October Advent, Day 4: Age of Adz

When Sufjan Stevens released his sixth studio album, The Age of Adz (pronounced “odds”), my wife and I went to see him in concert. There were costumes, dancing, and a ten-minute essay from Sufjan about the story behind the album. It was probably the best concert I’ve been to.

I’d heard The Age of Adz several times before the concert, but it was only at the concert that I felt the power of the album’s eponymous song, “Age of Adz.”

You can listen to the song here if you’d like. It’s best LOUD, on a good sound system.

By all measures, the composition is messy and abrasive. The trombones, the flutes, the choir, the electric whirrs and pops, the whiny edge to Sufjan’s voice — it’s perhaps overwhelming. For me, the sounds conjure the wild imagery of Metropolis, the great German film from 1927.

It also conjures imagery from The Divine Comedy, Dante’s 14th century poem.

Indeed, the musicality of “Age of Adz” seems to take the general narrative of The Divine Comedy in that it feels like descending to hell and then — in the song’s last three minutes — ascending to paradise. It’s mostly because of the transition at the last three minutes that I’ve listen to this song on repeat for an hour or two hours literally hundreds of times since I saw Sufjan in concert. Those last three minutes still move me.

But what does any of this have to do with death — the focus on this advent calendar?

It’s in the song’s central refrain:

When I die, I’ll rot. / But when I live, I’ll give it all I got.

I swear when Sufjan sang it live he changed the first sentence to “when I die, I’ll rise,” and I swear the first time he sings the line on the album (at 5:20) he says “I’ll rise,” too. I like to think that the way he sings it suggests both possibilities — an afterlife and no afterlife, signifying how little we know and yet that we hope.

But whatever happens at death, the song is about committing to life. It’s a simple (perhaps even juvenile) refrain, and yet when it’s combined with the other refrains late in the song (“gloria, gloria” and “I’ve lost the will to fight”) it amounts to a powerful mix of melancholy about the inevitability of death and hope that death cannot conquer a life well lived.