Sufjan Stevens & Angelo De Augustine – A Beginner’s Mind (Vinyl LP)

It’s been said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture (impossible and absurd). But what about singing about movies? Sufjan Stevens and Angelo De Augustine have paired up for a collaborative project that does just that. A Beginner’s Mind is their debut album that contains 14 songs (loosely) based on (mostly) popular films. The source material is highbrow, lowbrow, and everything in between. The music is folksy, sweet, sincere and harmonically effervescent – Simon & Garfunkel with New Age flourishes. This album runs the gamut and has fun with it, even while its songwriters remain fully rooted in the melancholy folk idioms they are known for.

Stevens and De Augustine wrote everything with a deliberate sense of shoshin – the Zen Buddhist concept for which the record is named and an idea that empowered the pair to look for and write about unlikely inspiration without preconceived notions of what a film had to say. The underlying objective was empathy and openness, absent of judgment: to observe what is pure and good – or seemingly dark and villainous – with the eyes of a child.

1. Reach Out
2. Lady Macbeth In Chains
3. Back To Oz
4. The Pillar Of Souls
5. You Give Death A Bad Name
6. Beginner’s Mind
7. Olympus
8. Murder And Crime
9. (This Is) The Thing
10. It’s Your Own Body And Mind
11. Lost In The World
12. Fictional California
13. Cimmerian Shade
14. Lacrimae