Fictional Travelogues From The Artful Folk Cheerleader
BY Jenny Bulley

Cloud and proud: Sufjan Stevens, trapped in the title sequence of The Simpsons

“Sufjan is Persian Arabic or something,” explains Sufjan Stevens with a faint sigh that suggests he’s spent 29 years explaining it. Pronounced ‘Soof-yahn’, the New York based singer-songwriter’s name is a lasting residue of an unconventional upbringing in Michigan, where his parents moved around a bit, experimenting with hippy ideologies including the cult of Subub, whose spiritual leader chose names for Sufjan and four of his six siblings.

Leaving Michigan for NY to study creative writing in 1999, Stevens’ storytelling gift flourished at college, where he learnt the guitar and applied himself to songwriting, releasing two solo albums, A Sun Came and Enjoy Your Rabbit on his own Asthmatic Kitty label. One day, he says, he’d like to publish his short stories; for now, his elegiac songs detail his characters. Tales of families and workers, heroes and killers picked out on banjo and piano, oboe and percussion, his sweet, pale voice ranging from Eric Matthews smooth to a ghostly Elliott Smith whisper.

With the hippy ideal to thank for his name and his varied experience of The Great Lake State, Stevens stood in good stead for Michigan, the first of what he calls The 50 States Project. The aim is to record an album for each US state. “In the press release we made up this claim, that I was going to record these 50 albums,” he admits, “but it was really hyperbole.” Indeed, Stevens’ fourth LP, Seven Swans, then deviated from the plan with a beautifully sparse set of biblically themed folk reflecting his now-Episcopalian religious beliefs. Something he’d think twice about in future. “If I had known that this many people would be listening I wouldn’t have sung songs about Moses and Elijah and the Apostles.” he says with smile. “It asks a lot of a listener, you’re presenting something that has all this cultural and historical baggage.”

Finding fiction easier than autobiography, Sufjan rekindled The 50 States Project with Illinois. It’s a state he feels comfortable writing about, having spent time there as a teenager. “I’ve been reading about immigration there and frontier life,” he enthuses, “Abraham Lincoln and the poet Carl Sandburg. It’s so much easier to write about than Michigan.” Illinois depicts the state’s heroes like revolutionary General Casimir Pulaski, as well as its villains: murderer John Wayne Gacy Jr gets a song all to himself. Other titles - see Come On! Feel The Illinois! - show how Stevens is far more interested in poking at the seams of the American identity than simply celebrating it. ‘There are states I’ll probably never do,” he says, adding emphatically, “Texas. I just don’t even want to deal with that.”