Some people have model trains, D&D and Magic cards (or maybe it's mukbangs, playthroughs and Pinkydoll these days?). I, as the very patient staff at Exclaim! know all too well, have Sufjan Stevens. As a teenage baby with a highly mouldable brain, I first discovered Seven Swans through its track "The Dress Looks Nice on You" on Myspace while rooting around in some ex-boyfriend's ex-girlfriend's profile. Thankfully, that association never stuck, and I've had Stevens's catalogue to myself for going on two decades.
Something Stevens has remained excellent at all these years is album announcements. Enter "So You Are Tired," the first taste of Javelin, Stevens's forthcoming, sixth post-pandemic-era body of work and first proper follow-up to 2020's The Ascension (for which we, incidentally, spoke at length about the apocalypse and gardening, as well as digging up all his analogue instruments, which he appears to be using once more). The single sees the songwriter returning to the twing-twang of the aforementioned Sevens Swans, gives a lyrical nod to Michigan's "Vito's Ordination Song" and recalls the mournful tone of Carrie & Lowell.
At first glance, "So You Are Tired" reads as a breakup song, but I'm not so convinced. Like Carrie & Lowell, Stevens's reference to death here is hard to dismiss as mere metaphor: "So you are tired of me / So rest your head / Turning back all that we had in our life / While I return to death," he sings in the song's final verse (and before a full-minute outro of vintage-Sufjan finger-picking and angelic choral vocalization). It's every bit as devastating as wasp-on-the-length-of-my-arm fans have come to expect, it fucking tingles my brain, and it's an absolutely perfect introduction to the larger body of work arriving this fall.
(Asthmatic Kitty)Something Stevens has remained excellent at all these years is album announcements. Enter "So You Are Tired," the first taste of Javelin, Stevens's forthcoming, sixth post-pandemic-era body of work and first proper follow-up to 2020's The Ascension (for which we, incidentally, spoke at length about the apocalypse and gardening, as well as digging up all his analogue instruments, which he appears to be using once more). The single sees the songwriter returning to the twing-twang of the aforementioned Sevens Swans, gives a lyrical nod to Michigan's "Vito's Ordination Song" and recalls the mournful tone of Carrie & Lowell.
At first glance, "So You Are Tired" reads as a breakup song, but I'm not so convinced. Like Carrie & Lowell, Stevens's reference to death here is hard to dismiss as mere metaphor: "So you are tired of me / So rest your head / Turning back all that we had in our life / While I return to death," he sings in the song's final verse (and before a full-minute outro of vintage-Sufjan finger-picking and angelic choral vocalization). It's every bit as devastating as wasp-on-the-length-of-my-arm fans have come to expect, it fucking tingles my brain, and it's an absolutely perfect introduction to the larger body of work arriving this fall.
