From the Salmon

I thought I was ready. I really did.

I mean, I’d seen the man before. I’d read reviews of the current tour. I’d scoured YouTube. I’d downloaded a concert from the previous week and listened to it for much of the day. I was excited — gloating, even.

And yet seven songs into the set found me with my mouth agape and tears rolling slowly down my face.

But let’s back up a little.

When Sufjan Stevens announced that he would be stopping by Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on his fall tour, we knew we couldn’t miss him. We got a group of friends together and managed to score a dozen main floor tickets for Wednesday’s show. When that show quickly sold out and a Tuesday show was added, we managed to get two tickets near the center of the tenth row.

As we found our seats on Tuesday, my wife and I marveled at the difference between the 2,000-seat three-tiered classical concert hall and the last venue Sufjan had visited: a 600-person-capacity former bordello. We knew he was bringing a few more musicians with him on this tour, but we wondered if he would really be able to fill out the stage and the spacious theater.

Before we could get our answer, we were treated to a short set by My Brightest Diamond, a new musical incarnation for Shara Worden, who we’d seen last as head cheerleader and guitarist for Sufjan’s Illinoisemakers. With a spare string quartet filling out the space behind the brooding crunch of guitar or her fervent, dancing piano, Shara performed mostly material from her debut album, Bring Me the Workhorse. Each of her songs served to feature her sensational voice — an agile, dramatic, Kate Bush-like voice, with a touch of Björk’s whimsy and the tense percussive quality of Paula Cole in her darker, least Dawsony moments. The set really started to smoke when she added a bassist and drummer for songs like “Something of an End,” but the real showstoppers were the covers she chose for each night: a scorching rendition of Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” and Bill Withers’ sultry slowburner ”Use Me.”

As the last notes of “Golden Star” faded away, My Brightest Diamond left the stage, and we were charged and ready for the main event.

While Sufjan’s small orchestra found their places, I gasped. It wasn’t the costumes — I’d seen photos, so I was already ready for the lepidopterist marching band at Mardis Gras look. What made me gasp was the chorus filing in behind the musicians. I was completely unaware that two dozen members of the Pacific Mozart Ensemble would be collaborating with Sufjan for the two Berkeley shows. I was totally unprepared for the overwhelming pangs of jealousy that came from wishing that I had (a) heard of the Pacific Mozart Ensemble before that night and (b) had the foresight to audition. It’s been several years since I did any serious choral singing, so I’ve gotten used to the vicarious desire to be on the other side of the conductor. But I’ve never felt the desire to be onstage more powerfully than at these shows.

Then the music began.

In my experience, you can’t go wrong with a concert that begins with a saw. As one of the eight string players eked a few ringing, bending notes from a saw, the other seven quietly joined in, creating an undulating landscape of sound to welcome the rest of the musicians to the stage: trombone, two trumpets, a drummer, a bassist, a metamorphosed Shara Worden, and a bewinged Sufjan Stevens.

The introduction subsided and the band launched into “Sister.” When the chorus entered with their repeated fifths, I got chills. When they were joined by the brass and all 39 musicians onstage were engaged, I looked over at my wife and mouthed “Oh my.” This was going to be bigger than anything I had expected.

After attending one of the New York shows on this tour, David Byrne wrote:

Unlike most pop concerts, which often appear to be merely a string of songs, this came pretty close to being a coherent theater piece. Some songs were more memorable than others, but that’s normal, and it didn’t really matter in this context — the evening was more about establishing a mood of ecstatic reverie than delivering hooks.

I also felt was what I can only describe as a kind of Protestant reserve and reticence. Sufjan’s voice — most of the time a fragile introverted whisper (see also Chet Baker or João Gilberto) — was juxtaposed in this case with the emotional and even majestic spiritual release of his string and brass melodies. As if what he was feeling inside, but couldn’t express, was expressed in these instrumental passages.

Byrne gets it exactly right (not that that’s a big surprise, given his own musical brilliance). The soaring immensity of Stevens’ arrangements pointed to something bigger than the 39 people onstage, something greater than the 2,000 or so audience members. After only a few minutes, it was clear we were in Sacred space.

Not that the concert wasn’t spiced with plenty of the Profane. As the band propelled itself into “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts,” a quiet laughter rippled through the crowd. Turning around, we discovered that inflated Supermen (Supermans?) were soaring from the balconies into the audience below. About 100 of them. Suddenly there were dozens of Men of Steel being batted in all directions. Later in the show, we would experience a similar Santa shower.

Once the heroic inflatables were stowed away, we were back to the sacred with “The Transfiguration.” Starting with Sufjan’s hushed voice, the song and story grew until thirtysome voices were proclaiming “Son of Man, Son of God!” over a majestic brass fanfare. I was a bit surprised to hear him play the song, but it was a night for surprises, as he ended up playing seven songs from Seven Swans, the most spare and the most spiritual of his albums. The second night, he played five Swan songs, including an impassioned “Abraham.” (Strangely enough, he played no songs either night from his most recent album The Avalanche — although the setlist for the second night shows that he intended to play “Mr. Supercomputer.")

The rest of the songs came primarily from last year’s Illinois, including crowd favorites “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.,” “Casimir Pulaski Day,” and “Chicago.” Interestingly, while this set of concerts overall was several degrees of magnitude better than last year’s, “Gacy” and “Pulaski” couldn’t touch the captivating intimacy of the performances in the smaller space.

One of the highlights of the show was “Majesty Snowbird,” a new song that he debuted earlier on this tour and apparently the “theme song” for the tour. The second night he explained that the titular bird was actually the Dark-eyed Junco. I guess if God cares so much for sparrows, then the Junco’s not too meager a bird to deserve its own ten-minute epic. And what an epic it was:

“Majesty Snowbird” from Oct. 11 in Berkeley.
Recorded on a voice recorder, so it gets a little hot.

But the song that got me — the song that brought tears to my eyes — was “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!” While it’s lyrically more opaque than “Gacy” or “Pulaski,” it’s become my favorite song from Illinois and one of my favorite Sufjan songs, period. After the second verse, there was a build where brass and then voices join in descending scales, swelling into glorious percussive flourishes. Sufjan continued to sing about his love for his childhood friend while the chorus provided a background counterpoint of ecstatic reverie:

Oh great sights upon this state! Hallelu-
Wonders bright, and rivers, lake. Halelu-
Trail of Tears and Horseshoe Lake. Hallelu-
Trusting things beyond mistake. Hallelu-

Lamb of God, we sound the horn. Hallelujah!
To us your ghost is born. Hallelu-

Then, suddenly, the reverie halted, leaving Sufjan singing quietly over just the violins: “I can’t explain the state that I’m in, the state of my heart, he was my best friend.” It gets me every time on the album. When executed by the musical force congregated on stage, the transition did me in.

What happens next in the song provided one of my few disappointments with last year’s shows, largely because Sufjan had eschewed the rhythmic exuberance of the song’s ending to focus instead on the “terrible storm” and because the ensemble seemed too small to do either the storm or the song justice. This time, they sold me on the storm. The rhythym and beauty of the song began slowly to drift into dissonance, picking up speed and volume until at last swirling into a bombastic cacophony — almost two minutes of biting brass, wailing voices, pounding piano, furious strings, and shrieking feedback.

And then, the song resolved in a way I hadn’t heard before. Out of the chaos came slow, relaxed chords from the string section. As everything else dissipated, the strings were joined by the voices of the chorus, slowly crescendoing into each chord before fading away. It was a moment of beautiful contrast and simplicity straight out of Sigur Rós’ repertoire. It was breathtaking.

“The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us” from Oct. 11 in Berkeley.
The audio doesn’t do justice to the space and the acoustics, but it’s still nice.

After the first night, we could barely believe that we were going to get to do it all over again. But we did. The pair of concerts was quite simply among the best I’ve ever seen, and I honestly don’t expect that I’ll ever witness a show quite like that again. Thanks, Sufjan.