Sufjan Stevens’s pastoral folk pop finds an audience in the big city
Time Out New York
Issue 442: March 18–March 25, 2004

By Leah Greenblatt

When Sufjan Stevens was 19, he fell in love. “It was in college,” he remembers, nursing a tall Americano in a midtown deli. “I think I was a sophomore. A friend of mine who was going home for the summer loaned me his nylon six-string, and I spent every day with it. It was like meeting that special someone—there’s a sort of wordless communication, and the chemistry between you is just…I felt like I had a best friend. Oh, jeez,” he breaks off, laughing. “That’s really, really cheesy.”

Perhaps, but what young romance isn’t? Nearly a decade later, the love between man (pronouncing his name correctly—”SOOF-yun”—will earn the endless respect of your local record-store clerk) and guitar endures. Not that it’s been an entirely monogamous relationship; Stevens’s third album, last year’s Greetings from Michigan, the Great Lakes State, showcased the elegiac singer-songwriter on a veritable orgy of instruments, including organ, banjo, vibraphone, wood flute, oboe, drums and glockenspiel.

Listeners were taken by the Upper Peninsula native’s dreamy folk-pop poeticism and effervescent live shows—consistently sold-out affairs featuring Stevens’s Michigan Militia band and choir. Composed mostly of Stevens’s friends and decked out in park-ranger–like outfits, the Militia proved all the more charming for its amateurism, turning each performance into a joyfully off-kilter celebration.

Michigan was presented as only the first in what Stevens ambitiously promised would be a run of albums covering each of the 50 states—a plan the brand-new Seven Swans would seem to derail. Not so, he inists: “Swans was written prior to Michigan, but it was recorded around the same time,” he explains. “So I haven’t actually taken a break at all—I’m working on Illinois right now, and on Rhode Island as a seven-inch.”

Still, it’s Michigan Stevens continues to come back to in his work. A graduate of the New School’s fiction-writing master’s program, he is currently at work on a book of short stories about the state. But as much as it may appear that the artist longs for the land of his youth, he’s actually quite happy to stay put in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, his home for the past five years: “I miss [Michigan] abstractly,” he says, “but I don’t miss the day to day of it. I’ve gone back a couple times since I’ve released the record and it’s honestly been a little disappointing—there was no catharsis, there was no revelation. It just shows that memory is conditioned by our imaginations and our romantic inclinations and our sentimentality. And Michigan is as much a part of my imagination as it is a part of my reality.”

Today, the singer’s reality includes a long-standing collaboration with the Danielson Famile, the indie-pop siblings known for their earnest Christianity, heart-emblazoned nurse uniforms and oddly endearing performances. Stevens is a sort of honorary member of the family, having donned the scrubs for many shows, and he collaborated with Famile leader Daniel Smith on Swans, just released on Smith’s Sounds Familyre label.

Much like Michigan, the album coalesces around Stevens’s hushed lyricism and gentle folk-pop instincts. But unlike its predecessor, it navigates a steep emotional path, one rife with fractured biblical imagery. Stevens prefers not to discuss his personal beliefs, saying only that his faith is “not really appropriate for a public forum.” He acknowledges, though, that the bridge between music and spirituality is “a very important connection. I just think that when you start preaching and politicizing in pop music, it’s emotionally very confusing, and it creates a lot of ambivalence.”

His exploration of topics not often addressed in mainstream music has garnered him a surprising number of secular fans. Still, Stevens’s wavery, almost painfully intimate singing and unusual arrangements are so arresting, and his personal presence so shy and self-effacing, that it’s often difficult to imagine him as a real person out in the world—much less in big, bad New York City—going about his everyday life. “I’m actually a very normal guy,” he insists. “But then,” he says with a laugh, “you can’t trust anything I say. And I can’t trust anything you say about me.”

Seven Swans is out now.