I can't think of what to say about this concert, because every time I try to explain things in a logical fashion, it ends up in a big muddle. I guess I'll start at the actual music, which was only a small portion of the things that make up my opinion on this show. Sufjan has an impressive array of musicians with him on stage--horns and strings, along with a few multi-purpose musicians--and they make pretty sounds. I'm not sure I was expecting to see that many people on stage (15, if you include him), but I also can't say how I thought he could reproduce the sounds on his albums without that many people. And make no mistake about it, this group of people faithfully recreated every sound on the albums. In fact, that might be my only complaint about the show: things didn't sound that much different than they sounded on the album.
But the show wasn't disappointing, and it wasn't disappointing because of the eccentricity of Mr. Stevens. He wore some big bird wings (eagle, maybe), and the people supporting him all wore butterfly wings. He called himself, at one point, "His Majesty's songbird", which is weird, right? And then he referred to the other musicians as the Chinese...Butterfly Brigade, only there were a lot more words in that title. I just can't remember them all now. Yep, Sufjan is pretty weird. Not that I didn't know that before, but this was just...odd. And not only the wings, but the uniform. The whole lot of them wore strange uniform-like outfits. S said that they reminded him of Hale-Bopp (is that what that cult was called?) outfits, and that they were attired as if ready to committ ritual suicide at the drop of a hat. It might have been the fact that the pants didn't seem to fit anyone very well.
The thing about Sufjan is that he's Christian. And that's only a thing insofar as he sometimes beats you over the head with it. It's pretty easy to ignore his latent piety when you're listening to Illinoise! but it's harder when he's singing very overtly Christian songs right in front of you. He's a great musician, and I like most of what he does, but it's obviously incredibly hard for me to relate to lyrics that are Christian. I mean, it's not like we left when he started talking about God, and it's not even like I disliked those songs. (It's weird, because he's not like, evangelical about it. But one of his songs is called "Lord-God Bird" and yet again, he stole a rooster statue from a Perkins. It's all very strange.) It's just....I'm not even sure. I mean, I certainly wouldn't turn on Christian radio and start listening, but then again, I'm not sure you'd find Sufjan on Christian radio. But he wouldn't really be out of place there, though. This doesn't make sense, because it doesn't make sense to me. The goddy songs make me uneasy, but the rest of it is so damn beautiful that I just kind of ignore it. I get the sense that it's what many Christian music fans do with secular music. Maybe I'm wrong, but it's like...willful denial.
The only other thing I want to say is that S and I have rotten luck. We got to the concert on a bus, and we decided to take the bus home, since the concert got over so early. We didn't wait too long for the bus--10 minutes, 15, something like that--and it was pretty crowded, for whatever reason. I'm sure a good portion of the bus passengers were fellow concert-goers. At Irving Park, the bus stopped to let on a good number of persons. The last guy on tried to use an expired ticket, and instead of getting off the bus when the driver told him to (the guy had also tried to tell the driver that it wasn't expired; the ticket expired at 10, it was 10:45 when we picked him up. I think the guy was saying it wasn't ten yet? Which is ridiculous, as the bus flashes the time every few seconds), the guy wouldn't move. And he wouldn't pay. So now this man is on the bus, refusing to pay $2. The bus driver gets off the bus, calls CTA headquarters or whatever. A cop happens on the scene--and meanwhile, we're all getting restless, sitting on the bus--and they get the guy off the bus. He wanders away, and were still sitting on the bus, LOCKED in. Finally, the driver gets back on the bus and tells us we have to wait for a supervisor to come and get a report or whatever.
Well, shit. We got off the bus, but another one could be 20 minutes off, and the bus driver of our bus couldn't tell us when this bus would pull away. We also had no cash. So we had to frigging find an ATM, and then we jumped in a cab. (And our cab driver was a freaking idiot, and didn't get off LSD (going south) at Fullerton but North, which is stupid. But I was too tired and upset at this point to say anything.)
What a long night.
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