Making Room for the Homeless Accordion: The Life and Times of Sufjan Stevens
By Melissa Herwaldt
Sound Collector
Issue 8
2003

Musician Sufjan Stevens went through this phase in his early twenties where every day he would fry tofu in butter, put it on 99-cent bread, and bring it in a brown bag for lunch to the skyscraper on Hudson Street in Manhattan, where he worked as a graphic designer. He made it for friends. He made it for co-workers. He ate it every day. Stevens also gained a huge reputation among friends in Brooklyn for his nearly constant sushi making. “Sushi-an” they nicknamed him. Then every Saturday morning he would make French toast. Oftentimes he made his own syrup, adding whatever he could find, melting sugar and blueberry spread down together.

These habitual ways of living mimic a definite methodical, technical aspect of Stevens’s music making, which seem to strike a balance with a softer intuition and spontaneity. Often he creates in “series,” such as 2001’s Enjoy Your Rabbit (Asthmatic Kitty Records), which is defined as “programmatic music for the Chinese Zodiac.” Although very different from the eclectic folk/indie of 1999’s A Sun Came (Asthmatic Kitty Records), there are similarities of song craft; one critic cited the related “crackling beats, spiraling guitar lines, and expanding intricacies” of both albums, paralleling them as similarly “experimental recordings.”

Stevens has often worked within a framework; in a recent e-mail exchange, he described past song series, many never produced, written as “songs for the apostles, songs for the planets, songs for different places I’ve been. More and more I find it helpful (even liberating) to impose such limitations (songs in the key of D, songs for women in the Bible, songs in 5/4), because these limitations allow me to exercise, to practice, to hone my skill (if I can use a hackneyed phrase).”

Near-absolute creative control is another constant variable in all of Stevens’s solo projects so far, from the guitar quirk of A Sun Came to the Eno-esque Enjoy Your Rabbit to the forthcoming full-length release of piano songs on Asthmatic Kitty. Stevens has recorded himself performing all the instruments, singing all the vocals and harmonies; he has overseen the album art, and more.

“Minus most of the goofy interludes, A Sun Came is an exceptional album of gorgeous songs. Sufjan’s singing is beautiful on Sun as well,” says Steven Joerg, owner of avant-jazz label AUM Fidelity. Although known as a connoisseur of avant-jazz, Joerg counts himself among Stevens’s fans. “One-person home-studio projects are nothing new, but his arranging skills make it sound like a band - which is, of course, a compliment.”

Interestingly enough, Stevens is poised to give up some of that control with a forthcoming album of banjo songs produced by Dan Smith of indie-rock superfamily the Danielson Famile (to be released on Smith’s label soundsfamilyre); it is Smith who is in the recording and mixing booth for the project, not Stevens.

Yet collaboration is not entirely new to Stevens. He began his musical performance as guitarist and recorder player for the acclaimed but short-lived indie-folk quartet Marzuki, of Holland, Michigan, where Stevens did his undergraduate studies. Despite a yearlong stint living in Bloomfield, New Jersey, with high hopes for New York City success, they recorded their full-length indie-folk album, No One Likes a Nervous Wreck, but ended up returning to Michigan exhausted and burned out.

After Marzuki’s breakup, Stevens began concentrating on his penchant for writing short stories. He left Michigan to return to New York City in a much different capacity, as a graduate student studying writing, college diploma in one hand and half a notion of performing as a solo musician in the other. It was a very quiet, subtle beginning for his solo music, hardly a beginning at all. A Sun Came was recorded in between running to and from class, from work, from the bar, from the bookstore. Often he would suspend regular recording to bring in his friends, whoever happened to be around, for random eight-track tapings. Like a camel or a cactus, his source of energy seemed limitless; he often went without sleep or adequate nourishment for days, never breaking from his rigorous creative output schedule.

“The material for my first album was compiled from four track demos and outtakes that had been recorded in Michigan, in New Jersey, in New York, in various apartments, using various instruments and equipment,” he writes. “I spent as much time mixing and mastering things together as I had recording the material. But it was fun work. As long as I have time alone, I’m able to work under any condition, in any environment. I’ve spent very little time in a studio - I find the environment uninspired and expensive. There’s no better setting than a bedroom or a kitchen. I believe in writing and recording in your domestic space, with the sounds of the sink or the refrigerator or the floorboards moving underneath.”

And even once produced, A Sun Came didn’t leave domestic space for a long time. The album spent a year collecting dust, first in boxes on the shelves of his Manhattan apartment (”Can we use this as our coffee table?” his roommates were known to ask), then in the corner of his first Brooklyn apartment, stashed in piles under his bed.

It was far from laziness; Stevens was attending graduate school, working full time, and trying to write music. In hindsight, it’s amazing that anything was created at all. “New York is an anomaly,” he writes, “Here is this cultural center providing unlimited resources, music communities, creative opportunities, and incredible food! And yet the amount of work required just to maintain a normal existence is so much that it hardly provides time for doing what you want to do. Perhaps this is why it is so appealing.”

So what changed? Why did A Sun Came come out into the sun from under the bed? How did Stevens start touring in Germany and Norway, playing to puzzled crowds who could not pin down his singular, uncategorical style? How did his merchandise start selling like hotcakes at summer festivals? The answer lies in two words: musical community. Beyond that, all one can say is that certain factors created conditions under which certain circumstances were possible.

And for Stevens, a certain community of young people intrigued by the intersection of art and faith befriended one other, which enabled him to get to know Dan Smith of The Danielsons. It was this meeting, among others, which was a pivotal turning point in his music. Whereas Stevens was willing to create and create and create music that never got heard, Smith was insisting that the world hear Danielsons’ musical message. So the two, very different and yet strikingly similar people and artists, struck up a musical friendship. Smith started inviting Stevens on tours, hiring him as his opening act, challenging him creatively and spiritually. And the admiration went both ways.

A recent Danielson Famile; newsletter read, “The Sufjan Stevens new full-length is 74 percent finished, and it is sweet banjo. . . Oh, oh, oh, I can’t wait for you to hear this one.”

When asked which Danielson song he admired so much he wished he wrote it, Stevens writes,” ‘Be Your Wildman’ from A Prayer for Every Hour. You can’t get any more candid than ‘my loins say one thing but my brain says another.’ Or later, ‘deserve to be drop kicked!’ What marvelous exasperation Dan has! On a purely semantic level, I admire the sounds of the words, the vernacular and the strange syntax and syncopation. There are so many other good ones: ‘The Lord’s Rest,’ from Tell Another Joke at the 0l’ Chopping Block, always gives me the chills.”

So now, a few years and many live shows and travels later, the word has gotten out, and with it the strengthening of Stevens’s label, Asthmatic Kitty Records. Started by music mysterioso and record buff Lowell Brams in Holland, Michigan, to originally support Michigan-based bands like Marzuki, the stakes were heightened and the breadth widened when Brams moved the label to Sante Fe, New Mexico. Now with distribution by Nail and a strong base of growing artists like Half-handed Cloud and Liz Janes, Stevens and Asthmatic Kitty stand to play off of each other’s success. It’s a very exciting time.

With critics writing such outlandish praise about Stevens as “his vision is incredibly free of cliche or formula, making it hard to even find a reasonable reference point when describing his style” and “in the end, Sufjan Stevens proves that following one’s muse is sometimes all that is needed in finding that elusive versatility,” one has to ask what all the fuss is about.

Besides having equally strong mastery of musical technique, visual art, and proportion of sound, Stevens also has an absolute knack for unique song shape, uncanny narrative, and stunningly beautiful melody. Another intriguing aspect of his music is Stevens’s appropriation of sacred text and myth. By inserting them into absolutely new and strange contexts, he tries to come to a personal understanding of their significance. Nature, art, myth, and sacred text emerge as a chaotically complex pattern of interwoven symbols. The listener, too, reapproaches preconceived ideas by hearing them presented anew in the overall composition of an album or song.

A Sun Came makes this apparent immediately. “Wordsworth’s Prelude” utilizes material from Romantic poetry, while other tracks incorporate characters and episodes from Greek and Roman mythologies, Hollywood films (Demetrius), and even American fiction (according to Stevens, the song “Kill” is taken from Sherwood Anderson’s short story “The Man Who Became a Woman”).

“I started seriously writing songs around the same time I was studying English Romantic literature in college,” he said. “Of course, Wordsworth and Coleridge galvanized me to no end, in the most self-conscious way. I’m still daunted by Blake’s limitless imagination. For starters, I transcribed myths - from Wordsworth’s poetry, or from Greek mythology, or even from Isaiah. I would read about anything then and use it for song material, from Penelope to Aristaeus, the Bee-Keeper. I think of mythology as supernatural equipment for understanding a symbolic language that can be explained in no other way, except through story. I don’t think there’s a song on that album that doesn’t allude to a previous text or myth.”

This penchant for absorbing the stuff of legends, liturgy, symbol, time, and memory and outputting it musically is perhaps most fully realized on Enjoy Your Rabbit. This album is the one for which Stevens is well known, and it has quite consistently appeared in the top of American college-radio play charts. It’s a bit strange, since this, perhaps, is Stevens’s least accessible work, some of it manifested in shrill electronica.

“Of course, the album of zodiac songs is fixed in Chinese mythology,” says Stevens, “which I know very little about. I merely appropriated the animals and fabricated my own myths, which were more Western. Since that album has no text, it’s a little more frustrating to talk about ‘meaning’ without becoming philosophical or abstract. I call the songs programmatic because there is an undisclosed narrative waiting to be transcribed internally, subjectively. Music is hardly a static, isolated discipline. It’s an incredibly coercive, symbolic form of communication that can stimulate words and visions.” Although fascinated by these symbols and ideas, he believes, “Our work is very simple: to be mature and complete, to live and move and have our being.”

Though Stevens is ever striving for maturation and completion, it is, oddly enough, children and music novices with whom Stevens enjoys playing the most. The more sophisticated his own music gets, the more fascinated he is by unlearned music outsiders. It seems Stevens is perpetually trying to unlearn his own legacy.

“Children are not daunted by the effort to make music; they simply sing, erratically, off-key, improvised,” he writes. “They are not shy - they make up words and don’t bother to rhyme. They participate in the song as if it is the most natural thing in the world. This is a preternatural condition we have lost as adults. Trained musicians become competitive zealots who exert themselves to no end. It really is no fun to work with them. They have predetermined ideas and will not allow for diversions. They are always conscious of meter and key signature and tempo changes. Each phrase is preconceived. I’m one of these people. I guess I’ve found an interest in the untrained ear because a musical novice is far less informed by the conventions of music theory and won’t be so bothered by breaking the rules.”

One of the newest artists on the Asthmatic Kitty roster is Liz Janes, a sudden burst of light discovered by Stevens through his friendship with Janes’s husband, Mike Kaufmann (of the economically experimental band Therefore). After listening to a tape of the cryptic little songs she had been recording on four-track, he was struck by the singular beauty of her music and immediately began encouraging her, eventually leading her to Asthmatic Kitty and the good graces of Lowell Brams. The encouragement he had received from Smith, Brams, and others had come full circle.

Janes’s unentrenched blues have been compared to the heartbreaking swagger of Nina Simone, as well as the uninhibited howl of Prince. “Liz is a good example because she was previously entrenched in the noise scene, which had nothing to do with music theory,” he writes. “And yet her songs make reference to the types of music that are widely theorized: blues and jazz and country. She has that notorious elastic voice so common in blues singing, and yet her way of shaping a phrase is so original that it evades pretense. Also, her sense of timing is so unnerving that it would drive any jazz musician mad. She unknowingly changes time signature and key. She adds beats and speeds up and slows down. I didn’t really care too much about that. I was just stunned by her audacity.”

While it’s clear that musical community has yielded wonderful collaboration, friendship, and great reward for Stevens; everything comes with pros and cons. Stevens lives, like so many others in NYC, crowded into his own cubbyhole of a loft space with too many messy guys in a hip part of Brooklyn he half detests and half uses to his advantage. In fact, Stevens has never, ever lived alone. And there always seems to be a parade of friends and fans shuffling through, wherever he is. It seems the only time Stevens ever had true isolation was during the recording of his forthcoming piano album from Asthmatic Kitty. Last January he left the dirt and the noise behind for a month-long sabbatical to record piano songs in Northern Michigan, at his sister’s log cabin.

“The setting was more than ideal: complete isolation, insulated by six feet of snow, in the middle of the woods, with only a grand piano and a coffee maker,” Stevens writes. “I relished it. I have more material from that session than I know what to do with, and it has been a real task editing it down to 12 songs for the record.”

It was here, in these same Michigan roots, that Stevens first cleared a space in his life for music. Growing up in Petoskey, Michigan, his tastes formed, as they always do, in response to what his brother and sisters were listening to. “My sisters listened to Pat Benetar and The Cure and U2, which I never liked very much,” writes Stevens. “My older brother (who had a taste for classic rock) made me a ‘greatest hits’ tape of early Yes material. It was so dynamic and strange at the time. But I still listen to it. There isn’t anything as musical, or as skillful, with as much edge. They were able to successfully incorporate smart harmonies with jazz drumming and sophisticated guitar rhythms, all in the context of rock ‘n’ roll. I’ve also always loved Baroque cantata music. I remember when one of my father’s friend died of cancer and I was given his anthology of Baroque music, on 30 cassette tapes, everything from Vivaldi to Marcello to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. I was a sucker for all those Italian embellishments.”

Later in life his own music was challenged at the famous Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, where Stevens attended ninth grade. “I had poor embouchure,” he says. “I bit my reed with my teeth. I was last chair. I was not very musical, actually. I loved the oboe, I really did, but something about all those minor harmonic scales and breathing exercises did me in. So I started playing piano, by ear. I’d listen to the students playing Chopin next door and try to mimic their flourishes with wild improvisation. I was having such a good time! It was such an affectionate instrument, with a lid and hammers and internal organs, like a human being! Plus you could play more than one note at a time. Imagine that!”

Stevens describes instruments like the fiction writer that he is, imbuing them with human characteristics in a slightly disconcerting way. Each instrument, he says, has its own disposition. Listening to his descriptions, one gets the idea of Stevens, alone in a recording studio, surrounded by instruments all clamoring for his attention and love. “These are my best friends,” he says. “The piano, he writes, “barks and yells” and “sits there like a very large dog begging at the dinner table. It is so demanding. “While a guitar, on the other hand, “hums. The guitar is something you hold in your arms, like a small child.” The oboe? “Uncivil and pushy, like a younger sister with chicken pox. “The banjo? “A lanky man with crutches.” The drums? “The drums are a litter of kittens all making noise at once, gasping for milk. “The xylophone is “a school-teacher with perfect posture waiting to see who acts up.” And don’t forget: “the hysterical recorder, who suffers from asthma,” the “choleric Casiotone,” and finally, “the melancholy vibraphone, with its rotating fans and rubber mallets.” Stevens calls himself a foster parent of instruments, making room for “the homeless accordion, with its allergies and broken keys, or the harmonica, which is hard to turn away because it is so small.” It would make a great comic book. “Sufjan and The Choleric Casiotone in the Musical Lagoon.”

But destiny wouldn’t keep Stevens at Interlochen for long. Just as fast as he began to find his own way in the world of child prodigies, his parents ran out of money, and he went back to Petoskey. This was another turning point, and perhaps the reason that he currently finds himself developed as a writer as well as a musician, and the reason for the “elusive versatility” the critics coo about.

And so it’s clear that despite the current attention for the electronic Enjoy Your Rabbit, which will no doubt bring his beloved G4 and ProTools proficiency to the forefront, Stevens remains a very organic character. He wears dirty hunting caps in the heat of summer, with wool-lined earflaps. If he had the time, he’d plant a garden right now, with “vegetables. Squash, zucchini, spinach, peas. Basil, peppermint, and ginger.” He leaves the broken soles of his last pair of shoes, black boots, in the bar and doesn’t look back. He bikes full-grown women around on his handlebars. He doesn’t always want to live in the city. No. Someday he’ll settle down and teach writing at a university in Vermont or Wisconsin. “Somewhere with cattle and cornfields.”

But all sides of Stevens are not so quiet. The rumor is that recently Stevens and two friends got kicked out of Ludlow studios for playing too loud and trashing the place. Apparently Stevens was scraping his guitar against the amplifiers.

It’s clear that Stevens has more than one approach to life, as well as more than one approach musically. On the Asthmatic Kitty Records web page (www.asthmatickitty.com), Stevens defines himself as a knitter of ski caps, a writer of short fiction, a graphic designer - everything but a singer-songwriter. Is that a label he avoids purposely? Is he still avoiding the role that so many admirers would like to pin as a permanent part of his destiny?

“No. I’m also a singer-songwriter,” he says at last, “We’ll add that in. People aren’t just one thing, you know. They’re many things.”