Impossible Soul

No rational A&R person would release a twenty-five-minute track as a single. Sufjan Stevens was not consulting A&R people when he made The Age of Adz — an album about a near-fatal illness, the apocalyptic outsider artist Royal Robertson, and the dissolution of a significant relationship. The album was a departure from the chamber folk of Illinois that had made Stevens a critical darling, and “Impossible Soul” closes it with something that exceeds the word “ambitious.”

The track is divided into five movements, traversing acoustic balladry, glitchy electronics, orchestral buildup, a breakdown so vulnerable it barely qualifies as performance, an Auto-Tuned section that was immediately controversial and is now understood as essential, and a gospel-inflected choral climax that is among the most moving passages in twenty-first century popular music. The structural ambition is staggering, and it would be meaningless if the emotions it carries weren’t real.

Stevens has described The Age of Adz as his most autobiographical record. “Impossible Soul” is the culmination of that autobiography — the section where the narrative demands its full reckoning, where all the elements he’s been working with across the album must be resolved or at least acknowledged. The Auto-Tuned breakdown around the fourteen-minute mark is the point where the armor comes off.

“Boy, we can do much more together / It’s not so impossible.”

The final section — voices layering into a chord that seems to open upward rather than resolve downward — is the kind of musical ending that people describe as religious whether or not they have any relationship to religion. It is not triumphant in the way a stadium anthem is triumphant. It is triumphant in the way that arriving at acceptance is triumphant: quiet, hard-won, permanent.

Press play. Do not skip. Twenty-five minutes is not long for what this song contains.