Byrne, Stevens, Baroque Americana

David Byrne blogged recently about a Sufjan Stevens concert:

The feeling was of whispered intimate reminiscences of a midwestern childhood juxtaposed with their transcendent implications — the glory of the world discovered in the backyard, on a cross country trip, or at summer camp. Videos that looked like super 8 movies helped reinforce the aura of transcendental nostalgia, along with costumes that looked like they came out of a Jr. High theater production (everyone wore bird or butterfly wings and matching outfits.) Inflatable Supermen and santas were tossed off the balcony into the audience during appropriate songs — more images of childhood myths. It certainly all hung together.

David Byrne, of course, wrote a song entitled "The Big Country" on the indispensable More Songs ... in which the central refrain was I wouldn't live there / if you paid me to - referring, of course, to fly-over America. That was in the heyday of the disaffected New Wave, and Byrne later traded in this attitude for the ersatz folksy charm of True Stories. Nevertheless his original distaste is emblematic of a chauvinism found between the Hudson and the East River - one that David Byrne, at least, is capable of leaving behind.

Sufjan Steven has more expansive ambition. He has embarked on a plan to write albums about each of the 50 states, and the distinct locality of place that makes each one unique. It's not an entirely original concept - Dvorak wrote music inspired by the woods near Spillville, Iowa - and Mercury Rev has a wistful fascination with old and rural New York. But the scope of Stevens project is impressive.

And I guess I'm interested, these days, in any art that brings us back to the old, weird America - the people and states and municipalities along train routes and highways. To take on such subjects seems like defiant innovation in the face of so much self-centered, self-referential media (Studio 60 anyone?) which endlessly churns forth from the East and West coast.

Tags: Folkways, David Byrne, Sufjan Stevens