Flint (For the Unemployed and Underpaid) — Sufjan Stevens

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAJCUGD6FtM

2011, Spirit Day in high school; I have a new album (eight years old, but new to me) and, stuck in a window seat, too early in the morning, I begin to listen to it. It's a long trip, the bus is hot but the outside is horrid and dreary; I press my cheek up against the glass and let the temperature difference flow through me. Flint begins, and it sets in; we drive north through upstate New York, approaching Bear Mountain; my friends from the city, set against this weird landscape, familiar and repetitive but still novel every time. And the song is melancholy and beautiful and slow — and I fall asleep, waking up at the end of the album, when we arrive. I don't remember any of the songs, but on second listening, everything is strangely familiar, inherently false jamais vu.