Sufjan Stevens. Musician
The Singer-Songwriter

By Dwight Garner
Photographs by Chris Buck
Aug 21, 2004, New York

Last year, Sufjan Stevens released “Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lake State” - a strange, elegiac and warmly literate concept album that made his home state seem like its own reverberating lonely planet. This wasn’t Michael Moore’s Michigan, or the novelist Jim Harrison’s, or Eminem’s, or anyone else’s. Stevens, who was born in Detroit and grew up there and in Alanson, a small lumber town in northern Michigan, took listeners on a kind of plaintive dream-tour, from Flint to Sault Sainte Marie to Ypsilanti, in lyrics that tended to be about not just factories and marching bands but also personal heartbreak and desolation. The album was a declaration of a serious - and seriously idiosyncratic - talent.

Stevens, who sings in a confident whisper, is the kind of sensitive post-folkie who draws comparisons to performers like Nick Drake, Elliott Smith and Iron and Wine. He makes, in other words, very fine music to be bummed-out to. But Stevens - his first name is pronounced SOOF-yan - isn’t another cookie-cutter emo-boy. His meditative, lo-fi albums are speckled with small, surreal outbursts of sophisticated musicianship. (On “Greetings From Michigan,” which he produced, he plays more than a dozen instruments - banjo and acoustic guitar, glockenspiel, English horn, vibraphone and sleigh bells.) His lyrics are as likely to refer to William Blake and Flannery O’Connor as to his own anomie. And in the fashion of the writer Dave Eggers, Stevens, who is 29, has gathered around himself a sprawling and ragtag community of like-minded souls, most of them self-taught musicians.

“Our band, the Michigan Militia, has sort of a rotating set of members,” Stevens told me after a recent sold-out concert at the Mercury Lounge in New York. “Who’s playing depends on where I am in the country.”

Stevens’s songs may be scaled to small, intimate topics, but his ambitions are out-size: he has plans to write and record albums about the other 49 states as well. (”It’s daunting,” he admitted. “But I’m a man of my word.”) In the meantime, listeners will have to make do with his preternaturally lovely new CD, “Seven Swans” - an album that is perhaps less quirkily grand than “Greetings From Michigan” but more accessible and tilled with hooks you can’t shake out of your head. The album is dominated by Stevens’s banjo playing, which has an Appalachian austerity; lyrically; it touches frequently on his own Christianity. (He’s an Episcopalian.) “My listeners are fine with that,” he said, “because they know I’m not selling them anything or making any claims.”

Stevens is so soft-spoken that I asked him if he ever felt like letting loose with a gut-twisting Roger Daltrey-type scream. “Do I ever,” he said. “It’s a good time for yelling. And I can be a real baby, so I’d be great at it.”