Before Sufjan Stevens became who he is today, he was a nerdy college kid stuffing pillows and sheets into the air vents so folks couldn’t hear him sing his tentative “assembly-line-style” songs. In an amusing, thoughtful post over at Asthmatic Kitty, Stevens explains the week his parents gave him the option to change his name (he couldn’t come up with anything that worked), allowing that to lead him into a discussion of the various “name songs” he wrote in college. He unearthed a bunch of them recently, “stuffed onto tape cassettes, 4-track recorders, forgotten boxes, forgotten shelves, forgotten hard drives” and decided to make at least one of them public. So, here’s “Sofia,” created “in a world where the banjo was my journal, where Sofia Coppola was my imaginary confidant, and where singing out of tune was perfectly OK!” Sounds OK to me, too:
(Via P4K).
Phoenix should cover it. Read the rest of Sufjan’s “What’s In A Name?” entry at Asthmatic Kitty.
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Sufjan does the banjo very well.
Is he dressed up as Erlend Oye in that picture? I like it.
The song is nice but that photo is even better.
The song is charming and the AK article/post is really well written. Sufjan, please release the rest of the name songs. A compilation of compellations! From mundane monikers to ethereal epithets, oh my!
i have been yearning for new sufjan for too long (and that picture is incredible).
I love how we all bow to his feet when something like this comes out, despite hearing a new record from him in years…
I was just thinking if this more La’s business is true, he should just put out the demos immediately! Stuff like this sounds just about fine as it is…There’s GOT to be more going on than just waves this summer.
make a new record already, asshole
hey sufjan, how bout you give my life meaning again and start playing shows and cut some new material?
thanks,
ryan
Song and story make me smile.
yeah, i need something new to obsess over and one song can only go so far. i need an album Suf, and quick
Robyn Hitchcock says he never got beyond Visions of Johanna…that he could get lost in each of those verses and I can believe it…