Sufjan Stevens - Casimir Pulaski Day

 

I'm not going to write anything here about this song, a gorgeous and absolutely heartbreaking song in the form of what is almost a lullaby. I don't need to. Greg Olear at The Weeklings has already done that, and it's a fantastic piece of writing. I encourage you to read the whole thing. I'll give you a sample, but give your appreciation to Mr. Olear:

Song Beneath the Song: “Casimir Pulaski Day” by Sufjan Stevens
Greg Olear
Tuesday, September 4, 2012

(Come on Feel the) Illinoise, the second installment in his [Sufjan Stevens] proposed-but-as-yet-unfinished Fifty States Project, is, for my money, the best album made in the oughts. At turns lush and spare, it features the soaring“Chicago” (the best song of the decade, it says here), the frantic “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts,” the 5/4-time title track, and the devastatingly beautiful “Casimir Pulaski Day,” known in our house as, simply, “Sad Song.”

When my son was two, he was having a tantrum, as two-year-olds will. As he screamed and complained, “Casimir Pulaski Day” came on the iPod. He immediately stopped crying, as if a button had been switched off on his back, and walked to the speakers, listening intently, spellbound by the music. “This is a sad song,” I told him. “Sad Song,” he repeated. And so it has remained.

I’ve listened to “Sad Song” hundreds if not thousands of times. I don’t mean I had it on while I was driving, or in the background with friends over; I’ve listened to it. I hummed the trumpet part to my daughter the night she was born. I’ve sung it to her and my son as a lullaby countless times, and each time, as I sing lyrics I know by heart, some new flash of insight hits me. It’s a song that never fails to move me.

“Casimir Pulaski Day,” the seventh track on the Illinoise, concerns a young man’s memory of the week leading up to the death of his dearest friend. It is unquestionably the best song ever written about a 12-year-old girl dying of bone cancer.

There is an adolescent and artless quality to the lyrics. There is no metaphor, no fancy fifty-cent words, no coherent structure. The story itself is poorly told; we must assemble and organize the traces of the narrator’s memory to deduce what happened. The music underscores this simplicity: the same four chords repeated over and over, uncluttered arrangement, none of the swirling synthesizers and female chorales and abrupt shifts in dynamics that characterize “Chicago” and “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts.”

But it is this very artlessness that makes the song so moving.

The entire piece is here...