DO you have to wait until the end of your life to choose your absolute favourite things?
Because I think I have my favourite musician and I’m not sure I see myself swithering, whether I am gifted 50 more years or five. This is an unusual predicament, given I would have been named Most Indecisive had I graduated from an American high school and had my name printed in a year book.
Seeing the merits of almost everything, I have no favourite anything. But I have a favourite musician and his name is Sufjan Stevens.
There are albums and songs that come in to your life at precise times, for a precise need, and which never leave you. A quick phrase, a snatched lyric, of anything from the album Come On Feel the Illinoise is a time machine to specific moments.
I lived in Sydney and I loathed my job and I loathed my cockroach-addled nine-in-the-flat flat.
Each night I would walk home through Darling Harbour, the air thick and heavy, the cicadas blowing their electric kisses and the sky obsidian, listening to Come On Feel the Illinoise.
The lapping water in the harbour would be as thick and black as the sky and I would think about slipping in to it, to see what would happen. Trouble, certainly. I’m no swimmer.
Hearing the beautiful opening piano of Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois, conjures exactly the taste of the air and the noise of office workers gathering at outdoor bars with cocktails.
The album is a cure-all for everything. How can you not find delicious an album with song titles such as: To the Workers of the Rock River Valley Region, I have an Idea Concerning Your Predicament, and It Involves an Inner Tube, Bath Mats, and 21 Able-Bodied Men.
Or A Short Reprise for Mary Todd, Who Went Insane, but for Very Good Reasons.
And The Black Hawk War, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself in the Morning, or, We Apologize for the Inconvenience but You're Going to Have to Leave Now, or, I Have Fought the Big Knives and Will Continue to Fight Them Until They Are Off Our Lands!
I have seen Sufjan perform three times: twice at the State Theatre in Sydney, where I paid some hundreds of dollars for two tickets on Ebay for the first night, and stood in front of the box office on the second night with such mournful eyes that a kind usher allowed me to stand up the back for the performance.
The third time was on Sunday night at the Edinburgh Playhouse, his precise chaos captivating.
I’ve never thought him handsome but he appears buff now, which I found terribly distracting.
Anyway, is that luck, is it, to find the love of your musical life so young? Or sad, a vow that disallows the exercising of alternative tastes?
I’ll never know. I’m committed.
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