Put On Your New Jersey!
A proposal for the third installment of Sufjan Stevens’ 50 states project, or, New Jersey is the Rodney Dangerfield of America
By Arye Dworken
Photos by Denny Renshaw

In truth, I can’t recall the last appropriate homage to my most favorite state. Yes, there was Zach Braff’s Garden State, the coming-of-age indie-hit, but its earnest and “eccentric” tone inaccurately portrayed Newark as if it were a Califomia suburb. Despite the young star’s best intentions, New Jersey, as usual, didn’t get no respect.

As a child, New Yorkers constantly mocked my home, dubbing it the “armpit of America.” But if one were to record an album devoted to the splendor and oddness of the foul-smelling state, he or she would find many wonderful trivial treasures. For example, did you know that New Jersey has the most diners per square mile in the world? Moreover, the largest seaport in the United States is located in quant Elizabeth, N.J., the city in which I grew up and spent my best years in a parking lot of a bustling 7-Eleven.

Besides the praiseworthy dock and even bragging rights to the largest petroleum containment outside the Middle East, Elizabeth also boasts the first Ikea in America. And if Swedish armoires aren’t American enough for you, consider that the first baseball game was played in Hoboken, which would make New Jersey, the Garden State, the epitome of America right alongside apple pie and Grandma.

My First Encounter with Sufjan Stevens, or, Before the Expectations, Jan. 9, 2004

It is quite possibly the coldest day yet of the winter season in New York City, yet Sufjan (pronounced “soof-yahn”) Stevens walks into Teany, Moby’s small Lower East Side cafe, without a coat. Instead, he is layered in bundles, shirt over shirt, with a scarf wrapped around his neck multiple times, tightened to the point of obsessive. He says he is used to weather like this. After all, it’s colder in Michigan, the state where Stevens grew up.

Stevens, just rising from obscurity at the time, is impossibly serene and beautiful. His sincere eyes gaze uncompromisingly like those of a deer head mounted on a wall. He projects an otherworldly presence, or some might say a social awkwardness, that is both mysterious and beguiling. At certain points throughout the night, Stevens will peer beyond me like a lost child too overwhelmed to speak. He talks deliberately and softly and intermittently during our conversation.

A waiter approaches to take our order. Stevens scratches his stubbled chin and asks for an English tea but not one that tastes like “aristocracy or royalty - something common.”

“That’s how I like my women,” I joke.

Stevens smiles. Somewhat.

Michigan, the first record of his preposterously ambitious 50 States Project (Stevens plans to record an album for every state in the nation), has just been released and Stevens is reluctant to discuss his work at length. At one point, he sighs and apologizes for not being prepared with articulate responses. “These are really hard questions [you're asking me], and I feel like an idiot for answering them wrong,” Stevens says. “I thought you were going to ask me simple things like how I play the piano.” His attitude is justifiable; he recorded the songs for both Michigan and its follow-up Seven Swans simply because the songs were on his mind. Stevens says he never anticipated anyone would be interested in his music.

But Stevens’ modesty is antithetical to his vision. He is an uncompromising artist who at times creates haunting beauty while at others produces bombastic thrills. Michigan and the acoustic-leaning Seven Swans are evocative trips into suburbia, capturing an unbiased snapshot of America. His honey-glazed voice is the perfect accompaniment for his tales of desperation, longing, honesty and life. Stevens is an orchestral Michael Moore, a documentarian with a penchant for the flugelhorn.

“Truthfully, because most of the stuff I write is on a whim, I never expected people to grab onto it like they have,” Stevens says. “But, on the other hand, I also want to be generous as a musician and a storyteller.”

Stevens modestly looks down and take another sip of his “common” tea. “And one way I could do that is by recording 50 consecutive records.”

A Proposal For The Third Installment of the 50 States Project, Part II, or, Enough With The Bon Jovi Jokes!

There’s no shortage of famous people in California or New York. The list is potentially endless. Yet New Jersey has a well-known short list of societal contributors. Essentially, there’s Jon Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen and Frank Sinatra. Oh, and Kevin Smith. Sorry about that one. With a little research, though, you’ll find that New Jersey is actually a hotbed of zeitgeist participants.

First you’ll discover that comedic innovators Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were respectively born in Paterson and Asbury Park. Arbiters of great literature Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and Judy Blume all started weaving their quintessential American yarns in Newark. If pretentious art is your thing, there’s poet Allen Ginsberg, photographer Irving Penn and, ahem, Jerry Lewis. And while inventor Thomas Alva Edison was not born in Edison, N.J., he did invent most of his historical contributions in West Orange.

Additionally, the Garden State is rife with legends and ghost stories. Among the most notorious is the Jersey Devil, a mythic flying creature said to inhabit Jersey’s Pine Barrens. And while Chicago has its John Wayne Gacy Jr., New Jersey has Richard “Iceman” Kuklinski, a serial killer convicted of an unfathomable 40 murders. There’s even a magazine devoted to the eccentricities of my home state called Weird N.J., which includes features such as “Cemetery Safari,” “Jersey UFOs” and “Only Go There At Nights.” If this place doesn’t practically write it’s own album, then you may as well quit this 50 States thing. After all, South Dakota is gonna be a bitch in comparison.

The Story ofSufjan Stevens, or, Yes, There Are Some People Still Calling Him “Soof-Jan”

Sufjan Stevens, whose Armenian first name means “comes with a sword,” was born in 1975 in Detroit and lived there until he was 9. He attended the Detroit Waldorf School, which promises the parents of potential applicants that it will turn every child into “a gift to the world.” Eventually, the Stevens family left the financially depressing city and moved to Alanson, a town in the Michigan countryside, where Stevens sucked his thumb until he was 11 and soaked in the peacefulness of the rural life.

The few details Stevens shares about his upbringing seem unusual and unconventional. “My mother would use a Ouija board sometimes, and we would talk to the ghosts of Elvis and Helen Keller,” he says. “My parents, at one point, were convinced that they were star people.” Stevens also informs me that he was “sort of born” into a Subud cult, a way of life that, according to the official Web site of the World Subud Association, is “not a new religion nor a sect of any religion - nor is it a teaching. It is only a symbol for the possibility for mankind to follow the right way of living.”

In junior high school, Stevens joined the school band. He was tricked into picking up the oboe — he wanted to play the clarinet — and learned such songs as the Kingsmen’s “Louie, Louie.” From there, he spent his freshman year at Interlochen Arts Academy, a private boarding school for the arts, but transferred, for reasons unexplained, to a public school for his three remaining high school years. Stevens picked up an acoustic guitar during his second year of college and recorded intimate bedroom folk that, as he warns, will never see the light of day. “I did not have the best discretion back then,” he says. “I wasn’t very responsible as a songwriter, and when I listen to those songs, it’s almost painful.”

After college, Stevens moved to New York City like most aimless artists and enrolled in the New School for Social Research to obtain a master’s degree in creative writing. “Initially, I wanted to be a writer, not a musician,” he says. “I thought I would write the Great American Novel — or several of them.” With no success as a fiction writer, Stevens began recording music again, releasing his first album, the perplexing and overlooked A Sun Came, in 2000 (reissued in 2004 on Asthmatic Kitty Records). His second album, Enjoy Your Rabbit, a self-described “collection of programmatic, symphonic songs for the animals of the Chinese zodiac” is, in summation, truly odd. Having embraced his Eno, and sometimes his presumptuous super-Eno, Stevens composed a bloated 80-minute instrumental album full of spatial echoes and ambient circles, which also feels necessary for his own musical development as if it were the outlet he needed to get the kinks out of his system.

Noticing the ambivalent response to his music and writing, a determined Stevens soon thereafter ventured into a more accessible form of songwriting, combining his leftover fiction ideas with his newfound desire to incorporate melody into his artistic palette. And that is how he wound up in Michigan.

A Proposal For The Third Installment of the 50 States Project, Part III, or, Get to Know New Jersey, Officially Speaking.

Did you know that New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the U.S.? The state, the fifth smallest in the nation, is named after the island of Jersey in the English Channel. The eastern goldfinch was adopted as the New Jersey state bird in 1935, and the state flower is the common meadow violet. New Jersey even has a state bug — the honeybee. And while we can clearly point to the official state dance — the square dance — there is no documented or definitive explanation for New Jersey’s nickname, “The Garden State.” In fact, only 2.4 percent of New Jersey’s workers are employed on farms. Perhaps it just sounded better than “Armpit of America.”

My Second Encounter with Sufjan Stevens, or The Reluctant Folk Hero, Summer, 2005

It’s been more than a year and a half since Stevens and I first sat down to talk. For many, 547 and a half days could pass by uneventfully, but, for Stevens, everything has changed. Although the now-Brooklyn-based songwriter still speaks softly and reluctantly, still wears a Michigan baseball cap and still attempts to avoid the private details of his life and religious philosophies, his relevance and importance as a musician will only see a greater ascension. In the last year-and-change, Stevens has been the recipient of a reverence usually reserved for music veterans.

He and I have reunited to discuss his fifth album, Illinois, a potent masterpiece. Each song - there are 22 of them - tells a distinctive story of a character confronting his or her personal conflicts and questioning whether there is a larger, encouraging answer to this metaphysical joumey we call “life.” One song (”Casimir Pulaski Day”) is about cancer and prayer. Another (”John Wayne Gacy, Jr.”) is about a mass murderer and the average person’s ability to relate to one. And a third (”The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts”) is either about Superman, the mortality of man or Jesus - the intention is confusing.

Stevens seamlessly straddles the line of literal and metaphorical and refuses to articulate further. Moreover, Stevens, an exemplary and prolific musician,}s a successful narrator - an anomaly in a world of unsubstantial lyrical content and sometimes-random word associations. He is like a great author of postmodern literature with an awareness of mortality, religion and technology that positions him akin to a devout version of novelist Don DeLillo.

Potent lyrics aside, Illinois is a wondrous album, full of Broadway-production gospel, festive instrumentation and orchestra-folk that pierces and penetrates like the surreal bittersweet moments when you realize that all will be OK and also not OK at the very same time. While this album’s 79 minutes may seem long, the record is sensational throughout, a sublime effort that never falters. Stevens’ tender voice is both soothing and seductive. Musically, Stevens could be criticized as being out of sync with his generation, if only he hadn’t captured the essence of our country today, when God is both everywhere and nowhere.

Because of all this, the reluctant musician again sits across from me. He is crumbling his muffin (”I don’t like to eat in front of people”) and sipping yet another cup of tea. I ask him if any of his songs are based on real-life happenings.

“I don’t think I can answer questions about what’s real and what’s not,” Stevens responds.

“I’m wondering why you’re so hidden,” I persist, dissatisfied with his dismissive answer. “Granted you don’t like discussing personal insights, but I’m trying to write an article here.”

“It’s weird,” he says. “I have complete strangers asking me personal questions, and I think it’s healthier and safer for me to protect what’s personal and real to me. I feel like my work should sufficiently reveal my convictions. If I discuss things in detail, then I feel vulnerable. It’s not that I don’t trust people … I just don’t think a musician’s personal life should be discussed publicly.”

We chat about Stevens’ current tour entitled “Feeling the Illinoise!” with his band, the Illinoisemakers. Despite the unfortunate puns, his performances are thrilling and captivating and wholly sincere (although, I’m still undecided by their mid-set human pyramid). I visited New York’s Bowery Ballroom for three of Stevens’ five sold-out shows, an almost unprecedented venue occupancy, which Stevens donned as Pep Rally Week. Each night had its own theme: Fake an Injury Night, Fake Facial Hair Night, Fake Tattoo Night, Backwards Night, and finally, Prom Night, or The Formal, at which a prom king and queen were selected from the audience and crowned on stage. With a set list concentrating on his Illinois material, Stevens performed for unusually hushed crowds. Even the cynical journalist coalesced with the devoted fans.

Stevens mentions that he’s so preoccupied with the performance itself that he can’t focus on enjoying the moment and being comfortable. “As a sensory experience, it’s pretty unsettling,” he says. “And I’m so self-conscious as it is. In some ways, it’s unfair because I’m not able to enjoy myself. I’m almost jealous of the audience being able to watch me without being unnerved. It may be my disposition … I think it’s because I’m inexperienced with being watched. I’m also not technically masterful or confident as a singer yet.”

“Since we spoke in January 2004, have you acquired more confidence in comparison?” I ask.

“Probably not,” he says.

His humility feels genuine. Maybe it’s that overwhelmed look in his eyes, the sort of look you can’t quite fake. “Like I said, I definitely never expected to make a career out of being a songwriter,” he adds. “And I most definitely did not plan on doing all these interviews, playing sold-out shows on a countrywide tour, explaining my work, discussing my life in great detail as if my words were of great value.

“I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but it can’t go on like this in the future - I’m already planning my exit strategy. I’ll keep making more music, but the current climate is exhausting, and if my strategy backfires, well, that’s fine. Truthfully, I don’t mind keeping my music on an intimate scale.”

Finally, I ask Stevens the Million Dollar Question - which state will prove to be his next muse. He tells me he’s not sure, and I plead my case for New Jersey. I tell him my home state is a terribly underrated American locale worthy of the Stevens treatment.

“It even comes pun-ready,” I add. “Put on your New Jersey!”

Stevens smiles, take another sip and thinks for a moment.

“How about you write up a proposal,” he jokes, “and then I’ll take a look at it.”