It is possible that “Cimmerian Shade,” a song written by Sufjan Stevens and Angelo De Augustine, and loosely sung from the perspective of the character Buffalo Bill, the second-most famous serial killer from the film Silence of the Lambs, is the first song in history to use the word “autogynephilia.” The somewhat obscure term describes the supposed sexual arousal a man may feel imagining himself in a woman’s body; it is considered to be anti-trans. In the song, an acoustic meditation, Stevens and De Augustine, after declaring their narrator “safe in my autogynephilia,” ask in a sweet whisper of the film’s director: “Fix it all Jonathan Demme.” Is the song a protest against retrograde depictions of trans people on screen? Is it a sympathetic ode to a murder? Is it a joke?
Every song on the album contains a similar puzzle of meaning. A Beginner’s Mind is made up of 14 songs, each based on, inspired by, or in reference to a different film. It’s a weird collection of movies, from bank robbing surfer bro tone poem Point Break to cheerleading sequel Bring It On Again to Hellraiser III. The conceit allowed indie superstar Stevens and somewhat less profile if equally gentle songwriter De Augustine to escape into a fantasy, propelled by a bunch of films they largely describe as “problematic.” The music, however, is in line with Stevens typical hushed beauty. It’s a jarring but semi-funny experience when you hear a couple of angels coo a line more appropriate for Cannibal Corpse: “Cenobite seized within the throes to be released from the pillar of souls/ Dragged from the dark, my love extolled/ Bring me the beast, my life gives blood.” (That one’s from “The Pillar of Souls,” the Hellraiser III song.)
Stevens and De Augustine stumbled onto the album’s concept accidentally while working in the studio together. After finishing work for the day would watch movies at night. Eventually, the films’ themes began to seep into the songs. In one way, A Beginner’s Mind is an experiment in source material and inspiration. In another, it’s a commentary on how poorly things age, and on the film industry’s historic sexism. It’s also a nice album filled with vocal harmonies, loping piano runs, mellow guitar solos, and the occasional sleigh bell. Over Zoom early this week, Stevens and De Augustine discussed the genesis of the album, the issues with their taste, and popcorn.
GQ: As any person who has ever tried to watch something on Netflix knows, it’s very hard to find even one thing to agree on to watch with another person. You have 14 movies you both watched. How did you do that?
Angelo De Augustine: Some of these were movies that we liked when we were kids, but most of these were just recommendations. Some of them I hadn’t seen and some of them Sufjan hadn’t seen, so in some instances we got to experience a movie for the first time, which was a cool experience.
Sufjan Stevens: I think other than maybe All About Eve and Wings of Desire, they’re not art films, they’re more popular films. Action and horror. So I think we were connecting on that level unconsciously. We were just gravitating towards films that were in the pantheon of popular culture.
Are any of these movies that you didn’t end up liking?
Angelo: A lot of these movies are pretty problematic. They didn’t age very well.
Sufjan: We chose a lot of these because of their imperfections. And because there’s this strange tension within them between creative intention and consequence. Looking back, there’s a lot of conflict and trauma and violence in a lot of these films. I don’t know if that was a conscious decision, but I think we both found that meeting point of tension and relief to be interesting.
Why write songs about movies you found to be problematic?
Sufjan: Well, Return to Oz is a sequel to The Wizard of Oz, and there’s little or no resemblance to the original, so aesthetically that’s problematic. None of the characters resemble the former characters—they don’t even try. And then the first scene is the uncle taking Dorothy to a psychiatric hospital where she’s given electric shock treatment, which then precipitates all this calamity, and there’s a storm. Lightning strikes the hospital or something. Then through a moment of trauma, she’s transposed to this new fantasy world, and the Oz that we formerly knew as something that was full of Broadway songs and bright colors and friends and comrades is now replaced by violence.
As soon as Dorothy steps into Oz, there’s just immediate antagonism. In every scene and every sequence, she’s met with violence. She’s risking her life. There’s just a whole cast of very problematic and strange and kind of nightmarish characters, and it’s all very life-threatening. It’s strange that it’s a Disney movie. My takeaway from that film is that it’s really about child abuse.
How did you end up watching this?
Angelo: Did we just look up, “What’s the scariest children’s movie of all time?”
Sufjan: We were on a horror, sci-fi, and fantasy kick at the time.
Angelo: We got up to Hellraiser 5, and then we were like, “Well, what’s next?”
So you did all of Hellraiser one through 5?
Angelo: I think so.
You guys have a lot of patience.
Sufjan: I know, I know. I’m the one who’s a horror movie nut. I’ll watch any horror film, whether it’s good or bad.
You said, “I know, I know,” like you were kind of lamenting your own patience for it.
Sufjan: I mean, I don’t have great taste in movies. I can appreciate an Antonioni film, and I understand the value of Ingmar Bergman, but I have to really be disciplined and dedicated to sit down and watch those films.
Do you think you have good taste in music?
Sufjan: Not really. I don’t think so.
Do you just think you have bad taste?
Sufjan: Well, I have tastes. But I’m not a connoisseur, and I’m not a tastemaker.
Before this album, Sufjan your most notable association with film is having your song “Visions of Gideon” play over the final scene of Call Me by Your Name, which is a pretty heavy scene. What did you take away from that experience?
Sufjan: Well, it’s funny, because I really hate music in film. I’m often really distracted and disappointed by it. Especially movie soundtracks. I think it’s really difficult to do well. I wish there was a “mute the soundtrack” button on my TV. There are exceptions.
Like your own song at the end of Call Me By Your Name, or no?
Sufjan: No. No.
Not an exception?
Sufjan: Well, okay, for starters, I never watched that film before I wrote those songs. I just read the script and I read the book. I wrote the songs. I sent them to them and I said, “You have my blessing. Use them if you want to, but if it doesn’t work, I can try to write something new.” And I didn’t want to see the film and I didn’t want to go to the set and I didn’t want to meet with [director Luca Guadagnino]. I did the work and then I handed it in. But I wanted to stay out of that whole process. So I didn’t actually know how he was going to use the music until I saw the film for the first time.
I’m not going to say anything about what I think about my music in that film. But what I will say is that I think Luca Guadagnino is one of those directors that understands music and film and has a real reverence for the combination of those two, and also has incredible scholarship about it. He’s very intentional and he has a very strong aesthetic and he’s very certain of himself and what’s required. I think he gets away with murder because he uses a lot of music in his films and normally I’m turned off by that, but he’s a real craftsperson when it comes to audio and visual. So I’ve admired his use of music in his films before Call Me By Your Name. I Am Love and A Bigger Splash use a lot of music and it’s done really, really well and it’s contributing to every scene. So that’s kind of why I decided that I could trust him.
With all of that in mind, at the risk of asking a stupid question, why did you make an entire album about movies?
Angelo: We didn’t plan to. Sufjan was helping me work on some songs of mine, and then we liked working together so much that we decided, “Let’s try to write a song together.” And then we were able to write a song, and it went well. The movie thing really came accidentally. We realized that as we were watching these movies and then working the next day that some of the themes from the movies were creeping into the songs, so we decided to embrace that because I welcome happy accidents. I think that’s where magic can come from, and take you somewhere new.
Sufjan: And I really don’t think these songs are about the films. I think they use the films as a catalyst, but create a new cinematic experience, just through song and through language that we’ve constructed and that is almost entirely our own.
Some of the album is actually pretty funny.
Sufjan: I think that for us to make critiques of these films and to be dead serious about it, it required that we work these little moments of comic relief into it. I was almost like a tempering of extremes. The songs became these weird mashups. Sometimes we would just stumble upon a phrase in a film that was so ridiculous that we wanted to somehow work it in. I think it’s not so much that we’re winking and being self-conscious about it. I think what we’re doing is almost a descriptive analysis of the language that we receive from all these pop culture sources.
So did you stream all these movies, or did you torrent them?
Sufjan: It was all streaming, right? Or no, actually for a while, John [Beeler, the manager of Steven’s label Asthmatic Kitty], who’s listening in on this call, was my go-to for pirating. Weren’t you, John?
John: Thanks for that, Sufjan. I hope you pay my bail when GQ narcs on me.
What’s a movie you would recommend everyone watch?
Angelo: Son of the White Mare. It’s a Hungarian animated movie made in the ’80s that never got released in America until a year or two ago.
Sufjan: I think your readers should get stoned or do mushrooms and watch Son of the White Mare.
Were you stoned or on mushrooms watching any of the movies for the album?
Angelo: No.
Sufjan: We didn’t even have any weed.
What kind of snacks did you have?
Sufjan: Popcorn, straight up.
Microwave popcorn?
Sufjan: No, from the stove! With a little bit of olive oil and salt. That’s my recipe.
Orville Redenbacher?
Sufjan: No, no, no. It’s going to be, like, organic.
Angelo: We go to the co-op.
Do you have thoughts on motion smoothing?
Sufjan: Yeah, it’s horrible. It sucks. It’s a shitshow. You go into a hotel and they’ve got their flat screen TV and none of it is set up correctly and everything looks like it’s on cheap video from the nineties.
Angelo: Is that the thing where you’re watching a video on a new TV and it looks weird and you can’t figure out why the people don’t look real?
Yes.
Sufjan: Also, I’m not an audiophile, but I’m really fussy about the sound when I’m watching a film, obviously, because I’m a musician. So I can’t use the speakers the TV comes with. Everything goes through my stereo.
So do you ever watch TikToks on your phone?
Sufjan: Yeah, I can’t do that. I’m too old.