#for the widows in paradise for the fatherless in ypsilanti

[knightofleo]

Sufjan Stevens | For the Widows in Paradise, For the Fatherless in Ypsilanti

I was dressed embarrassment I was dressed in wine If you had a part of me Will you take your time? Even if I come back, even if I die Is there some idea to replace my life? Like a father to impress Like a mother's mourning dress If you ever make a mess I'll do anything for you

[bookofjudith]

These songs are like.. running parallel to each other… the melody in the beginning “I’d do anything for you/ I did everything for you” and “I would do anything she wants me to/ anything she wants me to do, I would do”

[alphacrone]

[eternal--returned]

Sufjan Stevens (@s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s) ֍ For the Widows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in Ypsilanti (Live during SXSW, Austin, TX) (2004)

Morning comes in Paradise, morning comes in light Still I must obey, still I must invite If there's anything to say, if there's anything to do If there's any other way, I'll do anything for you

If you had a part of me, will you take your time? Even if I come back, even if I die Is there some idea to replace my life? Like a father to impress Like a mother's mourning dress If you ever make a mess, I'll do anything for you

[abacistat]

read sb94 #59 again. died.

[rithmeres]

1 & 2. game shows touch our lives by the mountain goats | 3 & 4. goodbye by cage the elephant | 5. game shows touch our lives by the mountain goats | 6. just one yesterday by fall out boy | 7. jesus christ by brand new | 8. for the widows in paradise, for the fatherless in ypsilanti by sufjan stevens | 9. no hard feelings by the avett brothers | 10. john 15:13 | 11. learning how to die by jon foreman | 12. nothing fades like the light by orville peck | 13. amen by amber run | 14. goodbye by cage the elephant | 15. futile devices by sufjan stevens | 16. john my beloved by sufjan stevens | 17. devil's backbone by the civil wars | 18. the iliad trans. emily wilson | 19. "the thing is" by ellen bass | 20. woke up new by the mountain goats | 21. john 11:35 | 22. heartbreaker by autoheart | 23. he was a friend of mine - traditional american folk song | 24. the predatory wasp of the palisades is out to get us! by sufjan stevens | 25. "poem" by langston hughes

[lemon-russ]

The Unfathomable Burden Of Premonition

I had cursed thoughts and now curse them unto you :') Short and sad. (Thanks @squishyowl for the dividers)

CW: Sad, mentions of death

Ao3

Taglist: @sleepyfan-blog @undeaddream @scriberye

Song: For the widows in paradise for the fatherless in ypsilanti - Sufjan Stevens

Even if I come back, even if I die Is there some idea to replace my life? Like a father to impress Like a mother's mourning dress If you ever make a mess, I'll do anything for you

Sanguinius paced the elegant nursery.

The tiny, cherub like form of his infant son lay peacefully in his bassinet, a cradle of gold bars and red silks. One of his sons- the 7 foot tall astartes variety, not to be confused- had created the bed for his newest brother of sorts when Sanguinius announced that their Legion Mother was with child. They had all been so excited, and excited more when the baby was born with two little feathered wings, like Sanguinius himself.

The Greatest Angel, they jokingly called his son, playing off Sanguinius’ own moniker of The Great Angel.

He stepped to the bassinet's side once more, carefully leaning over and stroking the chubby cheek of his sleeping child. Little wings splayed, cherub-like cheeks and golden curls so much like his own. The only thing he'd gotten from the Legion Mother was his eyes.

Sanguinius wondered how else his son would be like him. Would he be creative? Empathetic and kind? Would he be wracked with the deep, gnawing rage Sanguinius had to constantly subdue? Or worse, would his dreams be plauged with visions of things yet come to pass? Things the Angel now grew increasingly concerned were going to happen, instead of his normal omens of things that may or may not.

No, these new dreams were far too specific. No vauge metaphor, no blurry half remembered shapes. A clear, defined vision of his brother, the warmaster himself, standing over Sanguinius’ corpse.

Would he see his sons first birthday, he wondered. He knelt beside the cradle, laying his arms and head on the side so he could watch the tiny movement of the baby's belly as he breathed.

His wife had explained many of her homeland traditions for children, and a first birthday was a large celebration. She already was planning for it, and their child was only a month old.

He gently pet his son's gold curls. Maybe the vision of his death happens centuries from now. Maybe his son will become a strong, grown man before he is forced to handle his father's demise. Or maybe it happens soon, and he misses all the milestones a baby goes through as they to navigate their new bodies and the world around them.

When his wife told him she was pregnant, one of his first thoughts was how excited he was to have someone to fly with- if the child had wings, she had told him with a gentle smile. But of course his child would have wings, he had told her, they will be more of an angel than he ever had been. He wouldn't have been surprised if they'd have come out with a golden halo of light to match.

Flying lessons. He hoped he got to give his son flying lessons someday. It had been trial and error for him. A lot of jumping off things and not quite making it. His primarch durability helped, but they didn't know the extent that his son inherited that resilience. If he couldn't teach him the tricks to taking off and landing, would he have to repeat Sanguinius’ methods? He imagined the little cherub flinging himself off a tall rock, flapping his wings and crashing to the sands. A smile crossed the Great Angel’s face at the thought of the little boy finally staying in the air for a moment before falling once more. He'd be so excited, just like the first time Sanguinius had managed to flap mid air.

He'd write a guide, he thought. Just in case. A manual to flying, assuming his son had similar wings to his own. Then he could at least have guidance while his poor mother watched him careen himself off of cliffs.

He swallowed back a growing lump in his throat, reminding himself he had no idea if he'd be gone sooner or later. It was just as likely that he expirenced all the wonders and tribulations of fatherhood as not, he lied to himself. The growing bookshelf of handwritten tomes in the corner of the nursery were just safeguards.

There was a good chance his son would never need to sit by the little library and read his father's notes on dealing with a red thirst, should he inherit it. Hardly a chance the boy would borrow a leatherbound tome from the Legion Mother's desk, then sit in his fathers old office, a tear stained journal page open, reading about his father meticulously sculpting a rose from gold to present to his wife as his son painted his mother a picture of the flower for her birthday.

A tear fell to the bed, discoloring the deep red silks of the baby's sheets. Sanguinius sighed, dabbing his eyes and composing himself. He gently leaned in an kissed the infant's tiny forehead before crossing the elaborately decorated nursery and sitting back at the little writing table he'd brought in. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly before picking his pen up once more and returning to the almost filled pages of another leatherbound book. What had he wanted to write? Ah, yes- he thought, as he titled the top of the page “Lessons in flying”.

Sanguinius turned back a moment, eyeing the strewn toys of the nursery. The walls were decorated in the finest gifts his genesons had been showering the child with. Many paintings depicting a cherub in golden light. One statue was a recreation of the baby in his fathers arms, moments after being born. A large, hand sewn plush bear sat in a corner, guarding the babe from bad dreams.

There was very little chance his son would need these notes and lessons and journals, he once again lied to himself. He should be relaxing, maybe spoiling his wife, maybe trying to get his own neglected work done. He watched the baby breathe those tiny, fluttering breaths a moment more before turning back to his writing.

Just in case. He will write everything his son may need to ask a father. Just in case.

[extraordinaryhistories]

#15 – 'Kill' (A Sun Came, 1998)

In 2016, a man named Marc Rebillet (yes, that Marc Rebillet) decided to search through a dumpster outside Sufjan’s studio in DUMBO, Brooklyn, which is a very mature and adult thing to do and reflects fantastically on Marc as a person, and certainly should have no consequences on his thriving music career. In that dumpster, he found an odd-looking CD – an unreleased album with a black-and-white cover titled Stalker, claiming to be performed by Sufjan Stevens. It had been recorded some time in the 1990s, and on a quick listen (the album was swiftly leaked online), it certainly sounded like early Sufjan, back when he did wild electric guitar freak-outs; his hushed but nasally vocal tone from that era is unmistakeable.

Everything seemed normal, except for the fact that the album was about tracking, sexually assaulting and then murdering people. It contained songs with titles like ‘I Know Where Your Kids Go to School’, ‘Baby Give Me a Feel’ and ‘U Kan Wrun But U Kan’t Hyde’. None of it was metaphorical. Sufjan recorded a noise rock album in the 90s that was quite literally about fucking stalking people. And then, not five years later, recorded ‘For the Widows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in Ypsilanti’. It boggles the mind.

At the time that Stalker was released, a significant portion of the Sufjan fan community cast doubt on the veracity of the leak. One of the major concerns was that the subject matter was far too direct, far too gruesome, for a Sufjan song. He would never be so brutally direct. He would never. Right?

‘Kill’ is a song by Sufjan Stevens that features the following as its chorus: ‘I want to kill him / I want to cut his brain / And when it's over / I know I'll feel okay’. Ah. Case closed.

The third-last track on A Sun Came, ‘Kill’ is a knotty piece of songwriting that may be the most multi-layered lyrical construction in his early work. Even purely on inspection one can see this to be true – it is a song with a clear narrative, some clear themes, a roiling balance of light and dark within it, which is far more than can be said for much of this era. But then you get to the allusions this song pays to other literary and musical sources, and things only begin to complicate further. I, personally, have not quite made my mind up about ‘Kill’. It is a song loaded with possibility.

An initial reading of ‘Kill’ gives the strong suggestion of a relationship narrative, and I do think that this is what lies at the song’s core. The relationship in this song need not be romantic, but given the sheer depth and fury of the passion here, it seems highly probable. There is a narrator who exists in what is very much a lopsided power dynamic with another (male) figure; very rarely is the narrator an active subject in this song, instead being subject to the figure’s curation and exploitation. The figure ‘took the stable / Bred me to be a mare / Made the brethren able / Gave me a room’, all of which are ostensible acts of kindness that nevertheless confirm a ruler/ruled dynamic. 

We receive that same confirmation in the next verse. ‘I never asked him / I never meant to stay’, says the narrator, and very quickly the song sours. The narrator finds themselves being used and abused, ‘never [leaving] the stall’ while their partner readily leaves their side. Any sense of a romantic relationship in an ideal sense – two partners, ‘riding side by side / Into the frontier’, tackling the world’s challenges as a single, symbiotic unit – is long defunct. Only misery remains for the narrator, with hope long-dashed by a pattern of careless exploitation.

With this as our narrative foundation, we reach the song’s climax, one of the most striking and instantly memorable moments in his catalogue on account of how utterly depraved it is. We are left with no doubt that Sufjan’s narrator is in a state of abject misery up to this point. But misery in Sufjan songs is so often detached, poetic, dejected, somehow fundamentally stoic. Not in ‘Kill’. The narrator has no remaining emotional bandwidth for stoicism. All that’s left is a carnal desire to exact onto the narrator’s partner some fraction of the pain that the partner exacted onto the narrator, and the only way to do this is through murder. 

You will not find a gnarlier image in the Sufjan catalogue than ‘I want to kill him / I want to cut his brain’, and the reason it has so much guttural power is because it does not quite read as psychopathic or unstable. The narrator only wants to do this. They never will, and likely never even could – the verses of this song are in the past tense, and by the time we reach the present tense of the pre-chorus, the partner has left the narrator forever. ‘Kill’ is a logical conclusion, an exhausted final attempt to lash out in a situation where the narrator knows they have no power to do so. When the chorus finally breaks down at the end into a futile repeated ‘I want’, the song’s message is complete. It is violent, but the violence is less a horror tale, more a tragedy.

This is the interpretation that a direct reading of ‘Kill’ provides us, but there are all sorts of semantic curios in this one that complicate interpretation. I am, of course, referring to the extended horse metaphor that this song seems to be pushing. Both narrator and villain are referred to as mares in this song; there is talk of stalls, of stables, of riding into battle in a literal sense. It is rather late for me to mention that ‘Kill’ has a source text, but it seemingly does – Sufjan cites an obscure Sherwood Anderson short story named ‘The Man Who Became a Woman’ as the basis for this song, but has refused to elaborate further. The surface-level parallels are very clear given that ‘The Man Who Became a Woman’ is a story about a horse trainer, but from there the complications begin, because Anderson’s story is a) incredibly obtuse and b) seems to reckon far more with gender, and to a lesser extent race, than it does dysfunctional romance as a theme. The narrative in ‘Kill’ certainly does not retell that of its source material, at least not in a manner discernible to the listener. But the connections are there nonetheless.

A Sun Came is an album that brims with loving, albeit surface-level, tributes to Sufjan’s musical and literary influences, and ‘Kill’ is one such example. But Anderson isn’t the only reference point for ‘Kill’. It is highly probable that Sufjan is intentionally referencing Elliott Smith’s ‘Roman Candle’ in the chorus of this one. Sufjan sings ‘I want to kill him / I want to cut his brain’; years earlier, Smith sang ‘I want to hurt him / I want to give him pain’. And this is almost certainly intentional given Sufjan’s professed admiration for Smith and the various comparisons that have been made between the two songwriters over Sufjan’s career. (What makes things even more interesting is that ‘Roman Candle’ is a song about Smith’s violent step-father. The same systematic patterns of abuse are present in the lyrics of both songs, albeit expressed with more eloquence in Smith’s. Even if not Sufjan’s own stepfather – Lowell Brahms is by all accounts a beautiful, caring soul – one wonders if the subject of ‘Kill’ might have a real-life referent.)

One could spend days attempting to decode ‘Kill’, and this is fortuitous, because musically it does not offer much. The bulk of the song consists of a repeating guitar figure that has a sort of leaden weight to it, dragging it down into the muck. It is vaguely reminiscent of – and inferior to – the ‘Abraham’ ostinato that Sufjan would pen a few years later, but this one is played almost entirely on the lower strings and as a result lacks the same ethereal pop and spring that many Sufjan songs capitalise on. There is some double tracking, especially in the chorus and pre-chorus, but it doesn’t add anything substantial to the arrangement. Neither does Sufjan’s strained, upper-register vocal melody, but there is certainly a sort of confessional quality to it that suits the subject matter. 

All of this comes together to create a song that is resolutely, undeniably un-fun to listen to. It is most likely for this reason that Sufjan chose never to play this one live, unlike some of the other stripped-back folk ballads on A Sun Came. When Sufjan dips his toes in depravity – ‘John Wayne Gacy Jr.’! ‘Saturn’! – incredibly compelling, listenable, rich things tend to emerge, but at this early stage of his career, it seems that the pieces are just not quite in place yet. But there’s no denying that ‘Kill’ is a fascinating and in many ways remarkably compelling song, just one that does not feel as listenable as it could be. It’s fine. Early days yet. All of these songs helped create our modern concept of Sufjan Stevens.

[dustdeepsea]

5 Songs/4 Outfits - Tav Tag 💫

Tagged by @voloslobotomyservice - thanks for being patient; this took forever ;_; Doing this for Octavia (more about them in my fic tags)

4 Outfits

Traveller's Clothes (Default Outfit)

I realised I've never posted Tav's character design sheet! This is their "default" outfit when they are recruited in BG3, and what they wear after Act 3.

Tav's outfit is inspired by loose Chinese, Korean and Japanese garment styles, paired with the tighter trousers, boots and bracers from BG3.

Here are some style inspirations from my ref board:

In a fever dream sequence, Tav might wear a brightly coloured hanfu like this:

(source)

Modern Tav

Here's what Tav would wear in the modern world: tailored + oversized pieces, with a splash of colour.

(I only have 3 fits, as Octavia does not have an in-game character model, and alas I have no fancy screenshots.)

5 Songs/Pieces

1. Tav the Hero (Act 1): Sufjan Stevens - For the Widows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in Ypsilanti

I have called you preacher, I have called you son If you have a father, or if you haven't one I'll do anything for you, I'll do anything for you

2. Tav/Rugan: TV on the Radio - Staring at the Sun

And we're all weaned my dear Upon the same fatigue [...] Your mouth is open wide The lover is inside And the tumult's done Collided with the sign You're staring at the sun You're standing in the sea Your body's over me

3. Tav the Hero (Act 3): Blue Foundation - Eyes on Fire

I won't soothe your pain, I won't ease your strain You'll be waiting in vain, I got nothing for you to gain

4. Tav Post-Game: Sheena Ringo - Gamble (ギャンブル) [translated lyrics]

声を出せばどなたかみえましょう (If I speak up, who will appear?) 真実がない (There is no truth) もう歩けない (I can no longer walk) 灰になれば皆喜びましょう (If I turned to ash, would everyone be happy?)

5. Tav Falling in Love: Sparklehorse - Apple Bed

You can be my friend, you can be my dog You can be my light, you can be my fog (Please, doctor, please)

[razorsadness]

i put my feet to the floor to make up for the miles i've been losing

The Decemberists - Bridges & Balloons

Sufjan Stevens - For the Widows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in Ypsilanti

Retsin - Moonshine

Jolie Holland - I Wanna Die

Richard Buckner - Blue and Wonder

Silver Jews - Tennessee

Knife in the Water - Sundown, Sundown

Smog - Let's Move to the Country

Karen Dalton - Are You Leaving for the Country

The Rolling Stones - No Expectations

Devendra Banhart - At the Hop

Tom Waits - Train Song

Howlin' Wolf - Smokestack Lightnin'

CLARK the band - Night Train

The Shangri-La's - The Train from Kansas City

Hank Williams - Ramblin' Man

The Magnetic Fields - Sunset City

Modest Mouse - The World At Large

Songs: Ohia - I've Been Riding With the Ghost

Royal City - Bad Luck

Sea Snakes - Conception Bay, South

June of 44 - Sink is Busted

Palace Music - New Partner

Iron & Wine - Passing Afternoon

This was originally made for me as a mix tape by my friend M., in November of 2004. You can listen on YouTube here.

[haveyoulistenedtothisalbum-poll]

Tracklist:

Flint (For The Unemployed And Underpaid) • All Good Naysayers, Speak Up! Or Forever Hold Your Peace! • For The Widows Of Paradise, For The Fatherless In Ypsilanti • Say Yes! To M!ch!gan! • The Upper Peninsula • Tahquamenon Falls • Holland • Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head! (Rebuild! Restore! Reconsider!) • Romulus • Alanson, Crooked River • Sleeping Bear, Sault Saint Marie • They Also Mourn Who Do Not Wear Black (For The Homeless In Muskegon) • Oh God, Where Are You Now? (In Pickeral Lake? Pigeon? Marquette? Mackinaw?) • Redford (For Yia-Yia & Pappou) • Vito's Ordination Song

Spotify ♪ Bandcamp ♪ YouTube

[drdemonprince]

on the train home from michigan listening to Sufjan

[toyhdgehog]

for the widows in paradise, for the fatherless in ypsilanti - sufjan stevens / graceland too - phoebe bridgers