sufjan's sweetest love songs

for your little star in the sky

The day that I both donned my heart-toed Doc Martens and a pink suede heart-flap purse, I knew I couldn’t avoid the truth any longer: I love a silly little heart. And it’s obvious to everyone. My parents have bought me two mini Le Creuset heart ramekins; I bought Jake some Valentine’s Day jelly beans because, well, I saw them. We even have a shared playlist: awe.

I love some silly little love. Happy first newsletter from all the brightest, warmest feelings I possess.

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2010 Tumblr sure knew to love Sufjan Stevens. In those days, the picture floating around most featured him in a red and white striped shirt and a loose-stringed cowboy hat, a banjo in hand. The prototypical soft guy for sad indie lovers.

To adoring fans’ credit: Sufjan sings about love endlessly. For Valentine’s Day, I wanted to pick out some of his very best love lines. The love can be romantic, familial, platonically adoring: but for today, we’re going to mostly stick to what’s bright, not tortured. 

Is the love song actually about god? Yeah, probably.

“I still love you a lot/I love you from the top of my heart”
–All Delighted People

Maybe it’s the birdlike flutes following “heart” that gives this line such a twinkle. Maybe it’s the following light “ooh ooh ooh ooohs.” But we’ve always loved from the bottom of our hearts, deeply; the top implies something fresh, something buoyant. Instead of a deep urge, it seems like a persistent awareness, a tug upwards. I adore that notion of buoyancy. As one Sufjan song title says: “Joy! Joy! Joy!”

“When you crochet I feel mesmerized and proud/I would say I love you, but saying it out loud is hard/So I don’t say it at all” and “You are the life I needed all along”
—Futile Devices

Being enamored is looking over at someone’s face and feeling overcome just by its existence. Finding awe in the littlest movements. The careful attention here to a domestic hobby is really a careful attention to hands and to creation; a sweater your mother made always means far more than the one from the store. And watching someone craft something beautiful from absolutely nothing renders them, in a sense, godly. 

That extra “you are the life I needed all along”? Aggressively eloquent; incredibly lovely. 

“I can see a lot of life in you/I can see a lot of bright in you/And I think the dress looks nice on you”
—The Dress Looks Nice On You

Per Genius, this song goes with a story: that a girl Sufjan dated taught him what sweet things to say to women. But what I appreciate here is not the easy sentiment that “the dress looks nice on you” — the value lies in the preceding lines. People will compliment the clothes, and that’s nice, but it’s normal. Sufjan starts by complimenting the soul inside it all, the internal beauty that fills out the silhouette. (That being said, feel free to compliment me on my outfit OR my soul.)

“I'd swim across Lake Michigan/I'd sell my shoes/I'd give my body to be back again/In the rest of the room/To be alone with you”
—To Be Alone With You

Devotion, devotion, devotion. This song, as a whole, is about what we’ll give up to reclaim a single space or moment. And what’s most beautiful is that it’s mutual; later on, the “you” gives up just as much “to be alone with me.” Love here is a hallowed space, both in location and time; more honestly, perhaps the “being alone” is more core to the song than love itself. As I think, I’m turning to one of my favorite poems: “Homewrecker” by Ocean Vuong. That poem has love but is stuck to the essential, beautiful, stolen moments. Especially on that morose final lyric, “I’ve never known a man who loved me.” (But also, maybe this one’s about God; who’s to say.)

“Oh, how I meant to tease him/Oh, how I meant no harm/Touching his back with my hand, I kiss him/I see the wasp on the length of my arm” and “I can't explain the state that I'm in/The state of my heart, he was my best friend” and “My friend is gone, he ran away/I can tell you I love him each day/Though we have sparred, wrestled and raged/I can tell you I love him each day”
—The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is Out to Get Us!

I could write an essay on this song alone (“thinking outrageously, I write in cursive” is such a killer first line). It has all the marks of fumbling adolescence, of nervous early love, and is so clearly stamped with self-reflection. The moment the wasp appears, we know: this kiss means danger. However, the tenderness stands firm in the fact of it. There’s no regret, necessarily. In fact, he reflects, “we were in love!” Not everything can work out, but this fond memory is a testament to the beauty of (again) a stolen moment.

“My firefly”; “my little hawk”; “my little dove”; “my little Versailles”; “my star in the sky”; “my little loon”; “my dragonfly”
—Fourth of July

Iconic pet names, really. Again I have to point to Sufjan’s unmatched tenderness. It’s one thing to give a nickname or two, but this set of names is not only creative but so careful, so ginger. And each does carry a separate weight and impression, giving us the variety of forms of softness with which he views, in this case, his mother. “My little loon”: he discusses her mental health struggles throughout this album. “My star in the sky”: a singular description of worth, a particular standout in the also-bright sea. May we all be described in so many thoughtful, gentle ways.

“When your legs give out just lie right down/And I will kiss you till your breath is found”
—Heirloom

A little cliche? Maybe. But come on. If you’ve been 15, you get it. And to indulge: what a pretty idea, to fill someone back up with your own breath; to, like CPR, pour your life into them and pass on that support. Being taken care of, being brought back up, is so much of love.

“All I want is the perfect love/Though I know it's small, I want love for us all” 
—Impossible Soul

At the risk of being Lennon-esque, this call always hit me like Sufjan’s thesis. In the span of the 25-minute song, with its four or five movements, he’s talking to a lover (at the beginning, he entreats, “Woman, tell me what you want”). But this later moment of universality is what really cinches together all “Impossible Soul’s” themes and pieces. His voice floats above the electronic production, the second line unshakeably fond. “Though I know it’s small”?! “Love for us all” is small. Perhaps he means it’s achievable, and it’s easy to obtain. But to go from his own desire (“All I want is the perfect love”) to that worldwide desire in such plain language, he does make it seem unbearably simple: almost like a sermon. Go forth; love for us all. 

“Oh, to see without my eyes/The first time that you kissed me/Boundless by the time I cried/I built your walls around me” 
—Mystery of Love

Wrapping yourself up in their world, daydreaming of the first kiss. Written for Call Me By Your Name, the love of this song does skew a bit tortured, but it overall hangs on the beauty of the first encounter, that initial enmeshment that solidifies a relationship as not eternal but self-revolutionary.  It’s the kind of relationship you write about, you think about forever. And it’s such a little-kid image, at first: squeezing your eyes shut to picture a treasured memory again. The innocence is so important to that immediate fall.

“I could not have shaken the touch of your breath on my arm/For it has stayed in me as an epithet”
—I Walked

An epithet (as I have just Googled) is, to paraphrase, something that you are described by. He is being described by the touch of their breath. The touch of their breath. For someone else’s very existence to so potently define you, to mark you?! Sufjan, please. We are, of course, very much defined by those we’ve known and our experiences together. But this is a state of utter intoxication. It’s in the bloodstream and the breath and the very being. It’s carried with the body forever.

“In the morning, through the window shade/When the light pressed up against your shoulder blade/I could see what you were reading” and “In the living room when you kissed my neck/And I almost touched your blouse” and most importantly “All the glory when you ran outside/With your shirt tucked in and your shoes untied”
—Casimir Pulaski Day

There was one fan-made music video on YouTube that I watched for years. It really seemed to get at the yearning, the love-without-saying-love, the heightened importance of circumstances in teenagerdom. This song isn’t composed of good love lyrics, per se, but is an incredibly canny take on what we notice about each other, and what seems to matter most. The awe of “all the glory” when she’s running outside, completely undone; his hope of “I thought I saw you breathing.” Though it’s a song closing in loss — her sickness quite evident throughout — it’s nuanced about its adoration. He deifies her, looking from afar at how the light hits just right, but then also (in some opinion) defiles her supposed purity (“when your father found out what we did that night/And you told me you were scared.”) But it’s “oh the glory,” “all the glory”; there’s a beauty that cannot be removed even from those messiest moments. It’s a eulogy.

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Honorable mention to “SuperSexyWoman.” If you don’t know the lyrics, go check them out. Or, actually, listen to it blind.

I’ve put together a playlist of all these songs (with some extras that didn’t quite make the cut). Happy Valentine’s Day!

Forgot the most important song of all? Have a different take on any of these lyrics? Let me know.