The Chicago Theatre is old and ornate, adorned with intricate, inlaid sculptures, gilded trim, wood & cushion seats, and is just one of those places where you feel weird wearing a t-shirt. This was to be a performance in a theater, not just some concert. This was to be an “exploration of internal life and love — of inner cosmos.” This was to be Sufjan Stevens purging and recreating his most experimental and luscious work. This was to be a semi-interactive musical art installation, allowing us to view private moments of someone unafraid to create within and without the confines of current zeitgeists. It was to be rocking, funky, funny, heartbeaking, and above all entertaining. But as I sat in my seat trying to decompress and synthesize his latest albums All Delighted People and Age of Adz in my head, I thought, “This was going to be…I don’t know.” I had no idea what cards Sufjan was holding. No one did.

When Sufjan and his band took the stage behind a giant scrim, he bee-lined it for his banjo, which, whoa, paradigm shift. I was all primed for the glitches and the sequences and the auto-tune and the hoyven. The sparse waltz “Seven Swans” was our prologue. Upstage, a vertical crawl projected houses, beds, and odd faces made of dots (stars?) that cohered and collapsed behind the band. You know when the band comes in on that song? On the album it’s very subtle, but that evening two drummers on two full kits, a percussionist, a bassist, a guitarist, two back-up singers, a keyboard player, and two trombonists exploded with a wall of sound that lifted the scrim up and there was our boy: handsome as ever, smiling, and chomping at the bit to dig into his new stuff.

Let me jump around in time for a second.

Mid-way through the set, Sufjy starts monologuing about Age Of Adz, explaining its origins in the artwork of Royal Robertson, a schizophrenic outsider artist from Louisiana who is obsessed with spaceships, aliens, monsters, temples, astral stuff,  the destruction of the world — real primal shit. He goes on to say that Age of Adz is deeply influenced by Royal, insofar as Sufjan tried to remove himself from his songwriting, and get into his head and find a creative core. Turns out it’s also some real primal shit. The songs on AoA are like personal soliloquies and private confessions which are majorly obfuscated on the album with all the glitches and the sequencing and the auto-tune and the hoyven. But in the live setting, you come to understand that these songs are some of his most personal, honest, and  heartbreaking yet. And still, underneath it all, says Sufjan: “The main theme is love.”

Back now to the beginning, “Too Much” began the so-called ‘exploration’, and within this song, a number of things were indeed explored. There was choreography (as Stevens’ backup singers are wont to to do), there were musical explorations reminiscent Eno or modern Electronica, and a seemingly conceptual staging exploration with the lowering of the scrim mid song. This apparently corresponded with some light thing that I really couldn’t see. The scrim-lowering happened a few other times for some weak-sauce lighting effect, but I prefer to think it was used to mimic some Brechtian distancing ideal – cause that sounds like something Sufjan would really dig.

It was a huge relief to see that nothing was looped during the show. Each drummer on either side of the stage had a drum/synth pad and did a bang-up job of punching up the songs. Those two really carried the energy for a lot of the set.

Near center stage was Sufjan, with a small cache of guitars, a little stand with either lyrics or music on it, and his new toy — a Dave Smith Prophet Synthesizer Module — on which he said he composed most of the songs for AoA. Sufjan adeptly oscillated between guitar and synth throughout the show, playing some avant- solos on both at various points.

One thing I didn’t expect: all of the songs off AoA landed perfectly. The title track was a standout performance, which included ribbon dancing from the backup singers and beautiful delivery from Sufjan. “I Walked”, (I can’t wait to tell you this), had Sufjan dancing like the whitest white boy ever, poppin’ and lockin’ to that beat. It was hilarious and self-effacing and genuine and mad adorable. “Get Real, Get Right” was dedicated to Royal Robertson (who passed away in 1997, destitute, broke, alone, poor, and unrecognized)  and all of a sudden took on this new sadness and urgency.

Now, I hopped on the “explore our inner cosmos” ship, so when we docked and disembarked to listen to some sweet songs off his latest EP, All Delighted People, it was a bit jarring and inconsequential. ”Heirloom” and “The Owl and the Tanger” are beautiful songs in their own right, but felt a little too precious here.

Yes, Sufjan can be a tad precious. When you take these big risks like, say, basing your album on a schizo painter who thought he was abducted by aliens, you run the equally big risk of egg running down your dome, and facing eye-rolls and brow-raises from your discerning audience. There were a few of these moments, but they were small and overshadowed by the scope of Sufjan’s project that came into full view with the “closer”, the 25 minute “Impossible Soul”.

What a performance. Auto-tune may sound cheesy on record, but it’s fucking dope live. As soon as he got to singing on that auto-tune mic, people cheered, and I had a shit-eating grin on my face. Then the dance party happened. In the “It’s a long life…” part, the funky party get-down part of the song, people for the first time started standing up and dancing in their seats, then it spilled bit by bit into the aisles on the lower floor.

The band was banging, and it was at that point that I wished the concert was outside and there were no chairs so we could all finish that connection between artist and audience with this piece that Sufjan has created. It was working so well! Next time though.

Then “Chicago” was played, and it was fantastic, and the crowd went nuts, and sang along, and there was joy in the air as the town’s de facto indie anthem rang out for the first time in years. The Encore saw four more songs off Illinoise played to varying degrees of sincerity and obligation. “Decatur” was rough, to say the least. You could tell he hadn’t played it in forever (he said he never plays it, but “I’ll do it for you”) so I can’t fault the guy. I’m one of those people who has a very personal connection to “Casimir Pulaski Day” so I’ll go ahead and side-step my way around that one. And closing with “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” may have been a bit too anti-climactic, but that little tune still can send a shiver down a corpse’s spine.

It’s good to see Age of Adz in its purest form — the difference between looking at a picture of a Jackson Pollack, and then actually seeing a painting of his hanging on a wall. The album’s seams are showing here and there, but its genius is readily apparent. It’s a challenging, forthright, erudite, un-ironic, anti-buzzband work of someone who’s constantly pushing himself to make something genuine, and he does one hell of a job recreating this process for us live.

Photography by Josh Darr.

Setlist:
Seven Swans
Too Much
Age of Adz
Heirloom
I Walked
Now That I’m Older
Vesuvius
Futile Devices
Get Real, Get Right
The Owl and the Tanger
Impossible Soul
Chicago
Encore:
Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois
Decatur, or, Round of Applause for your Stepmother!
Casimir Pulaski Day
John Wayne Gacy, Jr.