Sufjan Stevens has shared a new track.
‘Tonya Harding’ is a standalone release centred on the American ice skater…Tonya Harding (bet you didn’t see that coming), and has been in the works in one way or another for 26 years. Sufjan Stevens has “been trying to write a Tonya Harding song since I first saw her skate at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in 1991,” a note accompanying the release explains.
“The hard facts of her life are so strange, disputable, heroic, unprecedented, and indelibly American. A poor outsider, her rise to fame in the skating rink was seen, by some, as a blemish on a sport that favoured sophistication and style,” Sufjan says. Things were made worse, he continues, in January 1994, when “Tonya’s then-boyfriend Jeff Gillooly hired an assailant, Shane Stant, to break fellow figure skater Nancy Kerrigan’s leg at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships at Cobo Arena in Detroit, so that she would be unable to compete at the upcoming Winter Olympics. The after-math of the attack was recorded on camera and ultimately set off a media frenzy (and an FBI investigation).”
Check out ‘Tonya Harding’ below.