Sufjan Stevens, Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly: NPR Music Field Recordings
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- Опубліковано 7 чер 2017
- In a Manhattan studio, some of the musicians behind Planetarium play the album's beautiful closing track.
By Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey
Early on a spring morning in Manhattan, Sufjan Stevens, Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly and Nadia Sirota gathered at Reservoir Studios in Manhattan to play a song first performed five years ago and an ocean away.
"Mercury" is the closing track off Planetarium, a song cycle about the planets by Stevens, Dessner, Muhly and James McAlister. The work was originally composed on commission for the Dutch concert hall Muziekgebouw Eindhoven, and first performed there in 2012. Five turns around the sun later, Planetarium will arrive in recorded form on June 9 via 4AD.
"Mercury" is one of the most intimate songs on the record, a quality that's emphasized by its spot just after the 15-minute, ambient, electronic epic, "Earth." Where the record's other songs foreground synthesizers and spastic electric drum samples reminiscent of 2010's The Age of Adz, "Mercury" largely rests on Muhly's gentle piano work and Stevens' beautiful vocal. Where once, in the original live performances, the song swelled to a cinematic rush on the order of Illinois, it's now spare and elegant. Its warm intimacy is all the more apparent in the group's live performance, which features Dessner of The National lightly doubling on guitar Stevens' wordless refrain at the song's close.
Like many of the pieces on the record, its lyrics are a constellation of the cosmic, the personal and the mythological. The song, named for the messenger god, is a perfect musical setting for the feeling of having something dear carried away from you. "All that I've known to be of life / and I am gentle," Stevens sings. "You ran off with it all."
"Life is so abundant here, and yet we're so obsessed with the exterior of here," Stevens told All Songs Considered's Bob Boilen in a companion interview. "That's what's so interesting, there's a sort of beautiful, perfect order to life on earth that's so mysterious and so profound. And yet, as people, we really fuck it up. We're so dysfunctional. And we seek guidance from the exterior world - from the heavens - to help us understand our purpose here, and to sort of create a sense of order."
Credits:
Producers: Bob Boilen, Ben Naddaff-Hafrey; Director: Mito Habe-Evans; Editor: Nickolai Hammar; Violist: Nadia Sirota; Audio Engineering: Daniel Availa, Fritz Myers, Josh Rogosin, James Yost; Videographers: Annabel Edwards, Mito Habe-Evans, Nickolai Hammar; Series Producer: Mito Habe-Evans; Executive Producers: Anya Grundmann, Keith Jenkins; Special Thanks: St. Rose Music, Mark and Rachel Dibner of the Argus Fund;
Can you please bring Sufjan to do a desk concert?
i just love how Sufjan looks older and softer and maybe smaller with his huge glasses, but his voice is still the same as 15 years ago <3 honestly I will love Grandpa Suf with all my heart as much as I love everything he does now! And this song!!!!
Sufjan Stevens, Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly, and anonymous female musician. NPR, give Nadia Sirota proper credit by including her name in the title of this video.
I'm a simple man: I see Sufjan, I like
Sufjan Steven's voice is a cosmic anomaly, drifting down to us in its unparalleled beauty from the heavenly bodies whence it came.
Sufjan finally kinda looks like his age in this video
This live performance is incomparably greater than the studio version... so so so good.
sufjan enjoying himself here is the best part of the entire thing
This is so beautiful. I wish there was a documentary on the cosmos with the late Stephen Hawking where Sufjan Stevens made the score and Sir Attenborough narrate the whole thing.
I love how he smiles when he sings
The first half of the song speaks to the loss of innocence and attachment trauma experience I had through most of my life.
This is easily one of Sufjan's top 5 songs. The violin adds a different dimension to what we usually get in his songs and I love it. Nobody can do simple vulnerable heartbreak like Sufjan.
That violin adds an entirely new dimension to the composition.
Bryce really gives this song the otherworldly, spacey feel. He has such beautiful touch. Sufjan is one of my favorite musicians, but Bryce makes this performance really special.
I am so obsessed with this recording! The viola counterpoint to the ethereal guitars and piano is just transcendent.
came here for Sufjan and immediately found myself blown away by Nadia Sirota’s skill
Imo, Sufjan is at his peak right now vocally. This was flawless!
So love this version with violist Nadia Sirota! Sublime....
This song became my saviour through this quarantine
There's something lighter than air in this piece. It reminds me of Gustav Holst's own "Mercury, the winged messenger". Something very cheerful, but that's unfortunately just passing by. They truly managed to capture both the joy and the nostalgia in this piece. When I hear it, I recall bygone emotions. The strongest ones. Where have they gone?