Ave Maria
I don’t like Christmas music. I don’t know if that immediately disqualifies me from writing a piece for this project, but I think it’s worth noting that this isn’t a Christmas song by definition, but a prayer to the Virgin Mary. I’m also not a Christian, for what it’s worth.
What I am, however, is someone who found Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell after my biological father unexpectedly died the same year of the album’s release. My relationship with Sufjan Stevens and his music began the way it did for most people, with that same perfect album, but being a fan of his comes at the cost of sitting through 100 or so Christmas tracks. I had to suck up my own, moody, scrooge-like attitude towards the holidays to be able to truly immerse myself in his discography; something I find important to do for any artist I feel intimately attached to (the way you would an artist who guided you through your own grief).
A pleasant surprise in the Christmas library of Sufjan Stevens is the number of original songs that worked their way into my winter shuffle. “Sister Winter” and “Did I Make You Cry On Christmas Day?” are the kind of songs I can get behind; they match me at my moodiest, scrooge-iest, most challenging days as a person who lives with grief especially closely during the holiday season. It wasn’t until working through the massive box set that is Silver & Gold that one of the covers hit me with a feeling of comfort and security like I haven’t felt in years, no small feat for a song about prayer.
The first time I heard “Ave Maria” was when Sarah Brightman released her 2006 Best Of album. I grew up under my stepdad Jerry and my mom’s roof. My relationship with my late father was strained, to say the least. I didn’t lack the love of a father, not with Jerry. Instead, I had two dads, imperfect in their own ways, but both their love combined to overflow my cup. In this blended family, there were eight of us under one roof: a mentally ill mother, a couple siblings struggling with addiction, and a regular dance with poverty; all in a house we couldn’t afford to keep and inevitably had to sell before I could make it out of high school. (Themes that often pop up in Sufjan’s lyrics were real, lived experiences for me, and maybe that’s why I gravitate towards being a “superfan” when I talk about him).
Growing up, we didn’t talk about religion or politics or feelings, really. This didn’t make my childhood sad; there was a lot of chosen family in our family, a lot of love that we just didn’t vocalize. What we lacked in trips and extravagances we made up in watching a lot of movies and listening to a lot of music together. My first favorite artists were Damien Rice and Nine Inch Nails because those were some of Jerry’s favorites. His taste in music spanned from Iron Maiden to Taylor Swift, to Kanye West and Sarah Brightman too, especially her rendition of ‘Ave Maria.’
That song stuck with me ever since he played it on our Bose sound system and it rattled the walls in our home that Christmas. The times I’ve seen Jerry cry were mainly when we were watching, or listening, to something especially moving. In a family where we didn’t talk about our feelings a lot, I knew that art was a haven where our feelings weren’t for anyone but ourselves; a release, a vessel. I spent my teenage and early adult years making music with my friends and now I make movies professionally as an adult. Jerry’s influence on me, his tough exterior, and his tender insides, is carried with me even 800 miles away from home now. If there’s any Sufjan Christmas song I find a pocket of peace in, it’s his rendition of Ave Maria. If there’s any artist I can see in myself, it’s Sufjan Stevens.
Sufjan’s rendition of Ave Maria is one of the more gentle versions of the 1825 piece by composer Franz Schubert. It doesn’t demand your attention with striking vocals, it doesn’t overwhelm with string sections, and it doesn’t echo in the halls of your home like versions from artists like Beyoncé or aforementioned Sarah Brightman. Instead, the track opens with delicate bells and a ghostly harmonization. It’s as gentle and subtly haunting as an empty living room illuminated by multi-colored string lights draped upon a Christmas tree in a reddish glow. It is quiet in a way it shouldn’t be: sneaking around to get a peek at the bows and boxes underneath the glowing tree, hoping not to wake anyone up.
When the vocals come in it’s not Sufjan, but guest vocalist Cat Martino who dominates the song. Her singing is not donimating in the way that most vocalist stylings of Ave Maria have a tendency to take over the track, in fact, as gentle as the intro and the vocal stylings match that energy throughout. And it’s a shorter rendition of the song, too, clocking in at just a little over two minutes. This song’s inclusion on a 59-track Christmas album can make it feel easy for such a powerful piece of music to get lost in the mix, but it’s a soft, dreamy, unsettling inclusion when you compare it to the other tracks on Let it Snow: Songs for Christmas, Vol. IX (“A Holly Jolly Christmas,” “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town,” and “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” to name a few).
As the song fades out, the electronic bell noises fall out of tune and into a messy dispersal; one of the more noticeably ‘Sufjan’ touches on a holiday song. And when the two minutes is over, you don’t feel like you’ve just listened to a two-hundred-year-old track about Mother Mary, but a lullaby lost in grief, gone before you made peace with it being here. I know that feeling deep down in my gut.
As far Sufjan tracks go, it’s easy to write this cover off amongst the sea of pivotal and essential tracks in his catalog, but not for me. It’s a reminder of the love that my stepdad gave me and the way that love shaped me, the way it shaped my relationship with music, the comfort I found over the last five years of grievances. Jerry was and still, nearly 30 years later, my foundation. Carrie & Lowell normalized losing a parent, Sufjan and Lowell’s relationship to this day normalizes the bond I hold with my own step-parent, and this rendition of “Ave Maria” wraps all of that up in one, shiny box under a glowing tree.
Mal Burns is a 20-something-year-old filmmaker and socialist organizer in Chicago, Illinois. They also dabble in baking, film photography, zine-making, and, miraculously, keeping their 32 house plants alive. You can find them yelling about abolition at @localsadghoul on Twitter or pictures of their pets and friends at @h.a.unted on Instagram.