The Welcome Wagon: Welcome to the Welcome Wagon
By Grant Smith /// published in the December 2008 issue
The Welcome Wagon go out of their way to point out that they’re a gospel band, as if this generic distinction were helpful or meaningful. “A married couple… who execute a genre of gospel music that is refreshingly plain,” reads a primer on their website, one that continues, in the register of twee preciousness that has become the norm in post-Pavement indie rock, to inform us that member (the Reverend) Thomas Vito Aiuto, raised by “a gentleman farmer and a choir teacher mother,” is a graduate Princeton Theological Seminary now serving as senior pastor at Resurrection Presbyterian Church. (Amusing! Surprising! Even a bit cute!) In Williamsburg, Brooklyn. (Oh, never mind.) His wife, Monique, has worked “as a preschool teacher, craftmaker for Martha Stewart, and as a mother.” I think I like her better.
Anyway, a quibble: “refreshingly plain?” Gospel music has fairly meager generic requirements. Three I can think of: (1) It ought to be about God. (2) It should contain few curse words, except, perhaps, those that are a part of the vocabulary of damnation. (3) It should not resemble prog-rock in tone or philosophy. Nor gangsta rap or hardcore punk. (But maybe No Wave). Perhaps their point in emphasizing this supposed plainness is to underline the fact that they have few commonalities with, say, Creed, Switchfoot, or anyone that might appear on the Hour of Power. In any event, there is plenty of very plain gospel music, most of it sung by choirs in churches and not signed to Asthmatic Kitty, but, to any reasonable listener, the Welcome Wagon’s music is not, in any sense of the word, plain. This is because Sufjan Stevens produced Welcome to the Welcome Wagon, their debut album.
And because Sufjan Stevens, apparently, is not a producer with a light, barely-perceptible touch, this will be a positive review. That is to say, until the release of California (or Oregon, or New Jersey, or Rhode Island) — all candidates rumored on the internet to be the next in Sufjan’s fifty-state sequence — this can stand as a momentary satiation of Stevens’ devotees hankering for baroque instrumentation (French horn! glockenspiel! harpsichord?), quivering mid-registers and warbly falsettos, and folksy, though also maximalist, arrangements. Stevens is, semi-famously, a Christian himself, and his collaborators only up the Jesus by about fifteen percent. Maybe twenty. Certainly tolerable enough levels for us heathens.
It’s probably most helpful to point out precisely where one is reminded that this is not, in fact, a Sufjan Stevens record: “Jesus,” appropriately and unhelpfully titled, has moments of genuine gospel-ness, particularly the unanimous repetition of the title with varying inflections, as if Vito, Monique, and (is that him?!) Sufjan are playing a theater warm-up exercise. They ask the Lord to “help me in my weakness / ‘Cos I’m falling out of grace,” which would also seem to conform to Gospel Criterion No. One. Hilariously, it’s a Velvet Underground cover. Really.
“Half a Person” has a call-and-response structure that I’d imagine might be used by real choirs in real churches. But it’s a Smiths cover, and I must say, I prefer Morrissey’s aggressive dreariness to Monique’s fragile, sappy delivery. And the extended outro to “I Am A Stranger” seems to feature a genuine gospel choir. They make all sorts of woo-ing sounds in various registers, which I can’t say I’m particularly fond of. And lyrics likes the following abound, from “Deep Were His Wounds, And Red”: “He gave when He was crucified / Our burdened souls to save / What fearful death he died! / Though each of us, though dead in sin / through Christ’s eternal life, may win.”
But, by and large, one could easily mistake this for one of Sufjan’s future stops along the Bible Belt. While excessive exposure to Stevens has been known to induce cravings for some good ol’ rock n’ roll as the Sufjan faithful know, he has moments of exquisite beauty that perilously approach, without crossing, the sugar/saccharine border.
The Welcome Wagon has one of those: “American Legion” at 1:15 to 1:19. “All the rest is sealed up behind mem-o-ry” (ascending) “fad-ing aw-ay” (descending, with xylophone?). Listen to it, and put in a prayer for the state of your choice. If God isn’t listening, maybe Sufjan is.
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