"Welcome to Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where you go to die forever."
But does the "forever" in the title refer the cemetery's finality or Hollywood's immortality? So mused Sufjan Stevens, as he often did on Thursday night, with a mix of deadly serious philosophizing and lighthearted celestial banter.
The concert marked one of only four this summer in support of Planetarium, a solar-system-inspired album largely sung by Stevens but collectively created and performed by Bryce Dessner of the National, drummer James McAlister and composer Nico Muhly—who sparked the collaboration following a 2011 concert hall commission.
"Let's explore space together," Stevens continued.
All photographs by Rozette Rago.
The set tackled Planetarium in order, hopping from one planet to the next—"There's one more planet," remarked Stevens toward the end of the set, "if you're not too stoned and you've been paying attention"—with spacey squelches, cosmic blips and visuals that felt straight out of, let's say, an enhanced ride on Space Mountain. Though the music may be orbit-bound in name, the cemetery setting reinforced the celestial tracks' fascination with earthbound mundanity and mortality, with a little bit of Greek and Roman mythology thrown in for good measure.
The music never goes quite far enough, though; it never nears Rush-esque levels of planetarium-show rock, nor Stevens's own cathartic outsider art opuses of The Age of Adz. Only the set- and album-closing "Mercury" approaches the full potential of its collaborators' combined talents, with a beautiful blend of brass, chimes and shimmery guitar underneath Stevens's hushed vocals.
Though some in the crowd seemed certain there'd be an encore of songs from Illinois or the National, those would never come. But the two-song encore did start with "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," a sweetly spare, droning and Auto-Tuned take on the standard, performed in the very cemetery that's home to the graves of Judy Garland and Toto—or, in Toto's case, a cenotaph, as Stevens pointed out, since the Ventura Freeway paved over the iconic pup's original resting place. It was the opening countdown of a "Space Oddity" cover that finally brought the blanket-bound crowd to its feet—though it achieved liftoff, it never quite made the grade.
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