Sentimental Sufjan

I went to see Sufjan Stevens play last night.  He is on his Come On Feel the Illinoise tour for his recent album, Illinois, an album devoted to the state of Illinois.  I left telling myself  I wouldn't write a post about it because it feels cliche to see a concert and blog about it right afterward.  Plus, most of what I took away from that concert I haven't really been able to put into words yet.  I got this intangible feeling that seemed to come from the clarity of sound emanating from the stage.  Yeah, that's the best description I've got right now.

I wouldn't be writing anything about this concert if it weren't for the Cassavetes book I've been nibbling on.  When we left last night's show my wife mentioned something about how our country feels ready for an album like Sufjan's.  She couldn't put it into words, but I think she wanted to say what John Cassavetes once said,

I wish we weren't so hard-boiled.  The human spirit is really at a dangerously low ebb.  We need to pump adrenaline into our sentimental values, which have become so badly depleted.

I love that phrase, "sentimental values."  It's not talking about patriotism, it's not about good deeds or shopping at Sears.  It says to me, "We may not be the coolest people in the world, but we have some genuine feelings and if a feeling is genuine, it has value.  Whether it's sentimental or not."

I think that by celebrating the state of Illinois and its people, Sufjan has done something to free us up.  He has allowed our sentimentality for country and one another to no longer feel like the geek in our soul standing by the punch-bowl, wanting badly to need to pee so he can leave the dance floor.  My sentimental geek can bust an ass-clenchingly sweet move on the dance floor if he wants to.

Comments

[studiobeerhorst]

With Suf there is a specificness that we are hungry for in songwritting. A real place, real historical figures, a specfic state of the union that all can then become the context for the mystical power to pass through like the little wafer actually becoming the flesh of Jesus Christ. It is the same reason all those crowds of bewildered americans crowded around the American Gothic painting by Grant Wood when it was unvieled for the first time at the Art Isntitute in Chicago back in 1937. Maybe we need to know who we are again before we can take any more steps that take us any place really worth being.