"Christmas in July": A Musicological Analysis of Metamodernist Impulses in Sufjan Stevens’ Christmas Collections

One particularly noteworthy subset of Sufjan Stevens’ expansive oeuvre, and one which provides a useful way of exploring metamodern impulses in his work, is his collection of Christmas music. Two five-disc collections (Songs for Christmas, Vols. 1-5 [2006] and Silver and Gold: Songs for Christmas, Vols. 6-10 [2012]) with an additional single and remix (‘Lonely Man of Winter’) add up to 102 songs and nearly five hours of music, the majority of this having been recorded each year between 2001 and 2010 on a series of festive EPs gifted by Stevens to his family and friends each holiday season. This catalogue of carols and covers, alongside new original choruses and canticles provides the basis for analysis within this chapter, which explores individual tracks as well as tracking trends and changes from volume to volume and year to year. Although song lyrics are considered they are not interpreted in isolation, with the musicological analysis focusing predominantly on instrumentation, production, style, form and structure, tempo and metre, amongst other sonic parameters.

To quote Stevens, ‘Christmas is what you make of it, and its songs reflect mystery and magic as expertly as they clatter and clang with the most audacious and rambunctious intonations of irreverence’ (2012, p.9). The collections, and many of the songs that form them, have been created with an explicit awareness of the tension between mystery and irreverence, a tension which ‘does justice to the criminal, marrying sacred and profane, bellowing obtuse prophecies of the Messiah in the same blustery breath as a candy-coated, holly-jolly, TV-jingle advertising a string of lights and a slice of fruitcake’ (ibid.). The paradoxes inherent in these collections are similarly noted by reviewers and fans. One reviewer writes of Silver and Gold ‘the album exists on this plane where introspection meets with group sing-a-longs, depression meets with joyous outbursts, traditional meets with left-field kookiness’ (thebhoy, 2013). Live performances (including one festive 24-date North-American tour entitled ‘Surfjohn Stevens Christmas Sing-Along Seasonal Affective Disorder Yuletide Disaster Pageant on Ice featuring Sufjan Stevens’) also garnered similar responses – as one attendant recalled, ‘taking the stage in an outfit with enough spangle and sparkle to make Liberace blush, [Stevens] introduced himself as “Captain Christmas” and led his six-piece band in a kamikaze concert that gleefully teetered between the solemn and the silly’ (Reed, 2012). All of these oppositions and distinctions (solemn/silly, depressed/joyous, sacred/profane) can not only be identified in the lyrical and musical content of the Christmas collections, but also align with similar polarisations and binaries that have come to epitomise the metamodern in art and music (irony/sincerity, intimate/detached, and so on).

The work of Mary McCampbell (2021) and Janna Martindale (2014) represents some important first steps in the application of metamodernism to understandings of Stevens and his works, with McCampbell’s ideas about secularism applicable even more explicitly here in the realm of Christmas music, and Martindale’s bachelor’s thesis includes some helpful approaches to the analysis of one key track ‘Christmas Unicorn’. Cora S. Palfy’s work on mnemonic themes and spaces as a route to intimacy in Stevens’ works also provides a useful analytical frame. The chapter begins, then, by introducing some of this literature alongside more general positionings of metamodernism alongside Stevens as an artist (Dember 2017, 2019). It then moves into analysis, diving firstly into some in-depth analysis of a number of noteworthy tracks (potentially ‘The Child With The Star On His Head’, ‘Ding-a-Ling-a-Ring-a-Ling’, ‘Star of Wonder’, ‘Christmas in July’). Here, metamodern impulses are identified in the juxtaposition of thick and thin textures, hi- or lo-fidelity production techniques, the layering of lines and instruments in developing maximalist complexity, and the notion of irony/sincerity in instrumentation and timbre. Beyond this, these tropes are tracked throughout and between each of the ten volumes of Songs for Christmas, demonstrating that not only do the EPs develop in similar ways to the rest of Stevens’ output over the decade of their recording, but they also become gradually more ‘metamodern’ in walking the line between tradition and progression, sacred and secular, intimate and detached, hopeless and hopeful.