A Beginner’s Mind feels like coming home. A return to Sufjan Stevens’ best form; whispered confessions over intimate orchestrations. This is a testament to the personal nature of his work: feeling as if you are walking in on something you weren’t supposed to hear. But with A Beginner’s Mind, Stevens is no longer alone.
A Beginner’s Mind was written during a month-long sabbatical Stevens and Angelo De Augustine took in upstate New York, pre-pandemic. De Augustine is a singer-songwriter from Thousand Oaks, whose discography dates back to 2014. Stevens, on the other hand, has a discography dating back to 1995 and releasing four projects in the last two years. Despite his success with solo albums (Illinois, Carrie and Lowell, among others) and some of the songs on the soundtrack to Call Me By Your Name, Stevens is no stranger to collaborations, with past writers ranging from his stepfather Lowell Brams to The National’s Bryce Dessner.
I am not as familiar with De Augustine’s work as I am with that of Stevens, but I couldn’t ask for a better first impression. The two work together in such synchronicity on this album that it’s hard to pinpoint the places each is responsible for. While they are a match made in heaven, they are just as much a match made in Hell, given the way their subject matter calls upon horror alongside gentle underscoring in perfect harmony. According to De Augustine’s website, “Their method was simple: watch films at night, sketch songs in the morning. They wrote in tandem—one person writing a verse, the other a chorus, churning out chord progressions and lyrical tapestries willy-nilly, often finishing each other’s sentences in the process.”
Each song on the album is loosely threaded to a movie the two watched together. Asthmatic Kitty, the record label of Stevens and De Augustine, tweeted a full list of each film that inspired A Beginners’ Mind. I have no connection to most of the films—Night of the Living Dead, Return to Oz, Mad Max, Bring It On Again and The Silence of the Lambs, to name a few—that inspired the album. But their inspired tracks are grounded in enough emotional reality to draw me in.
I have spent years haunted by Stevens’ soft proclamation in “John Wayne Gacy Jr.,” the song titled and inspired by the serial killer and rapist on his album, Illinois, where he sings, “In my best behavior, I am really just like him, look beneath the floorboards for the secrets I have hid.” Stevens again empathizes with murderers in both “You Give Death a Bad Name” and “Cimmerian Shade,” in similar chilling, whispering tones. It scares and comforts me to hear the ease and warmth in which he is able to sing about “strikes to the brain” and “shots to the skull.” Stevens’ gentle pleas in “Cimmerian Shade” to, “save me from everything I ask for” will linger in my mind for just as long.
While the album dips into this darkness on certain tracks, it does not sink too far down. Even the deep percussion and rhythmic chimes of “Pillar of Souls” are juxtaposed with breezy melodies and vocals, allowing the song to float in an ethereal and spooky purgatory. Just a few tracks later, we are left with the sweetest and softest echoing of “it’s our very first kiss,” at the end of the dreamy duet that is “Olympus.” The second half of the album also rises with fantastical tracks like “It’s Your Own Body and Mind” and “Fictional California,” which both feel like they would make perfect “new beginning” endings to an indie coming-of-age movie.
There’s a simultaneous familiarity and newness to each song on this album. It feels as though these songs are the maturation of some of Stevens’ previous narrative work on Illinois, All Delighted People, and Carrie and Lowell, but is now unburdened by the darkness and shame that proliferated much of his past works. There is a lightness to this album: a peaceful acceptance of what was, is, and will be that some of his earlier work struggles to achieve, even in its darkest and most horrific moments. De Augustine himself wrote that “The underlying objective [of A Beginner’s Mind] was empathy and openness, absent of judgment: to observe what is pure and good—or seemingly dark and villainous—with the eyes of a child,” which is apparent in the duality their lyrics and music inspire.
Almost everyone who mentions Stevens’ work comments on its deeply intimate nature, despite being a rather private person on social media. Given the exponential growth of celebrity culture and parasocial relationships in the age of social media, many artists now have a cult of personality around them of their own devising. Yet Stevens is defined by his fans. Despite his mainly serious work, he has a humor and self-awareness about him. I can’t help but think about Chris Flemming’s parody of Stevens being startled by Kate Bush or the ways Stevens has poked fun at his own work and name in his Friendship Slay Ride series for Pitchfork years ago. Stevens’ Instagram is filled with reposted content from his only social media presence on Tumblr. Sufjan.com is now aptly titled “Sufjan’s Garden Blog,” featuring a few posts about his music alongside the fruits and flowers of his garden. Fans only have these few scattered posts and press interviews to go off of, rather than celebrities who share every waking moment of their life online. The same could be said for De Augustine, who has an Instagram that mainly focuses on promoting his work. Through the album, though, the two let us see a small glimpse into their relationship and lives. The video for the album’s first and most popular track, “Reach Out,” even features home videos of their respective dogs.
It’s refreshing. I sometimes crave a similar level of simultaneous secrecy and self-expression with others. In writing this piece, I wondered what it would be like to speak with them, to be able to somehow ask every lingering question it leaves me with. But I respect and cherish the distance. The way an artist is in control of how much they offer to the world, how much we are allowed to share with them, and how it is possible to be known and seen without laying it all out.
Stevens’ work has always seemed like a sacred act, filled with religious lyricism and imagery. And yet, in an interview with AnOther Magazine, he said writing music is a job for him and De Augustine, that they “punch in and out like everyone else.” Yet it’s clear, A Beginner’s Mind is something Stevens and De Augustine put their time and souls into, and it pays off. It does what the two go on to say they hope it achieves: it creates a harmonious “thing that doesn’t exist,” transcending the oppressive and stifling physical world.
The album begins with “the guiding light that opens my mind,” yet ends with the lines, “Lord, why must this life be so cruel? Shadowed in the gloom.” Despite this dreary-sounding ending, I’ve never heard Stevens so hopeful. After a rather dark year and a half, one that makes me long to take a trip upstate or escape the physical world, it makes me feel as though I can somehow be hopeful, too.