My Impossible Soul interweaves cultural theory and philosophy, fan accounts, music
journalism, and personal musical experiences to create a fabric that is, in-keeping with
metamodernism, both carefully interlaced yet thoughtfully frayed. Through examining
the work of Sufjan Stevens, the authors present a compelling case for a metamodern
mode of hearing and reading music.”

Samuel J. Wilson, Research Fellow, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, UK

Sufjan Stevens's fans know that his music moves between seemingly dichotomous poles: intimate and expansive, playfully ironic and sincere, programmatic and impressionistic, sacred and profane. It can be difficult to reconcile the personal singer-songwriterly introspection heard on Seven Swans and Carrie and Lowell with the experimental, orchestral sweep of The BQE or The Age of Adz. Stevens is clearly a master of pop aesthetics and form-crystallized on The Ascension and Javelin, as a foundation for the ambitious Michigan and Illinois albums, or reduced to pastiche on his sprawling Christmas EP collections-and yet he remains unafraid to explore more ambient soundworlds on Aporia and Convocations or classicism on Planetarium.

As the editors of My Impossible Soul argue, Stevens does not resolve these tensions but appears to relish inhabiting them. It is precisely this inhabiting that provides the metamodern foundation for this volume. As a framework that foregrounds the oscillation and interleaving of skepticism and sincerity as a critical state, metamodernism enables My Impossible Soul's contributors to investigate how Stevens, his music, and its listeners trace “ironesty” (the braiding together of irony and honesty) through similarly complicated (and seemingly contradictory) approaches to understanding Christian faith, grief, love, national identity, and queerness, among other themes.

When he emerged in the early aughts (initially gaining visibility as part of experimental gospel/folk artist Daniel Smith's cadre), Sufjan Stevens marked a clear progression from indie rock's ironic detachment in the 1990s. Like Stevens, My Impossible Soul marks a turn to a new critical approach to popular music: moving fluidly between introspective and outward-looking gestures, centering affect and analysis not as contradictions, nor tensions to be resolved, but rather as a productive critical space to feel and inhabit.

Andrew Mall, Associate Professor of Music, Northeastern University, USA