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Posted on Nov 20, 2014

Top 12 Sufjan Stevens Songs

(or 17 When I Decide I Can't Decide) - this Throwback Thursday is a Playlist/Facebook "Note" (wow) of my favorite Sufjan Stevens songs as of May 2012.

by barrierjunkies

Community Contributor

"Sufjan Stevens is my favorite musician, ever. He was my first concert (other than The Wiggles, which, no, thank you for asking, I would not like to talk about). Granted I was late to the concert game, I didn't see Sufjan/my first concert until I was 19 years old and a Sophomore in college (went with my best fran Lesley Ann!). But he is still my favorite, and he was my favorite before I saw him live; now he's just more my favorite. Also, you should know that I was late to the whole iTunes and real music game too. I did all the Britney and the Backstreet back in my day, but when I got too embarrassed to let people walk into my room and see things like Oops, I Did It Again, M2M, and the Titanic soundtrack, I repressed my amazing taste in music and pretended to myself and everyone that I only liked Movie Soundtracks, instrumental music, and obscure operatic/orchestral show soundtracks from Cirque du Soleil. Then, in my senior year of high school, a great friend, Lauren, really brought me into the real world and opened my eyes to the wealth of artists that were out there waiting for me. One of the first songs I listened to from the 3 mix-cds she gave me was For the Widows in Paradise, For the Fatherless in Ypsilanti by Sufjan Stevens. The rest was, as they say, history.

Now, I was trying to spread the good word to my friend Erin just recently. I was basically force feeding her posts about music and especially links to Sufjan Stevens. In the process of trying to Google how to spell ridiculous Sufjan song names like Ypsilanti and Casimir Pulaski, I ran across someone's attempt to narrow down a list of the Top 20 Sufjan Songs (http://www.thewildhoneypie.com/my-20-fave-sufjan-songs/). So I decided I needed to limit myself and figure out what songs I really needed to be sharing with the friends that ask me about this amazing artitst.

As I began, I critically and quickly weeded through all 182 of my Sufjan songs and placed any songs I thought could reasonably end up on my top 12 into an iTunes playlist. Round 1: 31 songs... I have work to do... after losing a lot of sleep and crying about 7 times, I finally got the list down to 17. Now, I'm frozen. Every time I try to move forward, I think of my favorite part of each song, compare it to another, and I start pinning the songs against each other. I wish they could just fight to the death in front of me so I didn't have this ungodly god-like role of choosing between them. Hey guys, I promise I'll pick 12. But I'll have my 5 honorable mentions just for the people I pretend might care. Of course, no one cares about any of this. But I should be writing a paper, and isn't that why we're all here??

Becca, I tagged you too. You probably understand my dilemma and might find this mildly entertaining. Let's do coffee soon."

- Michael (circa 2012)

Top 12:

Oh, and…

Honorable Mentions:

I made a YouTube playlist with all the songs in order from 1 to 17, I don't know what took me so long to compile a Sufjan playlist…