Tracklist:1. Reach Out2. Lady Macbeth In Chains3. Back To Oz4. The Pillar Of Souls5. You Give Death A Bad Name6. Beginner’s Mind7. Olympus8. Murder And Crime9. (This Is) The Thing10. It’s Your Own Body And Mind11. Lost In The World12. Fictional California13. Cimmerian Shade14. Lacrimae Sufjan Stevens and Angelo De Augustine will release a collaborative album, A Beginner’s Mind, September 24 on Asthmatic Kitty Records. Two songs from the album, “Reach Out” and “Olympus,” debut today along with a video for “Reach Out” shot earlier this year by Sufjan and Angelo on VHS-C cameras from their respective coasts, New York and California, starring their beloved dogs Joku (a Jindo) and Charlie (a Havanese) and edited by Jess Calleiro. Listen and watch here and pre-order/pre-save the album here. A Beginner’s Mind began when the two musicians and Asthmatic Kitty labelmates decamped to a friend’s cabin in upstate New York for a monthlong songwriting sabbatical. Watching a movie to unwind after each day’s work, they soon found their songs reflecting the films and began investigating this connection in earnest. The resulting album is 14 songs (loosely) based on (mostly) popular films—highbrow, lowbrow and everything in between. They wrote in tandem—one person writing a verse, the other a chorus, churning out chord progressions and lyrics willy-nilly, often finishing each other’s sentences in the process. Rigorous editing and rewriting ensued. The results are less a “cinematic exegesis” and more a “rambling philosophical inquiry” that allows the songs to free-associate at will. Plot-points, scene summaries, and leading characters are often displaced by esoteric interpolations that ask the bigger question: what does it mean to be human in a broken world?
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