#one saviour

Much like ‘love yourself’, the phrase ‘all delighted people’ was evergreen for Sufjan. We do not have the scores of demos to examine that are available for Sufjan’s most famous self-care anthem, but we do know that he first attached music to that phrase all the way back in the late nineties. That was to be all for a while – but some ideas simply refuse to die. At some point in the late 2000s, Sufjan decided to revisit those three words and construct around them a colossal, dizzying, earth-shattering monument to the apocalypse that announced to the world a dramatic change in style. But for a time, their significance was much smaller, and sweeter; their existence was only known to a handful of the most dedicated of Sufjan acolytes. And around them sat a veritable wrecking ball of synthesisers.

This right here is a proper deep cut. The release of the 2010 extended play All Delighted People condemned the 2000 song ‘All Delighted People’, released on the Eye of the Beholder various artists compilation, to the dustiest regions of Sufjan’s back catalogue. The fact that the dramatically updated and rewritten EP version of the song had its roots in a much smaller, hugely divergent embryo was not mentioned at all in Asthmatic Kitty’s press release for the song and went routinely unnoticed in contemporary reviews. 2000’s ‘All Delighted People’ was superseded and thus eventually forgotten. It was somewhat well-known among Sufjan obsessives during the 2000s, but was nearly entirely written out of history thereafter.

It is, in a sense, understandable. The final release of ‘All Delighted People’ is bigger, bolder, brasher, broader, more confident, more specific and more intentional. It is also only barely similar to its forefather. There is the lyric ‘All delighted people raise their hands’, which carries over unchanged, and there is the melody attached to that lyric, which is very similar in cadence and pitch to the final version and was clearly tweaked slightly for a new arrangement. Otherwise, though, there is not much else. It really is difficult to compare the sprawling, seemingly everlasting verses of 2010’s ‘All Delighted People’ to a song with a total of eight unique lines, one of which consists only of the words ‘all delighted’. For the most part, we must approach the first ‘All Delighted People’ as a work entirely unto itself.

The specifics are dramatically altered, but I would be remiss not to acknowledge that some of the broad thematic strokes stay the same. Most importantly, both songs stay committed to maximalist arrangements. One deduces that Sufjan saw a sort of spiritual and existential gravity in the line ‘All delighted people raise their hands’, and was resolute that whatever music eventually fell into place around it needed to be as dense as a neutron star. The final version would see Sufjan achieving that density with massive washes of orchestration; here he opts for synthesiser upon synthesiser upon synthesiser.

2000’s ‘All Delighted People’ likely originated from Sufjan’s experiments with the Roland VS880 EX digital workstation during his earliest days in New York City, which produced equally synthetic songs like the 1999 ‘Love Yourself’ and ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’. The approach here is not much different to those productions – we have squawking, abrasive keyboard melodies, malformed drum samples, and tiny explosions of energy at odd points in the song (the piercing break before the final refrain, which ends not      fifteen seconds later.) Sufjan seemed to view the synthesiser as a tool of cyclonic destruction at this point in his career; destruction certainly abounds on ‘All Delighted People’, often to the detriment of its listenability. It even has a cute little glitched-out coda that exists for no reason beyond itself. He could, and he did, without much thought to whether he should – and that, to be clear, is perfectly valid for a young, tenacious musical inventor. It just doesn’t make for palatable relistens, especially compared to better-executed excursions like ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’ or ‘The First Full Moon’ (or, hell, most of Enjoy Your Rabbit.)

Harmonically, melodrama abounds. We are presented with a simple four-chord loop over which floats one of the most sullen melodies that Sufjan has ever produced. There is not much light or hope in the songwriting here – it has a nearly operatic sadness to it, and it’s a sadness that shirks all ambiguity. Some of Sufjan’s best melodies have a paradoxical blend of simple harmony and a deceptively rich emotional profile, but on 2000’s ‘All Delighted People’ there is only forlornness to reckon with. You do not even have to pay attention to the lyrics to understand the atmosphere that Sufjan is establishing here. The effect is only compounded by a quivering vocal delivery that sounds as if it could be blown away by a strong gust of wind. In sharp contrast to the chaotic instrumental, here lies a tender, emotive, unapologetically downcast song.

I say you need not pay attention to the lyrics, but even if you did, you would register much the same emotions. The first six lines of 2000’s ‘All Delighted People’ speak of a society totally overcome by isolation and a pervasive, all-encompassing shame. Interestingly, the song begins on a variation of the title phrase: ‘All the lonely people put their hands / In the personal crocheted Afghan’ (‘Afghan’ in this instance referring to an Afghan blanket, made with a heavily textured crochet pattern.) Clunkiness of the phrase ‘personal crocheted Afghan’ aside, we have a solid evocation here of the behaviours that isolation forces us into. The more alone one feels, the more steps one takes to make that isolation imperishable – thus the covering of the body in this song, the locating of ‘a place / Where their hair cannot reveal their face’, under the assumption that to hide away is better than to hope, or to hurt. An ancient, but accurate, trope.

The song’s second verse – all two lines of it – focuses in on a single unnamed figure amidst the other ‘lonely people’: someone who ‘has happened to have pains’ (a line that, like much other early Sufjan writing, seems to overextend itself just to reach a syllabic quota), and who ‘will know enough to ache’. It is not unreasonable to interpret this song as an explicit psalm for Jesus after hearing these lines. The song’s themes fit such a reading precisely: God assuming the form of one of the ‘lonely people’ on Earth to bring about their collective salvation, a man who bears the weight of humanity’s trials, misdeeds and pains and will eventually die a righteous, but lonely, death. One might imagine the ‘delighted people [who] raise their hands’ at the end of the song to be the same lonely people at its start – this Messiah, this son of God, has cleansed them of their suffering. Free of sin, they now raise their hands in prayer.

‘All Delighted People’ beginning life as an overtly Christian song would not at all be unexpected, considering how dominated Sufjan’s early music was by his faith. It’s not as if the 2010 version was unabashedly secular, either. But the religion of the final ‘All Delighted People’ is complex, non-specific and surprisingly interpersonal; the religion of the first ‘All Delighted People’, if this interpretation does indeed hold water, is a simple invocation of Christ-the-Messiah. It is nothing that we have not seen from this songwriter before. The novelty of the 2000 ‘All Delighted People’ comes in its depiction of a world without Jesus. The presence of the Lord, but in silhouette; the misery we encounter in his absence.

God is never directly mentioned in the early ‘All Delighted People’, though. We are free to take it at face value if we wish: a sad song about the tribulations of loneliness. Maximalist though the arrangement is, it certainly sounds sad – you cannot escape the dourness of that melody, or those chords. Perhaps the electronic chaos is a little too suffocating for a melody this one-dimensional. But even though there may be no serious argument for calling 2000’s ‘All Delighted People’ a more impressive achievement than its successor, it is a vital baby step towards one of his career’s most lauded monoliths and a perfectly enjoyable listen on a miserable stormy day. Consider it another valid entry in the canon of Sufjan electronica.