Detroit singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Sufjan Stevens’ website succinctly describes his unusual artistry: “Sufjan Stevens mixes autobiography, religious fantasy, and regional history to create folk songs of grand proportions”. In the past, the epic scale of his aesthetic horizons have been exemplified by an album based on the 12 Chinese zodiac animals (Enjoy Your Rabbit), two conceptual albums about individual American states (Michigan and Illinois), a song for the AIDS benefit album Dark Was the Night ("You Are the Blood"), and a collection of songs about the solar system (Planetarium).
The proportions are similarly resplendent on “Tonya Harding”, the well-timed one-off single he released last month. It comes in two versions: a more majestic D major rendering, and in a more minimalist form (in Eb major). Like the recent Margot Robbie-led biopic (I, Tonya), Stevens aims to counter the callous manner in which Harding was publicly shamed, humiliated and reviled by the press as her saga as “America’s sweetheart with a dark twist” unfolded under intense public scrutiny. (It was submitted for the film’s soundtrack, but the movie’s music supervisors rejected it - presumably because its elegiac tone did not fit the film's camp aesthetic).
The elegant and heart-stirring melodies in both versions do justice to the kind of effortless poise and precision that figure skaters strive to achieve on the ice (‘Triple axel on high/ A delightful disaster/ You jumped farther and faster/ You were always so full of surprises’), while alluding to her precarious working-class origins that placed her at a disadvantage to more "sophisticated" rivals Kristi Yamaguchi and Nancy Kerrigan (‘Just some Portland white trash/ You confronted your sorrow/ Like there was no tomorrow’). After a series of literal recounts of the key events in her backstory (the whack head around the world, the untied laces, the fall from grace, the public flaying), the song elevates her to grand symbolic heights: ‘My American princess/ May God bless you with incense/ You’re my shining American star’. The most memorable couplet points towards the gritty personal circumstances - an unloving childhood and an abusive marriage - that Harding endured, in the form of friendly advice (albeit to a woman who hardly needs it at this point in her life): ‘Well this world is a bitch, girl/ Don’t end up in a ditch, girl’.
What is missing from the song - and not widely known - is Harding's eventual revelation of the extent of the domestic violence she endured at the hands of her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly. Sarah Marshall's 2014 longform article for Believer Magazine recounts the dire circumstances that had initially prevented her from reporting him to the FBI:
"In discussing her failure to come forward upon finding out about Jeff’s role in the assault after the fact—the only crime of which she was eventually convicted—Tonya said that Jeff’s abuse had only grown more severe following the attack on Nancy. He had put the plot in motion, she believed, because he was angry that she had reunited with him only at the USFSA’s request, and that she planned to leave him as soon as she had competed at the Games. “When he found out,” she said, “he came unglued… He told me he’d ruin me.” If this really was his plan, he could hardly have been more successful.
After the attack, Tonya told her interviewer, Jeff decided to threaten her by holding a gun to her head, letting two other men rape her, and then raping her himself, telling her he would kill her if she took her story to the FBI. Even if one finds reason to disbelieve this claim, Tonya’s history of abuse, her justifiable lack of trust in authority figures, and her equally justifiable fear of how the public might treat her if she came forward with what she knew all make her failure to act seem perfectly fathomable."
Stevens may have delivered on his artistic intentions to depict Harding’s arresting story and indefatigable survival instincts with “dignity and grace”, but the ex-Olympic figure skater (who now goes by Tonya Price) is not impressed. In a recent New York Times profile, she revealed to Taffy Brodesser-Akner that she considers Stevens to be a part of the abusive media ecosystem that exploited her infamy:
“She doesn’t want anything to do with Sufjan Stevens’s lovely song about her. Did he call her first to talk to her? Did any of those people writing their defenses of her call her up and ask if they could make money using her name? No! “Who gives these people permission to use my name?””
