Sufjan Stevens once picked the “perfect” song
There are few songwriters able to cultivate a more truly inspiring and visceral sense of emotion than Sufjan Stevens in recent years. Famed for his unique ability to craft melancholy into unifying anthems of heartbreak, the singer has consistently delivered beguiling tracks since his debut in 1999.
Stevens has rarely found himself easily defined. While his music is more routinely associated with the indie genre, his songwriting is ethereal and mystic in the truest sense of the words. He infuses traditional folk songs with a palpable sense of Americana and modernism, an ability most notable on his defining work Carrie and Lowell, a 2013 masterpiece that is yet to be truly matched for potent sadness and his two US state records, Michigan and Illinois.
Whether you’ve been a fan of Stevens since the start of his career or his music appeared to you within the confines of the 2016 movie Call Me By Your Name, one thing is clear: Stevens knows what makes a great record. So, when NPR asked the folk singer what he considered to be a “perfect” song, the folkie had a ready-made bullet of unique sonic proportions already loaded in the chamber.
Famously eclectic when picking his favourite songs, Stevens selected ‘The Lakes of Canada’ from the 1980s indie folk band The Innocence Mission. The group, now a trio, are still working behind the brilliance of principal songwriter Karen Peris as they deliver an intoxicating blend of richly atmospheric tunes. But it was from their 1999 album Birds of My Neighbourhood that Stevens selected the track he considers perfect.
“I’m in awe of big songs, national anthems, rock opera, the Broadway musical,” Stevens told the station. “But what I always come back to, after the din and drum roll, is the small song that makes careful observations about everyday life. This is what makes the music by The Innocence Mission so moving and profound. ‘Lakes of Canada’ creates an environment both terrifying and familiar using sensory language: incandescent bulbs and rowboats are made palpable by careful rhythms, unobtrusive rhyme schemes, and specificity of language.”
With the release date coinciding with Stevens’ own debut, there is good reason to assume that the band highly influenced the songwriter during the salad days of his career. When speaking of Karen Peris, it’s clear to see the admiration Stevens holds for her: “What is so remarkable about Karen Peris’ lyrics are the economy of words, concrete nouns-fish, flashlight, laughing man-which come to life with melodies that dance around the scale like sea creatures. Panic and joy, a terrible sense of awe, the dark indentations of memory all come together at once, accompanied by the joyful strum of an acoustic guitar. This is a song in which everyday objects begin to have tremendous meaning.”
It is this essence that Stevens has taken into all of his own songwriting. Driving a sense of universal emotion through atomised connection is what has made Stevens an essential songwriter for the last two decades.
Listen to The Innocence Mission song ‘The Lakes of Canada’ below.
