Sufjan Stevens & Angelo De Augustine Prepare ‘A Beginner’s Mind’, Share New Songs ‘Reach Out’ and ‘Olympus’

Sufjan Stevens and Angelo De Augustine prepare the release of collaborative album A Beginner’s Mind for September 24th. The fourteen track set is released through Asthmatic Kitty Records and is a result of both artists decamping for a month-long writing session in a friend’s New York apartment.

Songs Reach Out and Olympus give an indication of the folk-flavoured soundscape which Sufjan and Angelo will be exploring on the LP, whilst an accompanying press release delves further into its inspirations: “Watching a movie to unwind after each day’s work, they soon found their songs reflecting the films and began investigating this connection in earnest,” it notes sharing that the album is said to be “(loosely) based on (mostly) popular films—highbrow, lowbrow and everything in between”.

It continues “The results are less a ‘cinematic exegesis’ and more a ‘rambling philosophical inquiry’ that allows the songs to free-associate at will. Plot-points, scene summaries and leading characters are often displaced by esoteric interpolations that ask the bigger question: what does it mean to be human in a broken world?” Inspiration from classics such as eighties classic Clash of the Titans can be seen in the artwork alone. See the full tracklist below.

01 Reach Out
02 Lady Macbeth in Chains
03 Back to Oz
04 The Pillar of Souls
05 You Give Death a Bad Name
06 Beginner’s Mind
07 Olympus
08 Murder and Crime
09 (This Is) The Thing
10 It’s Your Own Body and Mind
11 Lost in the World
12 Fictional California