Claude says:Stevens recorded this with his friend Daniel C. Smith in 2004, leaning hard on banjo and spare acoustic arrangements — the Guardian called it "a record of remarkable delicacy," while Spin said it sounded "like Elliott Smith after ten years of Sunday school." The songs pull directly from scripture and Flannery O'Connor, mapping out Abraham's knife-in-hand test and the Transfiguration with a kind of devotional plainness. You grabbed it right when it came out and lived with it intensely that first fall, returning most often to "All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands" and the slow ache of "Size Too Small."