The Midnight Clear
I think “The Midnight Clear” might be cursed… At least when it comes to A Very Sufjan Christmas.
I’ve run this website for four years now, and each season brings its own unique set of challenges. I talked about some of these hurdles in the 2021 welcome post, but ever since the beginning, I’ve wondered what our fourth year would look like. More specifically, I wondered what our last song would be. Not the last song we posted, but the last song that anyone claimed.
At first, I figured it would be one of the weirder songs like “Mr. Frosty Man” or something totally discordant and incomprehensible like “Ding-a-ling-a-ring-a-ling.” Much to my surprise, those songs (primarily off Santas’s Little Helper and Christmas Infinity Voyage) were covered at a pretty good clip over our four-year history. Each year, at least a few of these “weirder” cuts would get crossed off our list and were often written about with much more care and adoration than I ever would have been able to imagine.
So as we opened the site up for writer applications this year, my eyes were fixed to our list of 25 remaining songs. As they got crossed off one by one, I waited with morbid curiosity to see which one would be last. I don’t believe that being picked last is necessarily an indication of a bad song, just a song that nobody was champing at the bit to write about. When you’re whittling down from a list of 100, you simply want to know who’s going to be the last man standing.
In the end, the last song claimed was “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear,” times two. See, one of the (many) quirks about Sufjan’s Christmas music is his inclination to record some songs multiple times. There are several examples of this across his 100 song repertoire. Some classics like “We Three Kings,” “Jingle Bells,” and “Silent Night” appear twice. Some songs are internally referential, like the paring of “Holy, Holy, Holy” and “Holy, Holy, etc.” or “Happy Family Christmas” and “Happy Karma Christmas.” Some songs are even represented three times, like “O Come O Come Emmanuel” and “Ah Holy Jesus.” Then, there’s the topic of this post: “The Midnight Clear.”
See, not only was “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear” the last song anyone grabbed, it was the last song twice over. Both “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear” off Songs for Christmas, Vol. VIII and “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear” off Songs for Christmas, Vol. X were the last two songs that anyone opted to write about. Even funnier, a few days into December, the writer who had applied two write about “The Midnight Clear” off Songs for Christmas, Vol. VI drop off. That’s not noteworthy on its own; people sign onto this site and back out all the time. Especially after four years, I get it; the holidays unfold and gradually take all your time away from you. Understandably, writing about a floppy-hatted folk dude’s Christmas music fades to the back of your to-do list. There’s no ill will on my end because it happens every year, but the fact that it happened to be “The Midnight Clear” was beyond funny to me.
Technically “The Midnight Clear” is a different song from “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear,” but it was still a bizarre experience to see so many ‘Midnight Clears’ staring me in the face at the tail end of this project. An interesting phenomenon, to be sure, and certainly not how I expected our final few songs to play out. I told myself I’d fill in to write about whatever song needed it this year, and it happens to be “The Midnight Clear,” but I just wanted to start this with this half-relevant piece of trivia surrounding “The Midnight Clear” because I am the only one with this esoteric knowledge and I’m sure someone out there will appreciate it.
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As mentioned above, “The Midnight Clear” is a completely different song from the centuries-old carol “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear,” but Sufjan has a way of playing within the bounds of holiday music that makes it fun to connect the dots. Just like the supplemental lyrics he adds to “Up On The Housetop” or “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town,” “The Midnight Clear” takes the audience’s knowledge of a familiar holiday tune and forces us to reframe it into something completely new.
“The Midnight Clear” is a haunting Christmas song that begins with a frigid, warbling electronic note that makes it feel as if you’re experiencing Christmas on another planet. After this scene-setting opening, we’re met with some Classic Sufjan Banjo Plucking™ accompanied by a shaker that keeps time. Around the 30-second mark, the man himself makes an appearance, joined by some Illinois-style xylophones that add an air of whimsy to the song’s wintery soundscape. The lyrics, spoken in a hushed tone, evoke the same feeling as the angelic meeting depicted in “Concerning the UFO Sighting.”
It came upon the midnight clear
That glorious sign of old
Enraptured secret sign of fear
In brave disguises
In the bridge, these sentiments pivot from divine intervention to earthly mundanities as Sufjan shrinks the scope of the song down to “petty things” that sound utterly unremarkable.
Old shoes and thirty feet
The prophet sighed of prophecy
I resign to petty things
Like angels bending on their knees
And suddenly, we’re off. A chorus of background singers suddenly materialize as delicate guitar strums join the previously-established banjo and shaker. The background singers emphasize the song’s lyrics, both by adding contrast to Sufjan’s words and (in some cases) completing his thought.
Do you delight, do you delight in me? (I laughed about it)
Come to me now, come to me now and bring (That rapturous moment)
I wasn't changed, I wasn't changed one bit (Though you may doubt it)
And I don't suppose, I don't suppose you care? (To ask about it)
Over the course of another verse, bridge, chorus, and coda, these sentiments develop as “the dead of winter takes a grip.” Throughout, the instrumental alternates from this frigid and restrained passage to a more warm and bombastic feel any time the background singers join in. The whole thing is guided by that same electronic note we heard in the opening, which creates a pastoral wintery soundscape as Sufjan waxes and wanes throughout.
Some fans have hypothesized that this song is a lifelong dialogue between its narrator and God himself, but I read it as more of a love song. In this track, Sufjan contrasts all of this religious imagery and language with the lowly pleasures of Earth. He goes from asking, “Do you delight, do you delight in me?” in each chorus to admitting, “I will delight, I will delight in this.” By the end of the song, our narrator welcomes a kiss in the face of a “rapturous moment” and seems resigned to finding peace in that. It shows someone warming up (or giving in) to another being; whether that’s God or another human is up to the listener.
Taylor Grimes is a Portland-born writer who currently lives in Denver, Colorado. When he’s not running this site, he spends his days writing about music over on Swim Into The Sound. You can find him on Twitter @GeorgeTaylorG where he is a constant purveyor of emo music takes and Sleepytime Tea memes.