Sufjan Stevens & Angelo De Augustine – “Back To Oz” & “Fictional California”Sufjan Stevens & Angelo De Augustine – “Back To Oz” & “Fictional California”
In the past year, Sufjan Stevens has released his album The Ascension and his six-volume ambient work Convocations. He’s not done. Next month, Stevens and the Los Angeles folk-pop musician Angelo De Augustine will release their new collaborative LP A Beginner’s Mind. When they announced the album, Stevens and De Augustine shared two new songs, “Reach Out” and “Olympus.” Both were gorgeous. Today, they’ve shared another two, and they’re gorgeous, too.
Stevens and De Augustine wrote the songs for A Beginner’s Mind together while on a songwriting sabbatical at a cabin in upstate New York, and the songs are all inspired by the movies that they watched together. Today, they’ve released “Back To Oz” and “Fictional California.” “Back To Oz” refers to to Return To Oz, the misbegotten 1985 sequel attempt where Fairuza Balk played Dorothy and the puppet effects gave a lot of kids nightmares. “Fictional California,” meanwhile, is based on the 2004 straight-to-DVD sequel Bring It On Again
On both songs, Stevens and Augustine once again sound lovely together, and the sound is clearly rooted in the delicate and layered indie-folk that Stevens was making when most of us first encountered him. “Back To Oz” has soft harmonies and lush clouds of sound and a restrained psych-rock guitar solo. “Fictional California” is built on fragile, hushed acoustic guitars and soft sighs. Check out both songs below.
On “Back To Oz,” De Augustine says:
This was a song that I had written mostly at home in California. We finished its lyrics after watching Return To Oz. The words reference an erosion of a central character’s internal reality. A loss of innocence is the impetus for a journey to find inner truth. In the film, Dorothy returns to the world of Oz to find its landscape in ruins and its citizens frozen in stone. Only she can find the ruby slippers and return peace to Oz. Only we can save ourselves, but we first have to remember who we truly are.
Stevens says:
Angelo is mostly known for his intimate home recordings; his music is quiet and confessional/ So for “Back To Oz,” we decided to go for something flashier. The song has a fun guitar groove, so we gave it some bass and drums, and Angelo even recorded his first electric guitar solo. It’s a sad song—being mostly about disillusionment—but it has a great party vibe too.
A Beginner’s Mind is out 9/24 on Asthmatic Kitty.
