Sufjan Stevens from Other Things by Ariel My Friend

Flat Earthers hate me
But it's unintentional
I said I like the atmosphere
The spelling's coincidental
“Please be gentle,”
I said while being taken to a shed
With a takeout bag over my head

“Hello, we hate you, but consider our plea,”
They said and told me that they organize a spelling bee contest
And due to a lack of ideas for words with a zing
They ordered me to come up with words that sounded interesting

Gewgaw, oddball, oxymoron
Dumbstruck, flabbergasted, ozone
Rorschach, Yahweh, ostrich, unction
Pregnant, awkward, liposuction

Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Stevens Stevens
Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Stevens Stevens

Robots
They were fighting some row boats
This makes no sense, nor a good plot
Must've misheard what the general said
Beta version, voice recognition bad
A mob of angry row boat owners kicked in the door
“Whatcha fighting our marine vehicles for?”
The general felt sorry and the tale goes on
But to hear the rest more clearly you'd have to slow down (by -87.575%*)

Since you were so nice and quiet
You deserve another try at
Sister, is anything wrong?
I'd eat you but I bit my tongue (for real)

Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Stevens Stevens
Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Stevens Stevens

Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Stevens Stevens
Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Stevens Stevens
credits
from Other Things, released May 29, 2024
The first part that began to be written for this song was the chorus, on 29th July 2017. The initial words were all “yami”, I think because I had Yam Umi Cohen on my mind, seemed like an interesting person to me.
Just listened to the first draft of the song, and indeed it appears that Yam Umi Cohen was on my mind. At that time I was working at a vegan pizza place called The Green Cat (החתול הירוק), and Yam was the content editor on their Facebook and/or Instagram page, I think.
The calm opening guitar part and the main hook/riff were written on 20th December 2017, and the low-voiced bridge parts (without the lyrics yet) were written a day later, on 21st December 2017.
I wanted the beat of the 1st verse to be a big mishmash of drumming styles, changing independently in both the left and right channels every ½ note, so I sampled A TON of different beats from the YouTube channel of Vic Firth (why them? No reason - I wanted to keep sampling from other channels as well but they were the first ones that popped in my mind and I ended up sampling way more than enough from their channel) and then chose 52 different samples at random. I did change a few of them which I didn't like as much.
After writing the lyrics for the 1st verse, it occurred to me that it would be cool to have samples of people from random films saying those lyrics the same time I'm singing them, so I used the website playphrase.me to find some fitting samples before compiling them all together.

The lyrics for the 2nd verse (“Robots, they were fighting some row boats...”) were written prior to the lyrics of the 1st verse. At that point, I thought that the 1st verse lyrics would probably just be a bunch of imaginary nonsense. Somehow coming up with the lyrics for the 2nd verse went quite smoothly, from the point that the fun line about the robots popped in my head (in the shower, I think), and I was easily content with the balance between the sense and nonsense they made. But I felt like the story was kinda cut short due to the arbitrary length of the verse, and knew that I could continue it much longer, and then I had the idea of recording the rest of it and simply having it extremely sped up, and telling the listener that they'd have to slow the track down in order to hear it.

Phone drafts:
amfsphonedrafts.bandcamp.com/album/sufjan-stevens

---

* The original length of the story between verse #2 and bridge #2 is 645368 samples, which were squished into 80182 samples. This is why in order to hear it in its original speed one would have to slow it down by (1−(80182/645368))*100 = 87.5757707231 percent.

Tracklist

10.	Sufjan Stevens	4:09

Credits

from Other Things, released December 8, 2024

License