Sufjan Stevens – “Impossible Soul”

though I know it’s small, I want love for us all

So, anyone got a spare 30 minutes to listen to a pop track?  I know, it’s easy to approach songs that lengthy with trepidation; usually they’re either a bloated mess, annoyingly repetitive, or worse yet – they do that pointless “hidden track” thing where they put 18 minutes of silence between two average-length tracks.  Thankfully, “Impossible Soul” is none of those things, and instead of viewing it as the final song from Stevens’ 2010 blockbuster The Age of Adz, I beg you to imagine that it is an album in and of itself.  After all, it’s more of a collection of movements than it is one drawn out song idea, with different concepts bleeding into each other effortlessly.

There’s a lot of inspiring messages floating around within the confines of “Impossible Soul”, but instead of rattling off all my favorite passages it would be more prudent to look at how the song evolves within itself.  It begins as this somber/electronic/dehumanized ballad, and gradually adds layers of warmth.  By the second “movement”, you can hear more audacious synthesizers zipping through space in the background, while Sufjan self-harmonizes to make it sound like he’s no longer in isolation.  Eventually, the song erupts into this celebratory dance — with a full crowd harmoniously chanting a series of choruses (“it’s a miracle..do you wanna dance” / “we can do much more together” / “it’s not so impossible”) that all brim with equal optimism.   Someone on Sputnik once said that The Age of Adz was akin to Sufjan Stevens finding the meaning of life and making an album out of it; I think the same praise could be extracted and applied to “Impossible Soul” – a song that offers bleak introspection yet proves such hurdles to be surmountable, after all.

Invariably, there will be several interpretations of a song with so much metaphorical and literal stature.  I could delve into all the ways that this song is about a relationship with a woman, or concerning Stevens’ ambiguous sexuality, or perhaps about a number of Biblical allusions, or just simply about the general trials and triumphs encountered in life.  But again, with a song this magnificent and meaningful, less description is more.  It’s best to develop your own bond, and choose your own meaning.  There are so very few tracks that I can unequivocally state are in the running for SOML (song of my lifetime) – that aren’t dependent on evolving taste, mood, associated memories, etc.  – but this is one of them.  Just click play and let all twenty five minutes of “Impossible Soul” wash over you — you won’t regret it.

Read more from this decade at my homepage for Sowing’s Songs of the Decade.

https://open.spotify.com/user/sowingsputnik/playlist/5JjmQsvmmmOBFnUjP7FLu4?si=dueJkvB9Tr6joByjClUpUw