to have been Gabe’s last-minute +1 for yester­day’s Sufjan Stevens show at the Beacon. I’ve been listen­ing to The Age of Adz for the past several weeks and have grown pretty accus­tomed to its strange­ness— a kind of campy, DIY electro-futurism seem­ingly calcu­lated to flummox fans of the precious, ideal­ized-campfire-singa­long Sufjan. During the first half of the perfor­mance, which was mostly new material, the audience seemed almost cowed; it wasn’t until after the 25-minute epic Impos­si­ble Soul and the band played the inevitable Chicago that we heard girls scream­ing “Sufjan, you changed my life!” 

When I listen to the record, Impos­si­ble Soul seems like about five separate songs roughly stitched together, but live, it was unac­count­ably satis­fy­ing. It’s the same kind of sense one has trying to under­stand the last movement of Mahler’s 2^nd symphony; if you’re not almost bodily involved in the music, it can sound episodic, or even nonsen­si­cal (but then, Mahler doesn’t have mid-movement dance parties, or release balloons from the ceiling). It makes me so, so happy to see a “pop” composer exper­i­ment­ing with large-scale forms, and even happier to hear them work so well. I can’t exactly even say why it works, but it has some­thing to do with its place on the album, and in the show, and the thinning and thick­en­ing of textures, and the pacing of events. I suppose those qual­i­ties decide why most music succeeds or fails. 

After which the “encore” section of the show felt like a completely differ­ent set— mostly consist­ing of material from Illinois, with only light contri­bu­tions from the band (by the way, yeah! that was Alex Sopp up there!). Chris Thile’s quip about Arcade Fire— “ten people doing the work of four”— felt apropos here. Sufjan ended the night with the ultimate downer, John Wayne Gacy, Jr., almost whis­pered— you could feel the entire theater collec­tively holding its breath. 

Speaking of songs about serial killers, I’m playing piano in Matt Marks’s The Adven­tures of Albert Fish on what looks to be a wholly crazy show at Gala­pa­gos on December 5^th.