April 24, 2009

celebrate the day by putting things where they don’t belong…

30_sufjan

Today Sufjan Stevens posted a very old cassette-tape recording that he wrote in his college dorm room about Sofia Coppola. Par for the Sufjan course, the song is humble and lovely and pensive (all minute and forty-seven seconds of it), with a taut string of some undefinable wistfulness running through the banjo plucks.

In the accompanying story, he kicks around ideas about names and name-songs, and the time in his life when he wrote this. It is a fascinating insight into his fire-hydrant creative process and the way we grow:

My older self, glancing back over simple chords and hazardous poetry, likes to think I’m older, wiser, more mature, more eloquent, more artful, more poignant, more contemporary. But that’s unfair. The concept has changed but the approach has always been the same….
[read the rest here]

Sofia’s Song – Sufjan Stevens



I’m pretty sure that one reason I like this little wisp of a song so much this week is that the “putting things where they don’t belong” lines echoed this poem, which has been looming large in my brain all week, taking up a lot of my thoughts.

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[lost/found penny, photo credit Nicky Thurgar]

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2 Comments

  • The poem’s wisdom is reliable and happiness can rest on accepting its lesson. Will listen to the song now…..

    Russell — April 27, 2009 @ 10:49 am

  • Ah! The romance of romance…a wisp of yearning,fantasy and youth…we all get to breathe that air and thats kind of romantic,too.

    Russell — April 27, 2009 @ 1:29 pm

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Bio Pic Name: Heather Browne
Location: Colorado, originally by way of California
Giving context to the torrent since 2005.

"I love the relationship that anyone has with music: because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. It's the best part of us, probably, the richest and strangest part..."
—Nick Hornby, Songbook
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