Nothing could quite describe my excitement when Sufjan Stevens announced the release of a new album, The Ascension, back in June. “Thank God, Suf is going to save our souls from this dispiriting year,” I thought. On September 25, the album finally released.
In February of this year, Sufjan and his stepfather Lowell Brams (co-founder of their record label, Asthmatic Kitty) released a synth-y, new-age album Aporia. Aporia is the Greek word for “a puzzle;” in the philosophical tradition, it was used most notably by Jacques Derrida to describe the point at which a text reaches an impasse and begins to deconstruct itself. Not to read too much into Sufjan’s own intentions, but a theological mystery such as the Ascension seems an appropriate response to the paradoxical nature of an aporia.
Dazzling in its desolation, Sufjan’s new album The Ascension is a masterpiece to tide us over while we wait on his unfulfilled promise of an album for each of America’s fifty states. But the Second Coming might arrive before Sufjan makes good on that promise. In the meantime, we have his heart-rending and relevant meditation on our country’s state in The Ascension’s lead single “America.” Written back when Sufjan was working on his 2015 release, Carrie and Lowell, the words of “America” describe the tragedy of injustice that has afflicted this country for far too long. One cannot help but hear a prayer ring out in the lyrics: “Don’t do to me what you did to America.” The guilt of having betrayed and the pain of having been betrayed are both manifested. It is like a break-up song: Sufjan’s break-up with the country he cared for so much that he wanted to get to know every state intimately. Now he confronts America with a dissonant echo of discord.
The album’s title track “The Ascension” flows along Sufjan’s soft voice and keyboard. But unlike his other song named for a mystery: “The Transfiguration,” the final track of his 2004 album Seven Swans, this song does not focus on the happenings between Christ and his Apostles. Instead, Sufjan speaks in the first person, “But now it strikes me far too late again / That I was asking far too much of everyone around me / And now it strikes me far too late again / That I should answer for myself / As the Ascension falls upon me.” A sense of urgency is apparent in the rapid, melodic, flowing synth waves of this song, but at the same time, the singer’s words resonate with regret.
One of the most lyrically-rich and sonorous tracks on this album is “Ativan.” Sufjan mythologizes the drug as he sings, “Tranquilize me, sanitize me, Ativan / (Ativan, my leading woman).” In the preceding track, “Die Happy,” Sufjan sings over and over again: “I wanna die happy” to a slow, steady xylophonic melody until it erupts into his typical cosmic synth-explosion. Yet it is simultaneously an intimate, rosary-like repetitive prayer for a happy death.
Perhaps the most hope-filled song on this album, which is equal parts crisis and contemplation, is the track titled “Run Away With Me.” It is reminiscent of the track “To Be Alone With You” from Seven Swans, in which Sufjan sings of a lover or of God (this song is perhaps Sufjan’s Song of Songs), “To be alone with me you went up on the tree.” In “Run Away With Me,” Sufjan sings in the voice of this same lover-God as he offers us a glimpse of hope in an apocalyptic time:
And I will bring you life
A new communion
With a paradise that brings the truth of light within
And I will show you rapture
A new horizon
Follow me to life and love within
Featured image courtesy of Joe Lencioni via Wiki
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