The recorded version of “Seven Swans” on Sufjan Stevens’ album of the same name always seemed a bit too subdued for the apocalyptic revelation it presents. Stevens opened his recent show at the beautiful Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver, BC (and all the shows on his recent tour) with that song, alone, spotlighted, scraping timidly at a banjo and murmuring, in his flawless falsetto, about signs in the sky.

Behind him, the outline of an ensemble too big to be called a rock band was waiting to burst, and about two minutes in, they did. Imagine two drum sets, two trombones, two keyboards, two guitars, and bass guitar all going “DAH NAHHHH!” at the same time. It’s kind of hard to explain with adjectives.

“Awesome” might be a good one.

The tone thus set—with a dark and blazing version of a song about the end of the world and the relentless pursuit of man by God—this ensemble spent the next sixty to seventy minutes playing material from Stevens’ new collection of disturbing, confusing, and beautiful music, The Age of Adz.

We sat rapt as Stevens and his band plowed through these difficult songs, which are a tangled mess of ideas about love, sickness, prophecy, the end of the world, mental illness, heartache, and the possibility of some kind of divine cosmic purpose.

Through a pair of headphones, The Age of Adz is a beautiful and unsettling experience, an electronic symphony of anxiety. In live performance, however, the inward-focused anxiety came out as something more like confused triumph and belief.

The enormous choruses of “Vesuvius” and “Age of Adz” seemed to shake the bodies of the singers (nearly all the band members seemed to be singers at one time or another). The post-modern funk grooves of “Get Real Get Right” and “I Walked” were proclaimed boldly, with Stevens slinking about in shiny disco pants. It’s kind of hard to explain with verbs.

“Dancing” might be a good one.

Stevens stopped several times to explain his approach to the new songs—that he wanted to stop approaching songs from a highly structured, narrative perspective, and write instead from a place of instinct, body, and immediacy—and their connection to Royal Robertson, a sign-painter whose mental illness led him to believe his wife had become a prostitute and who devoted the later years of his life to painting mythological and religious portraits of cosmic destruction.

These two things are somehow twisted up in each other, so that the songs emerge as both personal declarations of failed love and meditations on whether existence itself is even worth it, or if Stevens, Robertson, and all of us are deluded when we see prophecy and end times everywhere.

The confusion and questions melted away, though, at the precise moment that we all started believing in “Impossible Soul.”

A warning: if you attend one of the remaining concerts on this tour over the next few weeks, and you hear simple quarter notes on the piano and Stevens uttering the word “wo-o-o-man,” you are about to hear a song that lasts twenty-five minutes. It is called “Impossible Soul,” and it is an absurd, audacious thing that cannot really be called a pop song, yet cannot be anything else.

In Vancouver, at least, we started believing in “Impossible Soul” around the sixteen-minute mark, the part that repeated “we can do much more together” over and over, the part where Stevens and his back-up singers did a choreographed white-person hip-hop routine, the part where the autotune kicked in and the song became a dance jam, the part where we rose to our feet and started clapping.

And once we were believing, all those questions and problems and conflicts and tensions in the songs left. Stevens fell to his knees and sang “it’s not so impossible.” We knew what he meant.

Maybe this all sounds incoherent if you didn’t see the show. All I’m trying to say is, I saw a really good concert last week.

It’s kind of hard to explain with words.