Sufjan was Here January 12, 2010

Fresh off the back of his instrumental album The BQE, Sufjan Stevens has put his vocals to work once again, collaborating with Clogs, an instrumental band featuring guitarist Bryce Dessner of The National amongst others.

Shara Worden from My Brightest Diamond also features on the track, which will appear on Clogs’ fifth studio album The Creatures in the Garden of Lady Walton. It’s a nice, Dark Was the Night-esque mellow acoustic song with some nice twinkly bits at the end. (listen at the end of this post).

While it’s not a bad song, it only serves to reinforce how much I want another one of Stevens’ albums from his ‘Fifty States Project’ (be it a joke or not) to come out.

Sure, his Christmas album collection, The BQE and Asthmatic Kitty’s Library Catalog series have been fairly decent projects (some more than others) but I’d love to hear Stevens stop writing songs about trains and record something that can stand alongside his amazing tracks like Casimir Pulaski Day, Chicago, and To Be Alone with You.

Sadly, I’m not sure if or when Stevens will release another ‘traditional’ album. As he told Paste Magazine last November:

“In all honesty, [The BQE] is what really sabotaged my creative momentum. It wasn’t Illinois so much,” he says. “I suffered sort of an existential creative crisis after that piece. I no longer knew what a song was and how to write an album. It overextended me in a way that I couldn’t find my way back to the song.”

Oh well. Let’s hope he finds his way back to the song sometime soon.

Clogs – We Were Here (feat. Sufjan Stevens and Shara Worden) (download)

[Image: Into the Dustbowl]