Sufjan Stevens
“I’m not so sure it is [worth releasing], even now. I think I decided that the material was interesting to me, so maybe it would be interesting to an audience. I was going to post them online as free downloads, but I’d spent so much time reworking them and editing them that I felt there was a value to them, that it wouldn’t honor the songs enough to have them as downloads.”
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Most regrettably, “Chicago”–inarguably Stevens’s finest work and the most glowingly sophisticated pop-rock single to make it to commercial airwaves in years–appears on The Avalanche in triplicate. There’s the “adult contemporary easy listening version,” an acoustic version, and most egregiously the “Multiple Personality Disorder version,” which will make you resent him for even putting it to tape–it’s like if Big Star released a remake of “Thirteen” with Alex Chilton burping the lyrics.
