Sufjan Stevens at the Fox Theater: A Sufjantastic performance

I’ll start off  by apologizing for the horrible pun on Sufjan’s (pronounced: Soof-yan) name in the title, the temptation was way too overpowering. Moving on, Sufjan Stevens’ latest album Carrie and Lowell came out this year. The title and the music, a tender ode to his mother and step-father. The album practically chronicles Sufjan’s early life as he lays bare his most intimate and vulnerable feelings. Loss, regret, self-loathing, suicide, any other harrowing adjective you could insert, they are all covered in there. Certainly, not a party album to boogie. I usually find myself nodding awkwardly or mumbling incoherent words of empathy when I listen to people’s darkest woes. Those conversations are quite uncomfortable unless you’re a psychopath. The music in this album makes you feel exactly like one. It is enchanting and stunning. You are feasting on Sufjan’s sadness and loss, and enjoying the shit out of it. The personal lyrics, the raw and minimal acoustic arrangement and the soulful vocal harmonies are quite affecting. It will make you stop in your tracks. So, don’t be on the treadmill when you listen to one best albums of 2015 by one of the great song-smiths of this generation.

A couple of weeks earlier I discovered that Sufjan would be playing at the Fox Theater in Oakland. I stumbled upon this information while deleting one of those random emails from those random websites you don’t recall randomly signing in to. So, every spam does have a silver lining. I then went online to book tickets on TicketMaster. An act that conjures up Sufjanesque levels of loss, regret, self-loathing, suicide, any other harrowing adjective you could insert. The unfathomable service and convenience fees. The incoherent and unintelligible captchas. The incessant loading pages. And the final HTML page that declares the unavailability of tickets and shamelessly asks you to check back and relive the trauma all over again. TicketMaster is a rare entity that masterfully combines evil and shite in equal measures. In desperation, I turned to the only force every human turns or should turn to: Craigslist.

And, as always, Craigslist answered prayers, and I acquired a seat close enough to get a clear view of the stage but far enough to fail a driving vision test. The show had an all-seating arrangement that made sense as you do not want to be standing while drenched in your own tears as Sufjan gives your eyes a good workout. Helado Negro, a one-man band, opened the show accompanied by a couple of sparkly coated, round figures gyrating rhythmically in sync. The distance of the seats ensured I spent the whole act ignoring the music and trying to figure out if the shapes were humans or robots. This brought back unpleasant memories of the dress conundrum, and I gave up to not worsen the trust issues between my brain and my eyes. Those shapes turned out to be humans just for the record.

The stage was then set for the man and Sufjan’s whispered vocals and acoustic guitar took over the Fox. Unlike the album’s sparse production, electric guitars and percussion joined forces onstage. Vocal harmonies chimed in. I was hooked and reeled as strains of ‘Death with dignity’ and ‘Should have known better’ caused the hair on the back of my head to stand up. The live performance trumped the recorded version. The live rendition also had more factors going for it; the opulence of the Fox itself and video vignettes of Sufjan’s family from his childhood projected on the background screen. The fairly innocuous video clips – displayed through a frame designed to look like a garden fence – provided a powerful and poignant imagery to the music.

Sufjan, the multi-instrumentalist, showed off his talents by juggling between the guitar, the piano, the banjo. On ‘Eugene’, he crooned ” What’s the point of singing songs if they’ll never even hear you?” which seemed a bit ludicrous as the entire audience had their ears turned up. Fourth of July‘s cheerful repetitive refrain, ‘ We are all gonna die’ was hammered home relentlessly using electric guitars and drum crescendo. Enough number of times to convince anyone, even cats with their alleged nine lives,  about the inevitable end.  Sufjan worked his way through all but one songs from Carrie and Lowell in the same order as the album.

After the marathon session, he donned his ‘talking’ hat – a green cap which when worn enables him to initiate his spoken word monologue. The speech gave an insight into why death occupies the largest slice in his pie-chart of song-writing themes. It seems like death was the major ice-breaking conversation starter in the Stevens  family household. He also spoke about his family’s fascination with mystics, rebirth, and naming themselves and their animals after previous historical incarnations. It wasn’t as boring as it sounds, the entire talk was laced with generous dollops of humor. He even incorporated a gag involving John Calvin. There was an attempt by an idiot to heckle him, but that didn’t last long because no one gave a fuck. Possibly, drowned himself in self-awareness, or someone knocked him out. Hopefully the latter.

The monologue was then over. The hat remained perched, and Sufjan went back to singing, now, playing songs from his other albums. Highlights including ‘Heirloom‘, ‘The dress looks nice on you’, ‘In the Devil’s territory‘. The regular set-list ended with ‘Blue Bucket of Gold’ from Carrie and Lowell. An unwritten rule of live performances is that the last song of the setlist is reserved for testing the endurance of the human ears, eyes, and brain. It doesn’t matter if it’s a funeral dirge, it will be steered off course and made as loud and flashy as possible until you pop out your eyes and stuff them in your ears. So the song started out slow as on the album and ended with an intense cacophony of sounds – electronica, guitars, drums, vocals – and epileptic light effects. This bedlam continued for a while as people watched in awe or cowered in fear or gave up their lives. Phone cameras hallucinated as well. And then it ended. The people who survived gave a rousing applause as the band took a break before the encore section.

The encore was a trio of songs from Sufjan’s 2005 magnum opus ‘ Illinois‘. Sufjan’s boyish charm and self-deprecation shone through when he fluffed a line while performing ‘Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois’. He let the audience know about it while still playing the piano. This was followed by the delightfully sad ‘Casimir Pulaski Day’ and he closed out the show with the extravagantly titled ‘The Predatory Wasp Of The Palisades Is Out To Get Us’. Finally, the man and his band – who were quite superb themselves – took a bow to a standing ovation. In my opinion, the mark of an exceptional performance is its ability to dazzle me enough to not use the restroom. And at the end of that 3-hour performance, my bladder was threatening to burst more than the Hindenburg.