Sufjan Stevens – All Delighted People EP (2010)

Susan Stevens is one of my all time favourite artists. His album Come On, Feel the Illinoise! made a huge impression on me some time after its release. That album was mainly Americana folk, but there were some amazing orchestrated parts and strange noises on the album as well. Later on, I learned that Sufjan Stevens really had wanted to make a lot more alternative music in the beginning. His early recordings were full of experimental noise, but his father had convinced him that he needs to make more listenable music to reach audiences and if he wants to be a professional musician, he has to leave the experimental noise behind. He then gained huge appreciation from critics and also reached many indie audiences with his albums which finally gave him the opportunity to move his music into more experimental direction. All Delighted People EP is one of the first ventures into that direction.



I'm not saying that this album would be a difficult album to listen to. Most of the songs on it are still quite melodic and the sound world is not that far from the earlier folk albums. There is, however, a lot more electronic influences on this album and there are less and less basic folk songs in there. After this album Stevens really delved into experimentalism with his Brooklyn-Queens Expressway album dedicated to the highway with the same name. Also, the following Age of the Adz was quite far from mainstream sounds. Later on it seems that Stevens has reached back to his roots a little bit, but the electronic instrumentation is there to stay.

This record is called EP, but it's so long that it might as well be an album. It only has eight songs on it, but many of them are quite long. I remember being a bit disappointed back when this EP came out, because it didn't reach the expectations I had for a new Sufjan Stevens record. But then again, my expectations were probably ridiculously high. In retrospect, this is actually a great record. I bought it on vinyl here in London when the price was right.

I had a pleasure to finally see Sufjan Stevens live last year at the Royal Festival Hall here in London. I was impressed about his show even if he didn't play that many old songs. He has a way of making music sound really meaningful when he's performing live and I think I cried at least once during that gig. There doesn't seem to be any official music videos from this album, so I will just link a live video of the title track from Sydney Opera House. It also shows how Stevens' show doesn't really look like a show of a folk artist and how the sounds are actually quite massive on his gigs.

I don't think All Delighted People will stay in history as the most important Sufjan Stevens recording, but it does feature some great songs and it is kind of a bridge between his early more folky sound and his later experimental electronic music. More recently Stevens has played in a kind of a super-band called Planetarium. His vocals on that album have been distorted with vocoders and autotune and that I think is a very bad move on his part. Stevens' delicate vocals are one of the main things that make him so important to me and I really want to hear his natural voice. I hope that we will still hear some amazing melodic folk songs by Sufjan Stevens and this electrification of his career is just another phase that will be again replaced by something new and exiting.

Listen to the EP on Spotify.