Music / The Age of Adz

"Boy, we can do much more together."

The Age of Adz (pronounced "The Age of Odds") is the sixth studio LP by American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Sufjan Stevens.

Released on October 12, 2010, Adz was Stevens' first official studio album after 2005's Illinois! launched him into the indie spotlight (though in the interim he had put out an album’s worth of Cut Songs from Illinois, five discs of Christmas music, an orchestral suite, a string quartet reimagining of an earlier LP, an hour-long EP, and various covers, so it's safe to say he wasn’t resting on his laurels).

While many fans hoped Stevens' new album would be another installment in the so-called "Fifty States Project", following up both Illinois and 2003's Michigan, Adz came with no geographical concept and instead focused on, in Stevens' words, "my physical body, my feelings, touch, the nerves, anxiety, the chemistry of the brain and the spinal fluid" in the wake of a severe and unexplained illness which had caused him to cancel a tour the previous year.

Even more surprisingly, Adz was a New Sound Album which replaced Stevens' signature banjo-led indie folk and Baroque Pop with dense, manic, and occasionally autotune-inflected electronica. While Stevens had experimented with synth-led music in the past—his second LP, Enjoy Your Rabbit, was an instrumental glitch album—he'd become best known and loved for what he once referred to as "strummy-strum acoustic guitar songs". The unexpected sonic shift startled fans and critics alike, and to this day, Adz remains one of his most divisive albums.

In keeping with the album's more-personal-than-usual tone, Stevens' lyrics on Adz are also more confessional and less story-driven than his earlier work tended to be. Notably, the album includes Stevens' longest song to date, the 25-minute-plus "Impossible Soul", as well as his first-ever lyrical use of profanity—many times—in "I Want to Be Well".

Despite the initial mixed response, history has largely vindicated Adz—especially after Stevens returned to straightforward acoustic folk on 2015's Carrie & Lowell, thus proving that he hadn't abandoned the genre permanently. While some fans never warmed to the unique sound, others now consider Adz a contender for Stevens' best release, and individual tracks have been sampled by the likes of Kendrick Lamar and Mac Miller and used in—for instance—the 2017 film Call Me by Your Name.

While writing the album, Stevens was deeply influenced by Louisiana-based outsider artist "Prophet" Royal Robertson, whose apocalyptic paintings fuse imagery from the Bible, sci-fi films, and Robertson's own schizophrenic visions. One of Robertson's pieces was adapted into the cover art for Adz, and the song "Get Real Get Right" is based on the artist's life and work.

Tracklist:

1. "Futile Devices" (2:11)
2. "Too Much" (6:44)
3. "Age of Adz" (8:00)
4. "I Walked" (5:01)
5. "Now That I'm Older" (4:56)
6. "Get Real Get Right" (5:10)
7. "Bad Communication" (2:24)
8. "Vesuvius" (5:26)
9. "All for Myself" (2:55)
10. "I Want to Be Well" (6:27)
11. "Impossible Soul" (25:35) ^note  On the vinyl version, the last three-minute section of "Impossible Soul" is placed just after "I Want to Be Well" on side C, while the rest of the song makes up the entirety of side D.

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The Age of Adz contains examples of the following tropes:

• Album Title Drop: In the Title Track.
• Ambiguously Bi: An even more prevalent theme here than on most Sufjan releases. Some songs address men romantically ("Futile Devices", "All for Myself"), some address women ("Now That I'm Older", "Impossible Soul"), and some could go both ways ("I Walked", "Bad Communication", "Impossible Soul"). See Ho Yay on the YMMV tab.
• Anti-Love Song: "Impossible Soul" veers into this in the very last, acoustic, part.
  I never meant to lead you on
  I only meant to please me, however
• Auto-Tune: Used conspicuously throughout "Impossible Soul".
• Book Ends: The album begins ("Futile Devices") and ends (the last movement of "Impossible Soul") with quiet acoustic songs, contrasting with the rest of the album's electronic bombast.
• Break Up Song: "Impossible Soul" chronicles all the messy emotional stages of a breakup in great detail. "I Walked" and "Bad Communication" have shades of this as well.
• Broken Record:
  • The ending section of "Too Much" ("There's too much riding on that")
  • The end of "I Want to Be Well" (with repetitions of "I want to be well" and "I'm not fucking around" interspersed with one another)
  • Parts of "Impossible Soul" ("Don't be distracted", "Boy, we can do much more together", etc.)
• BSoD Song: "I Want to Be Well" deals with the narrator's despair—and then anger and defiance—in the face of a possibly-fatal illness.
• Call-and-Response Song: "Impossible Soul" has a call-and-response section between Sufjan and his longtime collaborator Shara Nova.
• Call-Back:
  • During the second movement of "Impossible Soul", there are a few times when the female voice sings the word "do" the same way that Sufjan sings it at the end of the first chorus of "Futile Devices".
  • In "Get Real Get Right", Sufjan sings "For you will not be distracted by the signs / Do not be distracted by them." In "Impossible Soul", the line "Don’t be distracted" is repeated 20+ times.
  • His version of "Joy to the World" (on his second Christmas album, Silver and Gold) takes a chorus from "Impossible Soul".
  • A short phrase and melody from "Vesuvius" show up in "Calm It Down" by Sisyphus, the experimental hip-hop trio of which Sufjan forms one third.
  • Sufjan also sampled from "Vesuvius" ten years after the fact in "My Rajneesh", the B-Side to "America".
• Cannot Spit It Out: From "Futile Devices":
  And I would say I love you
  but saying it out loud is hard
  so I won't say it at all...
• Cluster F-Bomb: "I Want to Be Well" ends with the refrain "I'm not fucking around" repeated over a dozen times. Doubles as a sort of Precision F-Strike, as this song is the only one on the album (and the first in his catalog up to that point) to make use of the F word.
• Concept Album: Averted. The marketing for The Age of Adz actually stressed the fact that Sufjan was finally releasing an album that has no concept.
• Crazy Jealous Guy: The narrator of "All for Myself" acts perhaps a tad more… possessive of his boyfriend than strictly necessary.
• Darker and Edgier: Even by Sufjan's usual standards, the lyrics on The Age of Adz deal a lot with difficult emotions and personal themes including death, disease, illness, anxiety, and suicide. This is also the first Sufjan release to feature profanity (and a lot of it, too, though it's confined to one track), and many listeners find the style much less pleasant and accessible than his other releases.
• Dark Reprise: At the end of "Impossible Soul", the optimistic "Boy, we can do much more together!" is transformed into a defeated "Boy, we made such a mess together".
• Electronic Music: Not Sufjan's first (or last) foray into the genre, but certainly his most famous.
• Eleven O'Clock Number: The 25-minute, multi-part "Impossible Soul" serves as the album closer.
• Epic Rocking: At 25:35, "Impossible Soul" is Sufjan's longest track to date, beating out "Djohariah" by a good 8+ minutes. It's so long, in fact, that the vinyl version has to break the song apart (with the last section moved to the beginning, on a separate side of the disc) in order for everything to fit.
  • Most of the songs qualify to some extent. There are only three tracks on the album under 4:30, and "Age of Adz" is 8:00 on the dot.
• Follow Your Heart: Stated verbatim in "Vesuvius":
  Sufjan, follow your heart
  Follow the flame or fall on the floor
• Homoerotic Subtext: The album contains some pretty blatant examples. See Ho Yay on the YMMV tab.
• Intercourse with You: Discussed most explicitly in "All for Myself":
  Impressions of the unmade bed
  You cradled close to me, close to my ear
• "I Want" Song:
  • "I Want to Be Well", obviously.
  • "All for Myself", with its repeated refrain of "I want it all, I want it all for myself".
• Last Note Nightmare: The screeching electronics that close out "I Want to Be Well".
• Love Confession: "Futile Devices" is about the insurmountable difficulty of making one.
• Love Hurts: Many of the songs involve romantic heartbreak or frustration. "I Walked", "Bad Communication", and "Impossible Soul" are especially strong in their expressions of emotional woundedness.
• Lyrical Dissonance:
  • The Title Track culminates in a soaring, triumphant crescendo of horns and electronics, with the lyrics "I've lost the will to fight / I was not made for life."
  • "I Want to Be Well" is an upbeat, uptempo song whose narrator suffers from an unspecified—and possibly deadly—illness.
• Mood Whiplash: Happens from part to part of "Impossible Soul" (it's especially jarring toward the end, where it switches from loud, fun and dancey to a quiet acoustic ballad).
• Motor Mouth: The narrator of "Too Much".
  Maybe I'm talking too fast, maybe I'm talking too much.
• Multi-Part Episode: "Impossible Soul" is (unofficially) divided into 5 movements.
• New Sound Album: The most obvious—and base-breaking—example in Sufjan's catalog.
• Not Staying for Breakfast: The ending of "Impossible Soul":
  And did you think I'd stay the night?
  And did you think I'd love you forever?
• Obsession Song: "All for Myself", in which the narrator expresses his desire to have his lover... well, all for himself.
• Pep-Talk Song: Part IV of "Impossible Soul":
  It's a long life! Better pinch yourself!
  Get your face together! Better stand up straight!
• Perishing Alt-Rock Voice: Mostly averted, rather unusually for Sufjan. Parts of some songs—especially "Vesuvius", "I Want to Be Well", and "Impossible Soul"—are almost yelled.
• Rearrange the Song:
  • The vinyl release moves the last section of "Impossible Soul" to the beginning. Though done in the interest of space, this also gives the song a slightly more ambiguous and unsettling ending.
  • "Futile Devices" was remixed by Sufjan's sometimes-producer Doveman (aka Thomas Bartlett) for use on the Call Me by Your Name soundtrack, where it appears alongside two film-exclusive Sufjan tracks.
• Self-Backing Vocalist: Done throughout the album, but especially on "I Walked".
• Singer Namedrop: "Vesuvius", with its Talking to Themself lyrics:
  Sufjan, the panic inside, the murdering ghost that you cannot ignore
• Song Style Shift: The multi-parted "Impossible Soul".
• Step Up to the Microphone: Shara Nova, previously featured on backing vocals, sings the lead vocals for the second movement of "Impossible Soul".
• Survival Mantra:
  • "I want to be well, I want to be well, I want to be well, I want to be well..." (from "I Want to Be Well")
  • "Don't be distracted, don't be distracted..." (from "Impossible Soul")
• Talking to Themself: From "Vesuvius":
  Sufjan, follow your heart, follow the flame or fall on the floor
  Sufjan, the panic inside, the murdering ghost that you cannot ignore
• Title Track: Though the song title does drop the "The".
• Wham Line: "I'm not fucking around" (repeated ad nauseum, in increasingly frantic fashion) in "I Want to Be Well." The popular perception of Sufjan as a Christian Rock-adjacent choirboy was... challenged a bit with this album's release.
• Xtreme Kool Letterz: "Adz", at least given its unexpected pronunciation.

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