Jingle Bells
To better understand the repeated left-turned-genre-hopscotch Sufjan Stevens has maintained throughout his 20-year music career, simply compare the pleasant version of “Jingle Bells” found on Songs for Christmas Vol. 5: Peace to the idiosyncratic “Jingle Bells” on Silver and Gold Vol. 7: I AM SANTA’S HELPER!
The former is a brisk, 30-second instrumental interlude, evoking joyous memories of singing around grandma’s upright piano. The latter eschews itself of the holly jolly persuasion, opening instead with a grungy acoustic rendition, his vocals doubled in a lazily mangled minor key. Following this riff played to laughing children, Sufjan’s moan takes us to the chorus, now in the familiar major key, played with mostly coordinated instruments and voices (with someone straight going in on that recorder). It resembles “In The Words of the Governor” much more than “Joy To The World.” It’s all pretty chaotic.
I AM SANTA’S HELPER is a silly freak out of a Christmas album and tends to be among Sufjan’s least-enjoyed (judging by streaming play counts, The Verge’s rankings, or the popular Spotify playlist “Sufjan Christmas without the weird stuff”). Many Sufjan fans simply choose to altogether ignore the projects with lesser folk leanings (The Decalogue, Aporia, and Convocations as recent examples).
But hark! The weird stuff is misunderstood!
Finding the consistent threads across his catalog, while delighting in its diverse eccentricities, is why I personally feel Sufjan is able to sidestep a draconian music industry largely directed by marketable expectation. This system rewards popular performers in their 50s to still write lyrics about how it feels to be a teenager (woah there, blink-182, big red flag). It’s central to understanding “Jingle Bells” from Vol. 5 to Vol. 7 — they’re not made by the same man, not really.
Over his 5 hours of Christmas songs recorded across a decade, Sufjan found joy diving into the emotional powder keg of Christmas, in all its jubilant, divine, childlike, anticipating, traumatic, rote, foreboding, messy, audacious, uncanny glory.
For whatever reason, in his second go at the belligerently inoffensive “Jingle Bells,” Sufjan composes the track as if conducting a middle school recital, whose evidently tipsy parents all jumped onstage to join along in the fun. Christmas is depicted here as a jumbled-together, familial mess. So, you know, it’s a fairly accurate depiction.
The joy of listening to Vol. 7’s “Jingle Bells” is hearing Sufjan have fun recording with friends and trying something new. It’s aware of its inconsequence, as should we.
Seeing Sufjan’s sillier side reminds me of something he said during an interview on Alison Stewart’s podcast just last month: “I think we all contain multitudes, and we should all engage with those multitudes. That’s just part of being a human.”
Even the Earth will perish, and the universe will give way.
Engage with your multitudes.
There’s no wrong way to Christmas.
Brandon Walsh is a filmmaker based out of Indianapolis, Indiana. A few heights of his Sufjan fandom include making a music video for “The Only Thing” using his grandmother’s 8mm home movies, seeing Sufjan screen “The BQE” live, paying way too much for a vinyl copy of Silver & Gold, and posting the occasional meme on the /r/Sufjan Reddit page.