Waxing on Sufjan
I accidentally stumbled upon Sufjan Stevens' lush new album, Carrie and Lowell , while actively seeking ways to ignore its existence. I loooooooooooved 2010's Age of Adz , but it's been about five years and he's not done much for me lately (to paraphrase Miss Jackson). I think what happened with Sufjan and me is that, frankly, he got much too big for me to keep up with. I am now going to sound very pretentious, but: For a group of people in the early-to-mid 2000s, Sufjan was very important and precious. I won't say "figurehead," but I doubt his popularity couldn't have helped usher in acts like Bon Iver and the like. When he became more - well - ubiquitous in a manner of speaking, some of that value/novelty for me (and perhaps others, I don't know, I haven't asked anyone!) disappeared. And when became a little more outrageously experimental, I was intrigued at first. Then, I backed away, distracted by other musical going-ons of the t...