#julia stephens

‘Julia’ is the second of three songs Sufjan has released that we know for certain to be written during his name-based songwriting blitz. It is the only of the three to have been explicitly labelled a demo by Sufjan, though really it does not sound so different to ‘Jamila’, and it may have even come from the same tape: the tape hiss is similarly abundant, the acoustic guitar tone is similarly lifeless, and both songs even come complete with false starts. ‘Jamila’ and ‘Julia’, though, are very – very – different songs. Whereas ‘Jamila’ is bright and clear, ‘Julia’ is a song of fog and murk – a Gothic ode to the lover that Sufjan could never have.

‘Julia’, by Sufjan’s admission, is inspired by a real historical figure, but said historical figure never really crosses over from inspiration into active subject here. This is a pre-millennial Sufjan song, so the sentiment here isn’t terribly complex, but there is a sort of carnal longing on display in ‘Julia’ that nearly every listener can relate to. Each verse is segmented into two halves, with the latter halves consisting of basic repeated yearnings: ‘oh to watch you’, ‘oh to kiss you’ and ‘oh to touch you’. (This song is so archaic even among Sufjan obsessives that there exist no lyrical transcriptions online, so this writer had to make his best approximation – if I make an obvious error, feel free to tell me I’m a fool online!) It is a song that very much exists in the physical space, albeit never directly acknowledging sexuality and thus being in a sort of narrative limbo space that (to me) suggests childhood. Sufjan would have been no older than twenty-three when he recorded this demo, so one cannot be too surprised by this. Indeed, it tracks with the other material he wrote around this time, with songs like ‘Rake’, ‘Dumb I Sound’ and even ‘Rice Pudding’ conveying that same sort of doe-eyed puppy love. Perhaps he had gotten the crude sexuality of his songwriting system with the Stalker project and was ready to return to a more childlike eros.

The other thing about children is that they are very good at unrequited pining. ‘Rake’ is not the most apt comparison for this one on account of how few emotional congruencies it has beyond love. We can point to the phrasing of the ‘oh to touch you’ refrains as evidence of one-sidedness, but to do so would be to paint an incomplete picture; consider instead the lines contained in the second and the fifth verses. ‘Are you other / Would I know you?’, Sufjan asks, and the implication of distance between narrator and subject becomes very clear. Not quite a standard he-loves-her-she-loves-him-not situation, though. ‘Other’ is a revealing word in this context. Not only is Sufjan not loved by Julia, he does not know Julia, and could not know Julia. Whether metaphorically or literally, the target of his affections exists in a reality separate to his – this pining could never actually be requited.

With a lot of Sufjan songs, we might at this point shrug our shoulders, mutter ‘he’s a poet, that one!’, and concede that we might never know the song’s intended meaning. Not so with this one. As it turns out, the extra-temporality is quite literal. In the blog post that accompanied the release of this song, Sufjan wrote the following:

"My collegiate infatuation w/ Julia Prinsep Jackson (photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron). Prose poems, pencil drawings and songs on 4-track cassette (“Julia” demo probably from 1998 or 1999?). Unearthed last week in an Adidas shoe box (with postcards from the Guggenheim Museum, mostly abstractions by Paul Klee, who also made puppets). The world is abundant."

Given what we know about young Sufjan – he of mythological obsessions and college English studies – this is far from surprising. His preoccupation with the literary canon, especially the Romantics, manifests also in songs like ‘Wordsworth’s Ridge (For Fran Fike)’. Julia Jackson, known later as Julia Stephen through her marriage, is an altogether more obscure subject to the general public than Wordsworth – to English historians she is known as the writer, model, socialite and philanthropist who mothered Virginia Woolf. She was by all accounts a breathtakingly beautiful woman, and this beauty comes across in the extant photographs we have of her. But she was far more than that, and in some strange way she emerges as a tragic figure. It’s not that she was stripped of her potential via the standards of her time – her rap sheet of achievements suggests, quite contrarily, that she found success in spite of them. The demands of her many faces led her to illness, and lacking modern treatments, she died of rheumatic fever at age 49.

Many, many answers here. Sufjan, in ‘Julia’, is enamoured by a woman whose internal and external beauty captivates the capital-R Romantic in him. He could never express any of this to Jackson directly – they missed one another by some hundred and fifty years – so he must play pretend. Who could blame him? Julia Stephen was remarkable. So remarkable that it feels almost cruel for her not to live forever. Sufjan tries to grant to her the little bit of eternal life that, through song, he also granted Djamilah; he is realistic, though, and knows that there is only so much he can do. ‘Oh, to touch you.’ Oh, if only I could breathe the same air as you, forever and ever. Suddenly, this love song becomes strangely, serenely sad.

The beauty of context! We now have answers to guide us through why this song both reads and sounds the way it does. ‘Julia’ is in a minor key, and takes great pains to remind you of that fact – the chord progression is intensely moody, almost Gothic in character, which was no doubt an intentional artistic choice from Sufjan given the subject (consider also the medieval clarinet and recorder parts.) The melody that springs therefrom has that same darkly misty character, and is particularly evocative on the ‘oh, to touch you’ lines. Just as the lyrics of ‘Julia’ are made obscure through the passage of time, so too does a fog descend over its music. I think he rather succeeds at executing that element of ‘Julia’, personally. A distant, sepia-toned arrangement for a distant, sepia-toned subject.

One would be remiss not to mention the fact that this song is both in 5/4 and, less commonly, is good at being in 5/4. Though when is a 5/4 Sufjan song not? His command of unconventional rhythm was one of the few aspects of his artistry that was fully developed at this early stage of his career, and we can hear it on ‘Far Physician’s Son’, on ‘A Winner Needs a Wand’ (a song that sounds suspiciously similar to this one), and on ‘Julia’. As with those songs, ‘Julia’ makes 5/4 sound no less natural than any time signature on the pop charts today. The 3-3-2-2 subdivision just flows. No need to overcomplicate things.

It's yet another method of reinforcing this song’s themes, in a way. The 5/4 here sounds no less natural than 4/4, but it does sound different – it snakes, ducks and weaves around the pulse, with a syncopation powerful enough to make any dancer wrong-footed. It feels, in fact, as elusive as reaching back in time to serenade a nineteenth-century lover. We may all feel at times that we were born in the wrong generation; it’s only natural to look at what’s around you and find the past to be firmer, fibrous, more exotic. The feeling is totally illusory, but we sure do like to pretend, don’t we? Julia Stephens is never going to send her love forward through time to Sufjan, but that clearly did not make the experience of writing this song any less fulfilling for him. Yes – we find pieces of our heart in times that we never were around to witness, and if we’re lucky, those pieces can add light and colour to the more visceral present.