Interview

This past Saturday (Friday coverage here) was a mercifully weathery day in Monticello, NY, where approximately 2,000 indie-music devotees were nursing a great collective hangover from the thunderous opening festivities of ATP 2009. Not that spirits were dampened; far from it. Well before Sufjan Stevens took the main stage for the first show of the day, Kutsher's Country Club was swarming with activity: the carpeted lounge areas buzzed with soundcheck-accompanied anticipation as people examined the afternoon lineup and compared schedules. Friendly show-goers were making their way hurriedly toward one of the club's two theaters, or pointing the way to leather and denim clad comrades; they intermingled with the performers and fellow fans at various activity stations along the main corridor: an arcade room, a chrome-framed beauty counter, a veritable kitch altar of a gift shop, the fishbowl pool room adjacent to a cocktail bar. (PHOTOS BY ABBEY BRADEN)
 
The main stage was set in an auditorium that looked like one half of a renovated roller-skating rink. Sufjan Stevens took the stage, promising a hangover-friendly show and delivering an exquisite performance of Seven Swans. That album, his 2004 debut, was remarkable at the time of its release–the height of the Bush Administration's power, with American paranoia fermenting in the War on Terror and right-wing Evangelicals waging a relentless campaign to collapse the boundaries between church and state–for its spare, evocative lyrics on Biblical themes. The unmistakably Americana-bent inflections in Stevens' delicate banjo accompaniment played perfectly out in the Catskills, with autumn just setting in. Now, at this performance five years later, there was a sense of being handed an extraordinary rearview mirror on our collective, and still very recent, past. That Seven Swans is as provocative, if not more so, now as in 2004 is a testament to the poetic force Stevens wields behind all those pretty, hangover-forgiving melodies.

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