Sufjan, Southampton, Santa & Me

It all started back in 2005. Quite a summer. I got made redundant, left home, worked at a theatre in Birmingham, recorded an album, and started Uni. I’d been pretty low for a while and these were my first steps out of it.

Back then, I listened to music even more obsessively than I do now. I would buy a new CD, listen to it non-stop until I got bored of it, then buy a new one. I measured how good a record was by how long that took. A standard classic album at that pace – Oasis’ Definitely Maybe and Michael Jackson’s Thriller, for example – lasted about a week. Coldplay’s X&Y hung on a gargantuan fortnight.

The night I came home from Brum I went to a party. At one point I noticed some interesting brass hooks coming out the stereo and asked my friend what he was playing. ‘The new Sufjan Stevens record’, he said, with a crazed smile. My life has not been the same since.

I begged a copy of this weirdly named guy’s wierdlier-named record, Greetings from Michigan: the great lake state. It sounded like a Paul Simon record produced by Brian Wilson. Hubba hubba. And I listened to it. Lots. It barely left my CD player until I left for university... 6 weeks later.

What made Michigan so fascinating was not just the crazy wonderful style of it all, but that it was about the place Mr Stevens grew up. And the magic is that it takes you back through your own story. The names and places are different, but the feelings & memories are very much the same.

So even though we were in the middle of recording our first record, Haberdashery, I started dreaming about writing a new set of songs that were meant to be together from the start. About the place I grew up. Southampton.

The songs have been coming together ever since. 5 songs in 5 years - not exactly prolific. Quality not quantity, that's what I say. They’re basically the supporting walls of my live set (so you’ve probably heard them all before.. but never like this); perhaps the best few songs I’ve ever written.

I was still fiddling with ‘Emmanuel’ between vocal takes in our recording sessions (appropriately, last Christmas). It was an idea I had during recording – to do an intro pondering the central theme of Christmas; God coming to live as an ordinary person. So I ripped off ‘Christmas song’ and went from there.

‘The Mother City’ is a common nickname for Cape Town. I was living there in 2008 and got a birthday card from my parents. Which got me thinking about leaving home and going back. About that indefinably significant relationship you have with the place you grew up. So it's a nice pun.

I wrote ‘Shirley Towers’ right at the start of the story, the week I lost my job, for a single mum I worked with. The idea suddenly made sense when it landed in the record, and I rededicated it to the little estate (full of single mothers) down the road.

‘Traveller from the East’ is my processing of a fact I’d heard years before – that 2 men had starved to death in Southampton. In Southampton? A modern western city? There’s also more than a bit of me leaving home in there. How much more must any of the thousands of refugees and migrant workers in the city feel it?

‘Christmas Complete’ was really the key to the whole thing. It’s still probably the best song I’ve written. Everything came together – cool 9/8-6/8 finger picking pattern; the old lyric-before-tune free verse approach I’d used for my previous best song, and a fascinating image.

I was home from Uni for the summer and happened to end up at the old warehouse of the charity SCRATCH down at the docks. And there I saw, hovering above your daily field of view on one of those massive shipping containers, the Rotary Club Santa’s sleigh that rolled past our house every Christmas since I can remember. To me, that thing is as much part of Christmas as presents and pine trees. Christmas! What more wonderful way to light up the magic in the ordinary? To top it off, on the side of the sleigh was written, ‘for the homeless and the hungry of Southampton’.

That pretty much summarises this record. Christmas, poverty and my hometown. For me, it doesn’t get much more fascinating than that.