Sufjan Stevens is one of those guys who really gets into the holidays. He produces a new five-song EP for friends every season and every few years or so boxes them up for the rest of his fans. This year he is even going on tour with the Yuletide songs, Santa hat, boxes of confetti, determined to bring Christmas cheer despite the fact that November still has six days left in it.
“I know it was just Thanksgiving,” he said by way of apology at the beginning of his sold out show at the 9:30 Club in D.C. Saturday. “But you can’t have too much Christmas.”
Evidently not.
And with a band dressed as a chicken, skeleton, unicorn, Santa, reindeer and various elaborate dresses, Stevens sang a number of his own inventive holiday songs, each of them reflecting the same kind of wistful, melodic, banjo and synthesizer based chorales as his regular music.
But in addition to songs like “Lumberjack Christmas” “Christmas in the Room” or throwaway ditties like “Dina-a-ling-a-ring-a-ling,” there was a 12-foot, game show style Wheel of Christmas which each band member spun to come up with the next titles to sing, from “Jingle Bells” and “Silent Night” to “Holly Jolly Christmas.”
As in the Elvis Costello Spinning Songbook tour, everything was rigged by the second spin, with ensemble members stopping the wheel on the song they wanted to perform the most. Fair enough. By the end of the night, just about everything on it was performed save for “O Holy Night” and the Muppets song “We Need a Little Christmas.”
To add to the elaboration, he had printed an eight page songbook to help out the singing along, though it was tough to imagine anyone in the audience who didn’t know the words to “Joy to the World” or “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”
Though he had some slight twists on the arrangements on his own recordings, the standards were performed pretty straight so as to encourage the lusty singalong. A holiday-hyped Sufjan crowd doesn’t need coaxing. And strangely enough even for this stickler on premature carols, it all kind of worked to have everyone singing as one amid the chintzy and fun Christmas trappings.
Sufjan looked as though he bought out a novelties store before hand, judging with how much confetti was going off and how often they threw out inflatable Santa dolls into the audience (who grabbed them and held them very tightly instead of batting them around).
The show, also titled The Seasonal Affective Disorder Yuletide Pageant On Ice, had the effect of spiked eggnog with the seriousness of a Bad Christmas Sweater contest. In fact the show was started with a strange standup act by a Sufjan backup singer Rosie Thomas, performing under the name Sheila Saputo and some heavy disguise, with thick glasses, buck teeth, a neck brace and an arm sling. She started by saying she was in a horse riding accident, so half the people sort of believed her. They wouldn’t be making fun of somebody with a speech impediment who’d been injured in an accident in a Christmas show, would they?
Sure they would.
The tendency toward the carols and ditties sort of made the starker ballads that are his specialty stand out even more in their frailty. Though his banjo busted as soon as he picked it up, he had it working after some fussing, the result of what must have been a Christmas miracle.
Though there is a whole school of Christmas song that Sufjan avoids – the novelties of the past 50 year, from Rudolph to Frosty – he added his own character to the canon in his epic “Christmas Unicorn,” which has a clever and wordy set of verses about being “a pagan heresy” and “a mystical apostasy” it moves into a more emphatic chorus that makes way for an unexpected refrain of Joy Division’s “Love will Tear Us Apart.”
For the two song encore, the band dropped the Christmas songs (if not the costumes) for well-received versions of memorable songs from his back catalog with long titles — the banjo-based “For the Widows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in Ypsilanti” and the major “Come On! Feel the Illinoise! (Part 1: The World’s Columbian Exposition; Part w: Carl Sandburg Visits Me in a Dream” – songs fans may have known for their choruses — “I’ll do anything for you” and “I cried myself to sleep last night” respectively.
It was only the second night of a month-long tour that will likely build on the Christmas cheer the closer it gets to the actual date. By then, Stevens will have learned something more about songs of the season and the transformative power of sing-alongs, just as his annual EPs have taught him something about recording holiday music.