Sufjan Stevens

11 August 2006

My mum believed he could be Cat Stevens' son. I swore he was the best thing since David Gates and Bob Dylan.

He is Sufjan Stevens, a minimalist American folk musician from Michigan, USA. And I don't think he's Cat Stevens' son. Though the name Sufjan does have an ethnic charm to it.

A friend sent me track from the Weeds soundtrack, called "All the trees of the field will clap their hands". I thought I'd heard it from Weeds before. Bittersweet, sterile. Beautiful.

Anyway, I went snooping around for more of his tracks, and came across one song that struck me like a soft slap on the face. If you've read my previous blog entries, you'll know I wrote one entry about about the child murderer Kevin Underwood, and how his blog seemed so ordinary, so much like my own and that of every other person I know who has a blog. And how I mused about how different we are from such so-called "monsters", yet strangely, almost the same in a lot of ways, at least in Kevin Underwood's case (don't get me wrong, I am not condoning what he did, I was just using him as an example of how fragile the human spirit can be).

So, here's that Sufjan Stevens song I've fallen in love with.

His father was a drinker and his mother cried in bed
Folding John Wayne's T-shirts
When the swingset hit his head
The neighbors they adored him
For his humor and his conversation

Look underneath the house there
Find the few living things
Rotting fast in their sleep of the dead
Twenty-seven people, even more
They were boys with their cars, summer jobs

Oh my God Are you one of them?

He dressed up like a clown for them
With his face paint white and red
And on his best behavior
In a dark room on the bed he kissed them all

He'd kill ten thousand people with a sleight of his hand
Running far, running fast to the dead
He took off all their clothes for them
He put a cloth on their lips
Quiet hands, quiet kiss On the mouth

And in my best behavior I am really just like him
Look beneath the floorboards
For the secrets I have hid.....

- "John Wayne Gacy Jr.", Sufjan Stevens -