Sufjan Stevens: "No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross"

Once again, Sufjan Stevens is finger-picking and whisper-singing to guide us towards cold moments of solitude and reverence. It’s comforting to hear his voice again, like it’s inches from the ear. “No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross” seems like a reflexive pendulum swing away from everything his challenging Age Of Adz stood for. No more high-concept art statements, just old-fashioned songwriting; a man playing guitar on a stool in the corner of a café. But consider the three elements of this song: his voice, his acoustic guitar, and some white noise underneath. The last one is important. The white noise is not an affected tape hiss, but rather the fan of an air conditioner, running on high, blasting into Stevens’ apartment.

“This is not my art project; this is my life,” he said of his forthcoming seventh LP, Carrie & Lowell. His choice to record the song with his air conditioner running—to feature it as a character—brings us into his personal world where the specter of his mother and his grieving is circling all around him. It’s silly, sort of, to apply this much gravitas to a household appliance, but it’s what makes this song less of an analog to his earlier work and more to that of Liz Harris’ compositions in Grouper (recall the microwave timer she let beep on last year’s “Labyrinth”). It creates a domestic space with full transparency. It copies a moment in time without artifice. “No Shade” isn’t an invitation to meditate on Christianity as Stevens offered on Seven Swans—it’s his view from the gutter after one too many tests of faith. These three elements in the song are simply his life, which, suddenly, create some of his best art.

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