Ice Queens

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I'm just going to pretend that Sufjan Stevens read my review of the movie I Tonya on Monday and in 24 manic hours churned out his brand new suddenly dropped out of nowhere song called "Tonya Harding" since he found my words so profoundly inspiring he couldn't keep it all in. That's what I am going to pretend. Sufjan says on his Tumblr that he's been working on the song for years and he offered it to the people behind the movie but they didn't use it. (Imagine if they had - he could be part of two Oscar nominees this season!) So instead he's put it online himself. You can hear it below, or you can buy it over at this link here. One of the reasons I've been so deeply bonded with Sufjan's music for 15 years now is he and I have similar Poor White Kid backgrounds, so I'm not surprised we both look back at the story of Tonya Harding through a personal lens.

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ETA oh wait, there's more! Sufjan has finally given an interview about the movie he did get a song into this year - three songs, actually - EW chatted with him about his work with Luca Guadagnino on Call Me By Your Name (thanks Mac) and he mentions that he thinks Timothée Chalamet is incredible in the film, and when he's asked if he used his own experiences in writing the music he says:

"Oh yeah. Those experiences never leave us. I was just conjuring my own experiences of summer camp and love and attraction. I’m always fascinated with the sublime nature of love in every kind of manifestation. Whether it’s divine attraction, the love of God, or the human attraction, the love of the body, like Eros, or there’s the love of humankind, like brotherly and sisterly love. It comes in all these forms. I really find that this movie has a way of encapsulating all of those manifestations in a really interesting way. The attraction between them, it’s sexual, but there’s also companionship and camaraderie and respect and there’s intelligence there and there’s scholarship there. Their attraction, it encompasses all of that. It’s so beautiful. That’s something that always moved me, whether it’s like, the sort of divine infatuation when you go to a cathedral or when you’re looking at a work of art or when you’re in the presence of beauty in the form of a person. These things, they all trigger many different things within us. It’s really cool."