A Beginner’s Mind

Description

It is said that writing about music is like dancing on architecture; it is both impossible and absurd. But what about singing films? Sufjan Stevens and Angelo De Augustine have teamed up for a collaborative project that does just that. A Beginner’s Mind began when the two musicians and label mates retreated to a friend's cabin in upstate New York for a month-long writing sabbatical. After each day of work, they would watch a movie to relax, and they realized that their songs tended to reflect the films, prompting them to explore this connection further. The result is an album of 14 songs (vaguely) inspired by (mostly) well-known films. They wrote in tandem—one would write a verse, the other the chorus, producing chord progressions and lyrics by feel, often finishing each other's sentences. A rigorous process of editing and rewriting followed. Sufjan and Angelo wrote everything with a deliberate sense of shoshin—the Zen Buddhist concept after which the album is named, allowing the duo to explore and write freely without preconceived notions of what the films had to say. The films became rhetorical prompts, with both songwriters letting their distinct reactions and creative instincts govern the process. The underlying goal was empathy and openness, a lack of judgment: observing with the eyes of a child. The music is folk, gentle, sincere, and harmonically effervescent—Simon & Garfunkel with new age flourishes. This album covers the entire spectrum and plays with it, even as the two songwriters remain fully rooted in the melancholic idioms for which they are known. The album artwork is by Ghanaian artist Daniel Anum Jasper, a pioneer in the 1980s for painting alternative posters to promote Hollywood film screenings on the backs of trucks. By transforming old films into new vital songs, the duo invites us to consider things from a different perspective—a new way of seeing and hearing—an exercise in recontextualization that is more necessary and relevant today than ever.