Make Haste To See the Baby
I first discovered Sufjan Stevens' music during Carrie & Lowell’s roll-out. It was February 16th, 2015, and I was delighted to find the new single that had just come out – “No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross.” At the time, I found it through the Indieheads community on Reddit, a few weeks after I discovered and started exploring that online platform. For Indieheads, I quickly realized that Sufjan was treated like some kind of god; humorous hyperboles aside, the affection that the musician gathered from that community of listeners was obvious.
I decided to show “No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross” to my father, an accomplished guitar player, in order to introduce him to a song that seemed to be an example of how anything extremely simple can be so emotionally impactful. To my surprise, my father immediately recognized his name: “this artist has a lot of Christmas songs,” was the first thing he said to me. What? Christmas songs? “There must be a misunderstanding here,” I thought; can a canonized artist on Indieheads be known by a string of Christmas songs?
Over the next few minutes, my father shared some examples of Sufjan's Christmas compositions with me, and my brain still wasn't computing the information properly. Something about the contrast between the rawness of the Carrie & Lowell singles and the cartoonish liveliness of the Christmas songs didn't fit in my head. That's how, from the first moment, I was exposed to the main asset of his career: the diverse display of sounds, the breadth of expression and talent, the openness to risk, with the willingness to be simultaneously serious and fun. As Sufjan commonly writes on his Tumblr: “The world is abundant.” This statement (which can also be applied to his wide musical expression) is a phrase that has often crossed my mind in my daily life since I first read it. It inspires me, as his music does.
My father knew Sufjan Stevens' Christmas songs because Christmas has always been an important event in my family context. I don't have any particular stories to share, but there are a handful of frames of my Christmases over the years. To properly and culturally contextualize the story, I am Portuguese. On Christmas Eve, my grandparents come to my house for dinner, and we eat boiled codfish with boiled potatoes, cabbage, and egg. At midnight we go together to Missa do Galo (Rooster's Mass, literally), where my father plays the chants that are repeated from year to year, cyclically signaling the peace and joy of that night. We don't open the presents until the next morning when we listen to a CD with Christmas songs’ covers accompanied by a pan flute playing in the background (it's always the same CD, every year; pan flutes became synonymous with Christmas in my head!). During the 25th, we make three or four visits to the homes of family and friends, spending hours in the company of our loved ones. Christmas trees, nativity scenes; the warm coats in the winter sun; a full belly, a “stressful” joy (but in a good way). These are intense days full of good memories and a somewhat magical feeling of gratitude.
We only set up the Christmas tree in my house on December 8th (which is a public holiday in Portugal). Also on that day, we usually go to gather moss to make a nativity scene under the tree, with houses, shepherds, sheep, mills, bridges, rivers… It is also more or less from that day on that we start to play Christmas music.
It goes without saying that at Christmas 2015, our holiday’s soundtrack had a new resident artist. But following a specific method: when I realized that Sufjan had not one but ten volumes of Christmas songs, I decided that I wasn't going to find everything out quickly! The thing is, each year I've been allowing myself only one new Sufjan Stevens Christmas album. We have a life ahead of us; why the rush to consume everything wildly? So, each year, I just listen to all the volumes I've already heard, plus a new one! The exception was the first year, in which I discovered two at once so as not to overuse the repeat button in those songs too much… in 2016 I discovered volume 3, in 2017 the fourth, and so on. This year I will discover the eighth, and I still have two more years of new Christmas music by my favorite artist!
With this methodical uncovering of Sufjan's Christmas discography, I was also digging progressively and in slow-motion through his main discography. In 2015, with Illinois, I was dazzled and amazed by what I heard! Then, in 2016, Michigan and Age of Adz reinforced my comprehension of his kaleidoscope of sounds. It was around this time that I realized that Sufjan Stevens had surreptitiously become my favorite musician. Almost 15 albums later (7 more of Christmas!), but with a few still to discover (high expectations for The Avalanche and All Delighted People!), Sufjan has become a symbol of the power of music for me.
Over the last few years, this blog – “A Very Sufjan Christmas” – has become a companion, a sort of guide to those beautiful days at the end of December. Reading about the experiences of so many people with Sufjan's music and Christmas made me feel inspired, hurt, empowered, confirmed. Much like the effect the “Humans of New York” page has on me; a feeling of relatedness/connection and identification with others, which inspires me to be better and to want to live my life more intensely. But I didn't think I had anything to add, as I didn't have a particularly powerful story to share. However, among the songs that nobody had chosen over the four or five years of the project, I found that there was one of my favorites from the entire Sufjan Stevens Christmas discography. Days later, when I revisited the page, I discovered that this same song was now among the last three that no one had picked up yet. It was the final sign that I needed to grab it with affection and take advantage of its ride to share myself in this text, even without any grand story to tell.
“Make Haste to See the Baby” is part of the seventh volume. Last year, I discovered it on this leisurely walk through the ten albums. The seventh chapter of Sufjan's Christmas adventures has a more chaotic flavour, with lots of short themes, a versatility of sounds, and a feeling of demos, songs that could have been more worked on. “Make Haste to See the Baby” is also short and wrapped in a lo-fi sound, but it encapsulates a candid light. The timbre of the instrument that opens it (something between an organ and an old concertina) is imbued with a comforting, nostalgic heat. This feeling is confirmed by the second half of the theme, with a distant piano, with an affected and sad reverberation. There is hope in "Make Haste to See the Baby." The night is dark and long, and we have no answers; there are so many moments of unfulfilled silences in our lives. But there is also this faint movement within us, this intuition that makes us travel through our days with a smile on the corner of our lips, this gentle desire to continue, a curiosity for what awaits us, and a confidence that we will not be alone.
Sufjan's Christmas music – like all his music, by the way – has the ambition of crossing his life story (a relatively ordinary one) with a non-conforming attitude towards life. It conveys the expression of a profoundly inspiring attitude, which is at the same time merciful to his past, brutally honest, and with a trusting serenity in an unknown future; in a silence we don't know whether or not it will be filled. This is the human condition – it's Sufjan's, and it's mine. Advancing in the awareness that “the world is abundant” makes this journey fuller and brighter, in an honest encounter with our wholeness, full of contradictions. That’s my will, and I think I detect it in Sufjan’s music: I will love, in a tender and open embrace, I will love while I still breathe (and, who knows, even after that).
My name is Tiago. I’m a 28-year-old Portuguese guy who loves listening to music, reading about music, dancing with music, and even making music. I also love cinema, poetry, going to the beach, surfing, playing board games, taking long walks, having endless conversations, and spending quality time with people I love. I’m a Ph.D. student making a thesis about cultural public policy. I write about music and other arts at Comunidade Cultura e Arte (in Portuguese). I co-host Sol & Dó, a podcast about music (in Portuguese). Did I already mention I like music? Yeah, I like music. A lot!