Dear Sufjan Stevens,
Every single day that I am at work I find a way to listen to music. Some days I find myself drifting along to whatever John Richards of KEXP has to offer, other days I browse random websites, myspace pages, and other forms of online media like youtube, and on a few days each month I dive into old albums and songs that I’ve always loved. I love music and I love to hear random tracks, brilliant live covers, and new music from artists that I genuinely appreciate.
Today at work I received an email that had a link to a youtube video. It was an artistic piece filled with clips of World War II stock footage and it was set to one of your songs. I immediately fell in love with the track and began to search, in earnest, for what the track was called and upon what album I could purchase it. In all honesty this song is quite brilliant. I went to your website, I visited your label’s website, I spent part of my lunch hour googling your name and reading every abstract blog post containing the words Sufjan or Stevens that I could find.
And I finally found the song. It was from a performance you did awhile back at PENultimate Lit and the song has never been properly recorded or released. The bigger issue, though, is where I found the track in question. You see I found it on my very own blog. From a post I made almost a full year ago. It has been so long since I last listened to this random collection of rare Sufjan Steven’s tracks that I literally forgot that I had already posted the song Barn Owl, Night Killer. It has been this long because you, my friend, have disappeared.
mp3 : Sufjan Stevens - Barn Owl, Night Killer (Live at PENultimate Lit)
You have disappeared and we, your faithful fans, don’t know where to go to find you again. We miss your voice and your clever storytelling. We want another album, or even a live show for which we can purchase tickets. We would even settle for a rumour that you’re again in the studio working on something that might, possibly, become a song.
I was inspired by you five years ago and it is largely your music that first made me interested in blogging. I remember how torrents and peer to peer file sharing networks didn’t have your music but there were blogs all over the world that were infatuated with your trademark sound. They trolled through hours of live recordings to find the newest rare Sufjan track and they cleaned it the best they could before releasing it onto the hungry masses. I remember checking almost daily on hype and elbows to see if there were any new songs of yours that I could listen to; and I remember being rewarded for that persistence.
At one time I believed that you might yet fulfill the dream of releasing a full album for each of the fifty states. When other people claimed that the Fifty States Project was too much for any one man to handle I promptly and disdainfully retorted “obviously you don’t know how prolific Sufjan really is.” I mean you’re the man who created Illinoise and then realized you had cut enough amazing material from that already sprawling epic album that you dropped another full album, The Avalanche, that was filled with just your leftover genius.
But where have you gone? Where have you disappeared to? I loved the BQE, and I know you were busy composing, recording, performing, and filming that entire process. I was overjoyed when I heard you were putting a new song on the compilation the boys from The National cobbled together. But there is only so long a man can sustain himself on mere scraps that fall from the master’s table.
So I ask you this. Please let us know that you’re working on a new album and that a massive national tour will follow. We all miss you. We are your faithful fans. Please come back to us.
Sincerely,
Billy
www.theworldforgot.com
+ Sufjan Stevens @ twf hype elbows site asthmatic kitty amazonmp3 itunes
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