Advent and Sufjan Stevens’s “Silver & Gold”

My Christmas album of choice this year is Sufjan Stevens’s Silver & Gold. In fact, it’s all I’ve been listening to, unless you count the wailing commercial drivel I’m forced to listen to all day when I’m at work.

With 58 tracks over five volumes, the sheer mass of music involved in this album is an artistic statement in itself, a symbol of the overkill of Christmas commercialism and cultural hype. To listen to the entire album (2hrs 47 min) in one sitting is a feat of discipline and attention antithetical to the typically frenetic bustle of Christmas cheer.

I don’t know if you have listened to this album or have even heard of the artist. But if you couldn’t think of anything else to say about the album, you’d probably just call it “weird.” Most people I’ve talked to (even fellow Sufjan lovers) aren’t sure what to do with it, and usually just say the prefer his previous Christmas album, Songs For Christmas. Sufjan’s Silver & Gold is not exactly “easy-listening” in its entirety, especially when contrasted with Songs For Christmas, which even my mom listens to, if that’s any indication.

Under the traditional expectations for Christmas music (easy listening, festive, usually commercial), this album is a bust. But Silver & Gold is hardly typical for a Christmas album. Which is why I love it. Or rather, have grown to love it. In a way, I can’t say I wasn’t disappointed when I was expecting more songs like the soothing, festive tunes on Songs For Christmas, and instead got songs like “X-Mas Spirit Catcher” and “Christmas Unicorn.”

But this is not a traditional Christmas album. In the greater context of Christmas and Christmas music, the album is actually an intelligently crafted epic, and as far as my own attitudes toward Christmas music are concerned, a hearty breath of fresh air. I’ve grown to lament most Christmas music, finding myself overwhelmed by its loudness, its inherent commercialism, its desperateness to invoke a response out of its hapless victims at every mall, grocery store, car, or cafe you are fool enough to enter.

Sufjan Stevens and Santa

So what is going on in this album? Sufjan purposefully arranges this mashup up bizzarely different songs in a way that embodies the craziness of Christmas. Some songs on Silver & Gold have the easy-listening folk-Americana most commonly associated with Sufjan’s music, but from there the album takes some hard corners, swerving from the reverent hymn, to the rompous family Christmas carol, to the psychedelic space voyage. It’s deep and mournful in one moment, fun and heartwarming in another, and sporadically noisy in the next. Kind of like Christmas.

In an essay in the album booklet, Sufjan describes, “Christmas music does justice to the criminal, marrying sacred and profane, bellowing obtuse prophecies of the Messiah in the same blustery breath as a candy-coated, holly-jolly, TV-jingle advertising a string of lights and a slice of fruitcake.” This is an adequte summation of what he’s doing in the album. To listen to Silver & Gold is to confront all of the tension, pageantry, profane noise, and sacred silence that is the experience of Christmas, and in that confrontation (in my opinion, anyway), to see more clearly the truth: the advent of Christ, the proclaiming of the gospel.

I’m not going to walk through the whole album, because nobody is interested in that, including myself. Rather, I’ll highlight a few examples of how Sufjan writes and arranges this music to make it so compelling to those of you who, like me, might be a little burned out by traditional Christmas music.

Sufjan opens the album with “Silent Night,” which appears to be a twist of artistic irony given all the noise about to follow in the next 57 songs. Following this is a song titled, “Lumberjack Christmas / No One Can Save You From Christmases Past,” which opens as a fun country jingle, but quickly reveals the themes of the album and its arrangement. Beneath the festivities taking place in the song (“Would you like to stay a while and dance with me? / Would you like to wrap the gifts and have a drink?”) is an undertone of abandonment and avoidance of something deeper. There’s a line where Sufjan resents that “Santa went and left us in the Alamo,” perhaps a hint of betrayal by the promises of Christmas that Santa often represents. The song ends with a tonal shift, both musically and lyrically, with the refrain, “No one can save you from Christmases past / you’ll have to love it or leave it at last.”

The first eleven songs, surprisingly, are “easy-listening” enough to enjoy without being weirded out too much. Of these is one of my favorites on the album: a Sufjan original called “Carol of St. Benjamin the Bearded One.” In this track, Sufjan addresses St. Benjamin, a relatively obscure deacon martyred in 5th century Persia. The significance of the reference is easy to miss, until you learn (if just through a quick wikipedia search) that St. Benjamin was imprisoned, tortured and eventually martyred, enduring having sharpened reeds thrust into his fingernails, toenails, and other ‘highly sensitive areas,’ (your own imagination might fill in the gaps here) and a knotted stick ground into his bowels, all because he refused to cease proclaiming the Gospel in a period of intense persecution of Christians. In this song, Sufjan sees himself being watched by the martyred saint and entreats him, “Oh, be kind to me / Oh, Benjamin who keeps his hands inside his sleeves,” and later, “In my heart and in my spirit I concede / The things you want in life you have to really need / This is a matter of life.” Combine the subtle references, the artful guitar picking and piano, and the gentle vocals, and you feel the weight of Sufjan’s plea, the invocation for grace in light of the greedy spectacle Christmas often becomes, especially when held up against the gaze of a figure like St. Benjamin.

Songwriting like this is scattered throughout the album, and it takes a few listens to begin picking it out. But if you are a music lover and appreciate well written lyrics, you will find gems like this all throughout the album if you pay attention.

Soon enough, the album embarks on a more noisy, chaotic adventure, oscillating between tracks of reverent, threnodic hymns and the noisy, chaotic, family-jam-session-style versions of secular Christmas classics.

“Happy Family Christmas” evokes a popular Christmas sentiment, “Just this once for Christmas / I want us all to be / Like one great big happy family” before descending into one of the many family-jam noise sessions, with electric guitar feedback, piano wailing, and some lyrical scatting. This is followed by a rendition of “Jingle Bells,” which is of the same character. Then, in sudden a sudden shift, an arythmic musical interlude called “Mysteries of the Christmas Mist” followed by a reverent choral rendition of “Lift Up Your Heads, Ye Mighty Gates.”

This back-and-forth happens for the next several songs. At first, I found the shifts annoying and disorienting. But as I listened more, I began to love them. By sitting through the intentionally noisey romps like “Ding-a-Ling-a-Ring-a-Ling” and “Mr. Frostyman,” the simple and mournful hymns like “How Shall I fitly Meet Thee?” and “Ah Holy Jesus” receive their full due. A thirst is created and then whetted, and created again and whetted again. As soon as the mystery and beauty begins, it is swallowed up in haste by another noisy Christmas jam, and the listener waits again for release.

The tension that this album creates is an embodiment of the tension of Advent. In a season of the year that has a knack at probing at our vulnerabilities through commercial extortion, cultural expectation, and personal failure, Sufjan offers an opportunity to ride through the hype, where Jesus (“Ah Holy Jesus”) enters in, is the heart of peace in the midst of it, who demands our unadulterated attention despite the noise, and fills us with love and grace when we inevitably fail to do so.

To close, in Sufjan’s own words about the album:

“My song is steadfast; my song is forgiveness; my song is justice; my song is solitude. And so, in this canopy of Christmas music, I summon the company of angels, the helper elves, the shepherds keeping flock, the innkeepers, the coupon-clippers, the marathon runners, the cross-country skiers, the bottom feeders, the grocery baggers, the toll both ticketers, the bridge and tunnel drivers, the construction workers, the ice cream makers, the street sweepers, the community of saints, the Virgin Mary, the Holy Spirit, the Prince of Persia, and all invisible hosts of heaven to assist me in this absurd cosmic adventure, pursuing holly-jolly songs of hope and redemption with a sacred heart for the enduring love of the holidays, for the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.”