He made a lot of mistakes. He made a lot of mistakes. Yes he did. From forgetting lines and false starts to long, drawn out songs—this concert was not what I thought it would be. I am a big fan of Sufjan Stevens. I have all of his albums. And I’d been looking forward to seeing him for a long time. But Saturday’s sold-out concert at The Orpheum was a bit of a letdown.

It was messy and disorganized. “It’s like a Sufjan Stevens song-writing workshop tonight,” Stevens said. And he wasn’t lying.

He started with “Seven Swans” off of the album of the same name in the quintessential Stevens fashion. Just him and his banjo. And it was wonderful. Then the rest of the band came out and joined him on stage to play the next song.

“Too Much” came off of the new album, and it was good, too. The bulk of the songs performed on Saturday were from the new album Age of Adz, but the show started to go downhill after the fourth or fifth song.

It was too much for the band to keep together. The new album is very busy, very dense, very much involved. And it seemed like the band could have used a couple more rehearsals to get it all figured out. The rhythms weren’t always synched, and vocals weren’t always in key. On an unrelated note, I spent a lot of time figuring out just what was going on with Stevens’s pants.

The backup dancers and singers were cutesy and helped with the visual quality of the performance but took the attention away from Stevens. The visual art was fantastic—lights and images inspired by Lousiana schizophrenic artist Royal Robertson. Stevens took about 15 minutes out of the show to talk about Robertson and his life in Louisiana and how the art inspired Stevens’s new album.

The art used really was awesome and went along well with the songs played. It was displayed on two separate screens, a sheer screen behind the band and another that would drop down in front of them intermittently throughout  the show.

If anyone could do without autotune, it’s Stevens. And yet, the 25 minute song “Impossible Soul” had entirely too much autotune, too much repetition and too much mediocrity. The song itself isn’t that great, certainly not worth 25 minutes on the album and definitely not worth that much of my time or money in person. Especially not for $50. “You paid for this,” Stevens said jokingly.

The show ended with “Chicago,” a crowd favorite. And thank God, because all the new songs are hardly made for singing along. The encore was better than the actual show. Stevens returned to the stage to play songs from older albums, songs the audience was more familiar with. He ended with the one song I had hoped to hear, “The Dress Looks Nice on You” from Seven Swans. And after a slow start while the band tuned and retuned instruments, it really ended well.

It’s too bad that the rest of the show wasn’t more integrated with old and new songs. It would have been better for keeping the attention of the audience and the variation would have salvaged the show’s integrity.