Sufjan Stevens at Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley

Sufjan’s quiet, unassuming, and bizarre. No muscle man poses, fist pumps, or crowd sing-a-longs, but he did make us laugh with a story or an offhand comment. He doesn’t dance.The wings of an eagle replaced that, strapped on his back, beating when he rocked back and forth. There were thirty-three among him, a string section, a horn section, a chorus, all accomplished, classically trained, bearing wings. The music was in turn savage, dark, elegiac, prosaic. It also felt sacred and precious. Songs would build one way, into cacophony, only to rest quietly, after some measure, as if the sound had gone down the drain. Or it would burst out from a whisper. Time signatures confuse us. The horns bright, the voices throaty and human, the strings strange, high. Dazzling us with the timing of thirty-four together.

Hard to imagine that so much comes from such a mild-mannered center. I have this idea that he’s been moving toward this all of his life, and things have arranged themselves around it. The center of him goes unchanged. He’s poured himself into this, gliding over obstacles like a stream over jagged rock, not inevitable but we would like it to seem so.

He tried to tell a story, to make one up on the spot, but couldn’t find an ending. He just began with something unassuming, and added moths and crows and when he falters, there’s delighted laughter at this little attempt at amazing. He just let the story go. Spoke of a mystery and tried to unfold it, but couldn’t. Somehow that was fitting.

Musically it was fabulous, precise and emotional at the same time. In performance a touch of its cerebrality is lost, its marked precision became less marked, its obviousness became instead spontaneous. It was brighter, more alive, cleaner, more exciting than on recording. I didn’t detect any real mistakes. I’m not one for details anyway, and have a tendency to let my attention drift to people watch. The bassist hopped about with his pink wings like a fairy, playing bass, then piano, then guitar. Timing the feedback screeches. The brightest diamond, what is her true name, the woman who sings the female parts on Illinois hovers about in the back, completely necessary, floating from one instrument to another. Played the celeste. A thing like a xylophone, but made with glass, or bells, its keys kept in a wooden box. Lovely thing. Airy. At shows, my thoughts tend not to complete, and then thinking goes. I blank out and I can’t remember where I’d gone. Then I come back, and I wish I hadn’t gone, because this is just a one time thing, you can’t repeat it.