While few are responding to The Passion with the same intensity that New York Times columnist Frank Rich did a week ago—for starters, Rich titled his harangue “Mel Gibson Forgives Us for His Sins”—it’s fair to say that, recently, the American public finds itself thinking more deeply about the tensions that can surface when religion and art intersect so explosively. Yet, from an art-historical perspective, it’s the dissociation of the two, not the intersection, that has always been most curious: Relatively speaking, only recently have religion and high art not been commonly joined at the hip. Religion has always served as an inspiration and benefactor of art, a fact which has made it all the more amusing when people criticize The Passion as an awful film purely because of its religious content—they might as well pass over, among others, the Laocoon statue, the Sistine Chapel, Bach’s St. Matthaus Passion, and practically every Dostoevesky or Joyce novel.
That said, skepticism still greets the release of Seven Swans, Sufjan Stevens’ sparse and intimate fourth album, in which the Detroit-raised Brooklynite deals with the stories of his Christian faith most directly. Which is not to say that Michigan and its tales of personal grief and acceptance of one’s suffering were any less Christian in ethos, just that Seven Swans is so topically concerned with Christianity that a few wrong steps could easily have been a disaster. Religious content, by its very faith-based nature, is passionate and fantastical, and, if not fashioned with a commensurate degree of care and artifice, the emotion exceeds the form, throwing the listener headlong into the realm of melodrama and self-parody (confer all “Christian rock” bands).
Frank Rich himself talks of The Passion’s unbridled over-the-toppity, the film “constructed like nothing so much as a porn movie.” Where The Passion fails artistically for Rich is not in its highly charged subject matter, but in its crudely considered execution. On similar grounds, Seven Swans partly succeeds for me because Sufjan rarely steps foot in the excess of pedantic preaching, despite the openly Christian nature of his lyrics here. At their melodic cores, the songs on Seven Swans are equally as potent as those on Michigan, though perhaps a little rougher around the edges and generally more sparsely arranged. The raw simplicity, coupled with the stripped-down, banjo-led instrumentation, lends Seven Swans a particularly high degree of sincerity: Even if we’re not taken by the subject matter, we’re taken by how beautifully and personally Sufjan is taken by it.
On songs like “All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands” and “To Be Alone With You,” Sufjan does well to collapse the distinction between divine- and human-directed affections—his “You” could apply to God and loved one alike. Especially in the former song, which opens Seven Swans, Sufjan showcases his curious ability to change a song’s grief-stricken tenor to a hopeful one on the flash. The opening moments prove this eloquently: As Sufjan sings, “If I am alive this time next year,” his weary banjo accompaniment slowly imbues the line with convincing optimism, a progression that continues throughout the song with similar effect as Sufjan is joined by a breathy background chorus from Elin and Megan Smith and drummer David Smith’s labored tympanics.
Because Sufjan commits himself so rigorously to this sparse, acoustic compositions, those few moments when electric instruments are used are particularly powerful. The first comes in “The Dress Looks Nice on You,” in which tandem plucks and sweeps of guitar and banjo are suddenly contraposed midway against a quirky Casio keyboard breakdown. A second comes during the vaguely alt-country lullaby “Sister,” which positions a light, nondescript jangle behind a screaming electric guitar that arises from the swell to become even more lively and expansive as the song builds on its repeated anthem.
“Abraham,” “Seven Swans,” and “The Transfiguration” confront religion most directly, and to varying success. In “Abraham,” Sufjan briefly recounts the Old Testament story in the Book of Genesis when Abraham, ordered by God as a test of faith to sacrifice his son Isaac (“Take up on the wood/Put it on your son”), leads Isaac up a mountain and prepares to kill him as commanded before God sends an angel to intervene. (See also: Leonard Cohen’s beautiful “Story of Isaac.”) Musically, the song marks the low point of Seven Swans: Sufjan’s vocal melody is well-delivered but somewhat impotent, and the backup chorus seems incongruous given the subject matter.
As the last two songs on the album, “Seven Swans” and “The Transfiguration” seem to work as a pair. Both are of relatively epic lengths and movement-like constructions, and as equal statements of faith—the fear-inspiring “My father burned into coal,” and the comforting “Have no fear! We draw near!”—they dovetail perfectly. First, “Seven Swans” is a dark, brooding anticipation of the Apocalypse in which Sufjan begins with a foreboding banjo line, only to be swept up in crashing storms of resonant piano and a terrifying octave-jumping chorus of “He is the Lord!,” easily one of Seven Swans’ most memorable moments. “The Transfiguration” follows immediately on the bittersweet note of Jesus’ requisite suffering, the song performatively ebbing back and forth from major to minor chords as new melodies and instruments are stuffed into the mix.
Given Sufjan’s ability to handle such dangerously effusive material as his own religion so well, it’s no wonder that he aligns himself with the similarly concerned writer Flannery O’Connor, whose short story A Good Man Is Hard to Find is recast here from the perspective of O’Connor’s Mephistophelic character, the Misfit. O’Connor, as the late Yale professor Robert Dubbin noted, is unusually capable of masking the Christian mechanisms at work in her stories without cheapening them—she effectively crafts Christian revelatory experiences into ones of universal enormity and applicability. The same comment could very well apply to Sufjan Stevens on Michigan and Seven Swans alike: A gifted musician to begin with, Sufjan invites not our religious conversions, but our innate human compassion.
