Savages’ Jehnny Beth Responds To Sufjan Stevens’ Critique Of Their Album Cover
Back when Savages’ debut LP Silence Yourself came out in 2013, Sufjan Stevens (of all people) wrote a nerdy Tumblr post critiquing “a very uncool typography blunder” on their album artwork. The London-based punk band didn’t respond at the time, but three long years later frontwoman Jehnny Beth has finally addressed it on her Beats 1 radio show Start Making Sense.
After a listener requested that she play Stevens’ 25-minute Age Of Adz opus “Impossible Soul,” she refused on the grounds that it’s ridiculous to play such a long song on the radio, but also because of his earlier comments about the group. “I don’t think I’d like to play some Sufjan Stevens on my show anyway,” she said. “I remember when my first record with Savages came out… He wrote a quite funny blog post about how much he hated our album cover, and went into quite extensive detail — the font, everything. It was cute, especially as I was looking at his own album covers… Mhmm … I’m going to say, I was not really very impressed.”
Apple Music has characterized these relatively innocuous comments as Beth “throwing shade” at Stevens (it’s not), but it is pretty funny that it’s still a thing worth mentioning all these years later, especially because Stevens seems to like the music itself: “I will never forgive your awkward italics, but I will forever sing your anthems to my children’s children,” he wrote in the 2013 post, calling them a “very cool” band.
Perhaps more inflammatory is her assertion that Pearl Jam Unplugged is better than Nirvana Unplugged: