There is a version of Christmas that smells like woodsmoke and feels like dread, and Sufjan Stevens spent most of 2010 living inside it.
Sleigh Bells — the correct title, not the autocorrected one — arrived in November of that year as a double album, fifty-eight tracks, nearly two hours of music, and it was immediately too much and exactly enough. Stevens had been gesturing toward this project for years, telling interviewers he intended to record a Christmas album for each of the fifty states. He never did. But he made this instead, and it is stranger and more lasting than any of those would have been.
The Shape of It
The set draws from recordings Stevens had been quietly making and gifting to friends and family since 2001, released as a series of homemade EPs before being compiled here by Asthmatic Kitty. Most of it was recorded in spare rooms with modest gear — the kind of circumstances that would embarrass a lesser artist but suit Stevens completely. The lo-fi edges aren’t a limitation; they’re the whole aesthetic argument. These songs sound like they were found in a box in a relative’s attic.
And many of them were, in spirit. Stevens reaches deep into the public domain — traditional carols, hymns, spirituals — and then places them next to originals so gentle they could be mistaken for centuries-old. The distinction stops mattering somewhere around disc one.
His sister Marzuki Stevens appears throughout, and the family-made quality of these recordings is not incidental. It is the record. You can hear it in the way the voices crowd the microphone, in the piano that sounds like it’s in the next room, in the occasional looseness of an ending that doesn’t quite resolve.
Why It Works When It Shouldn’t
The honest answer is that Stevens is a genuinely gifted melodist operating in a genre where melody is the entire game. Christmas music depends on tune recognition and emotional shortcut, and Stevens understands both. When he reharmonizes “O Come O Come Emmanuel” or lets “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” unspool at half-pace over a banjo, he’s not being arch. He means it.
The originals hold up against that company. “Sister Winter” is one of the best things he’s written — a quiet devastation about distance and longing that happens to mention snowfall. “Christmas in the Room” works the same emotional territory without ever going soft.
There is sentimentality here, and Stevens does not apologize for it. Good. The impulse to drain sentiment from everything is its own kind of affectation.
The album also contains some tracks that are half-formed and a few that are outright slight. Fifty-eight is too many. Stevens knows this; he’s said as much. But editing it down would change its character from artifact to product, and that tradeoff is worth considering before you reach for the skip button.
This is the record you put on when the presents are wrapped and the house is quiet and you don’t actually want the night to end. It does not demand your full attention. It rewards the moments when you give it anyway.