A Beginner’s Mind
Movies are like time capsules for me. Not because they’re windows into the history of actors and the decades they were filmed in. No, I mean in a more personal interconnected way. The way I can watch 2012’s The Avengers and it brings me back to watching it in theaters with shouting fans, and I hear that laughter again, and I connect to myself at that moment in time. When I hear A Better Place by Jed Palmer, it takes me back to watching Upgrade with my best friend in my dimly lit living room under the brisk AC air on a hot summer day. Those conversations that we had come right back to me. Music composed for film is very important to me and many others. But what if we made music based on the emotions we feel after viewing a movie, based on the after-image left in our minds that permeates our dreams the night after? That would be something truly unique.
That is exactly what Sufjan Stevens and Angelo De Augustine have done with the album A Beginner’s Mind. These two had the idea, so they stayed in a cabin in upstate New York and watched movies together every night for nearly a month (very romantic). They became more enthusiastic as the album began taking shape, and they took liberties with their songwriting. For example, when writing a song about John Carpenter’s The Thing, instead of writing about the movie's actual events, they wrote about its theme of social paranoia. Each song is carefully crafted, with a folksy sound throughout the album that bends in weird and interesting ways.
Not only are the songs outstanding, but the movies are too! In preparation for listening to the album, I watched every movie that each song is based on to understand the album better. The cinema varied greatly, from classic art films to newer slashers, to action thrillers. I found movies I really liked, such as the atmospheric and surreal movie The Last Wave, a very well-directed Australian Psychological thriller from the 80s. I found so many connections between the 14 films they picked; they must’ve spent the entire month at the cabin just finding movies that connect, forming a web of interconnected themes and events. Return to Oz is a movie on the list, and the movie She’s Gotta Have It references an exact scene that Dorothy from the Oz movies is known for. The films The Last Wave and Point Break both showcase large Australian ocean waves, weirdly enough. Those are the most basic connections, but there are distinct connections. For example, the movie The Silence of the Lambs depicts a cocoon of the Eastern Death’s Head Moth or its technical name, Acherontia Styx. Acheron and Styx, the rivers the moth is named after, are heavily featured in Greek Mythology, and the river Styx is a point of focus in the movie Clash of the Titans, another film from the tracklist. You might think that’s just a coincidence, but the song based on Silence of the Lambs is about Greek Mythology, furthering that connection. Another connection I noticed is that Return to Oz, Hellraiser 3: Hell On Earth, and Bring It On Again are all sequels received poorly by critics, yet the artists found interesting takes on their content.
They titled the album A Beginner’s Mind based on the Zen Buddhist concept, Shoshin. It means to view things without any preconceptions from the eyes of a toddler. So when watching these films, they tried their hardest to view things from fresh perspectives and not write based on what most people think a movie is trying to say, but what they truly feel the movie is saying to them in the moment. So to clarify, these are very loose but thoughtful interpretations of the films. This concept is reflected in the film choices, seeing as the first song, Reach Out, is based on the foreign art film from the 80s, Wings of Desire. Wings of Desire plays with the idea of how a child views the world versus how an adult would, and it expresses that in vivid ways.
The songs themselves are just as vivid and thoughtful, and I want to highlight a few of my favorites. First off, the song I found the album with, Back To Oz. This track is based on the largely forgotten sequel to The Wizard of Oz, 1985’s Return to Oz. Don’t get me wrong, the song's inspiration is a mediocre film that fails to capture the magic of the first one. Granted, it’s hard to make something out of nothing, but these artists must’ve clicked their ruby-red heels three times, and this catchy tune came out. This song takes me back to Oz, man, and makes me feel the magic. The actual content of the lyrics is very well thought out as well. Angelo De Augustine did most of the writing on this song, and he talks about Dorothy’s struggles to grow into adulthood. The song is a conversation between her younger self and the version of her that is on the cusp of growing up. The longing to return to these older memories is cleverly compared to an on-again-off-again relationship, as the two versions of herself argue, “Get it back, get nowhere. Get it right, follow my heart, back to, back to Oz.” At first, I thought it meant “get it right and follow my heart,” but the parallelism between these lines is an important note here. The first verse gives a seemingly good thing, “get it back”, but shifts to a bad thing because she “gets nowhere” and shows no improvement and development as a person. This important note changes the meaning of the next verse because it’s not saying, “get it right, because I follow my heart back to Oz”. It is actually saying she gets it right but then slips back into her old ways because she “follows her heart.” The careful thought put into storytelling and lyrics here are highly appreciated, but that would mean nothing if the song sounded bad. Luckily, the tune is great. Augustine sings in hushed tones, and Stevens supports with a similar style, offering a song that sounds like a lullaby with an offhand plucking of mellow strings that comes together into a wonderful and soothing song, despite the saddening subject matter. Back to Oz is far from the only good song on the album, so a few others I would recommend are Olympus, Lost In The World, Reach Out, You Give Death A Bad Name, and Lacrimae.
Sufjan Stevens has been on my radar for a while, with songs like Fourth of July and Chicago being mainstays in my music playlists, but Angelo De Augustine really surprised me with this album. He has a new album called Toil and Trouble coming out June 30th, which took a total of three years to complete. The single from it, Another Universe, is super cool and gives me hope that the rest of the songs on the album will be some of his best yet. Once you’re done listening to A Beginner’s Mind and watching all 14 movies, because I’m sure you will, you should check out his new album. If movies and their original soundtracks are windows to my past and a period in time for me, A Beginner’s Mind is stained glass, casting a foreign light on familiar memories, and man, are they dazzling.
