As of December 17, we are still trying to decide the winner of the Great Sufjan Song Xmas Change. We received so many great entries, this is a harder job than we thought! Expect something in the next day, and thank you for your patience!

Sufjan Stevens will be participating in the Tibet House Annual Benefit Concert at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday, February 13, 2008.  Sufjan will join Philip Glass, Nawang Khechog, Marisa Monte and others yet to be announced, for an evening of music in support of a good cause.  Please check Tibet House website regularly for updates: www.tibethouse.org

Sufjan Stevens’ performance at Southpaw, Brooklyn to benefit the PEN American Center has been rescheduled to December 17.

A friendly reminder: Sufjan’s Xmas contest – in which he swaps a song for a song – ends on midnight, December 1st. Hurry and get those entries in! Start reading the details here.

It’s Christmas time again! That means tightly bundled scarves, lively debates on the merits of real/plastic trees, a litany of Christmas television specials, and finding the perfect retro Christmas wrapping paper.

And gifts of course! Who could forget the gifts!

That’s why Sufjan Stevens is busy working on a very special gift right now, for a very special person. And in the spirit of Christmas, that person will give Sufjan a similarly special gift.

Here’s how it works: write an original Christmas song, record it, and email the song to us. Asthmatic Kitty will pick a winner, and that person will trade rights to their song for rights to Sufjan’s song.

Just like a gift exchange, Sufjan’s song becomes your song. You can hoard it for yourself, sell it to a major soft drink corporation, use it in your daughter’s first Christmas video, or share it for free on your website. No one except Sufjan and you will hear his song, unless you decide otherwise. You get the song and all legal rights to it. We get the same rights to your song.

Not a song-maker?  It’s ok!  We’ll stream the submissions just after we pick the winner on December 15th…and we are streaming Sufjan’s entire Christmas boxset for free! Click here for contest details and stream, and here to purchase the boxset for $19.

Tonight, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Sufjan Stevens will debut The BQE, a 30-minute symphonic and cinematic exploration of New York City’s infamous Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. A controversial roadway since its inception in the 1930s, the BQE tears through 11.7 miles of Brooklyn and Queens, severing neighborhoods, pillaging industrial yards, and contouring waterways with the brute force of modern urban planning.

Click on more to read further about Sufjan’s relation to the BQE.

For the unacquainted driver, the BQE is a beast to be reckoned with. Unlike the high speed Autobahn or the prestigious New Jersey Turnpike, the BQE is a battered and baffling roadway plagued by relentless constriction and inexplicable traffic jams. Pot holes, steep grades, sharp turns, traffic cones, detours, and a parade of big rigs and Mack trucks create a rollercoaster obstacle course for the unsuspecting commuter. Crumbling concrete, rusted buttresses, and a persistent cast of billboards advertising big cars and Hollywood movies convey less an interchange of traffic and more a post-modern joy ride through the carnival spook house of Brooklyn and Queens.

For Stevens, the expressway is not an unlikely love interest. Born in Detroit, MI, his preoccupation with the automobile is apparent in songs referencing Chevrolet trucks, back seats, hatchbacks, and car factory jobs. But this is not the typical machismo fascination with cars—horsepower and acceleration—but rather a metaphysical romance with movement, progress, and the American landscape, wrestled out with the politics of transportation and car companies. The automobile has come to symbolize one of the most efficient mechanisms of the American Dream, the machine by which drivers achieve their own Manifest Destiny. In this context, The BQE seeks to uncover, through soundscape and cinematography, the countless characteristics of that Manifest Destiny when converged with urban blight. As a musical and visual expedition, The BQE forages cement surfaces, badly marked exits, stilted bridges, spectacular city views, road workers, commuters, and construction sites for systems and patterns of mass movement that map out an epic legend inscribed in the twists and turns of city life. The BQE presents a consensus of abstract patterns of movement and sound personified in the snakelike meandering of roads, evoking a narrative pattern in traffic, in the effects of weather and pollution, in the constant activity of automobiles, the music of the car horn and the hydraulic brake, and the reverent hum of the combustible car engine thumping for miles around.

Sufjan Stevens will be appearing at the BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) in early November, but you can catch him performing for another New York acronymic mainstay, the PEN American Center (which officially stands for poets, playwrights, essayists, editors, and novelists) on November 28th at 8pm at Southpaw (125 Fifth Ave. Park Slope, Brooklyn). Sufjan will be speaking and performing alongside fellow writer/musicians Rick Moody, and John Wesley Harding (aka Wesley Stace).

Doors open at 7pm. Tickets are $10 and available in advance from the Southpaw website.

You’ll of course remember illustrator Tom Eaton’s marvelously animated video for Sufjan Stevens’, "Put the Lights on the Tree" (click here to refresh your memory).

Animation Block Party, which exhibits quality, independent art, is featuring Tom Eaton’s video at their yearly NYC block party. The video will air on the third night of the festival, July 29th, at the Galapagos Art Space.

Congratulations Tom!

See our sidebar for our own collection of Tom Eaton illustrations.

On November 1, 2 and 3rd Sufjan will be pairing orchestrated selections of both new and old material with the 25th Next Wave Festival commission/world premiere of The BQE-a symphonic and cinematic exploration of one of New York’s least celebrated monuments: the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

Robert Moses‘ controversial 11.7-mile roadway tears through neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens with the brute force of modern urban planning, and in Stevens’ hands becomes an evocation of the intersection of intimate experience and the American Dream. Merging a virtual road trip shot on film with a live band and orchestral ensemble, The BQE discovers abstract patterns and stories in the snaking traffic, potholed pavement, billboards, badly marked exits, and beautiful city views, revealing what happens when Manifest Destiny converges with urban blight.

There’s been a flurry of Sufjan-related content on the World Wide Web, not the least of which is the above video, but luckily you don’t have to go digging for it. We round it all up here, free of charge. Click on "more" to read.

If you neglected to attend the recent Music Now Festival in Cincinnati, you missed a series of amazing shows. Luckily, the king of online music video, La Blogothèque, did nothing of the sort, and while at the festival managed to coax a few of the participants into recording some video. Sufjan recorded two of them, one of which is edited together with the other musicians from Music Now, and the other performed on a blustery rooftop while covering the Innocence Mission (oh, they have a new album!).  Shara Worden, of My Brightest Diamond, elicits an especially clandestine sound from staircase and basement in her video. All three, and others just as beautiful, are available on La Blogothèque’s page. And for the next week or so, you can download them in high definition from that same page.

Sufjan has also recorded a new song for a 20-track strong compilation included with an upcoming issue of The Believer. You’d do well to pick up the issue (or even subscribe – it’s a dense but fascinating magazine), but if you’re far from a bookstore you can listen to the MP3 exclusively on Stereogum.

Finally, Sufjan recorded the first track on the recently released A Tribute to Joni Mitchell. He’s posted a sidebar entry on the process of capturing the spirit of Joni Mitchell’s "Free Man in Paris," which you can read here.