Sufjan Stevens, Silver & Gold
Featured Album
Brooklyn indie darling Sufjan Stevens will probably never finish his one-album-for-every-state project (48 to go!), but his holiday-music series seems unstoppable. By now, you should know the drill: Every year he gathers some musical friends and stitches together an EP to send out to loved ones. Some of the songs are standards, lovingly rendered. Some are standards, flipped into rock songs or spooky ballads. A lot of Stevens’s holiday tunes are originals, either sincere in their cheer or absurd, moody or baffling. (“Christmas Unicorn” is all of these.) Stevens’s last five holiday EPs are finally collected in the new Silver & Gold: Songs for Christmas Vols. 6-10, a collection that’s as upbeat and earnest as it is completely bonkers. Read here for a rigorously scientific unwrapping of the highlights of each volume, broken into statistical categories.
