The Union of our States
Sufjan Stevens takes the second step of a long journey
By Kurt B. Reighley
Photographs by Liz Tormes

When Sufjan Stevens was growing up in Michigan, there wasn’t much music in his everyday life. His stepfather had a decent record collection, but Stevens spent most of the year with his biological dad, whose sole foray into the filed was, oddly enough, occasionally playing bongos along with the radio or ubiquitous Motown 45s. Nevertheless, one musical incident from his childhood impressed young Stevens.

From day one, Sufjan (pronounced SOOF-yan) was convinced he was an atrocious singer. “But when I was very young,” he recalls, “we attended a Mthodist church,” and one Sunday, the parish youth group was roped into performing U.S.A. For Africa’s maudlin “We Are The World”. “I remember singing the Michael Jackson part, and being very excited,” he confides, “but I also felt horrible, because I knew I couldn’t sing.”

Look at the bright side: Somebody else was assigned Cyndi Lauper’s ear-splitting interlude. “My sister had to do that,” chuckles Stevens, 30. “She had the bangs for it, so she was very confident.”

Today, much has changed. For one, Stevens’ voice, his intricate arrangements, and his finely tuned songs have made him one of indie rock’s fastest-rising acts. And while he isn’t out to feed a continent, he has undertaken a task almost as daunting - an homage to every state in the nation via 50 individual concept albums. Thus far, he’s graced us with Michigan (2003) and the new Illinois (out July 5 on Asthmatic Kitty Records).

Michigan, Stevens’ third solo album, was adorned with hand-painted illustrations of the state bird (the robin), tree (white pine), fish (brook trout), and other key signifiers. The fifteen-song set delved into Stevens’ memories of growing up in the Great Lake State. With its gently swaying rhythms, intricately layered vocals and inventive instrumentation, the album offered everything from the enthusiastic “Say Yes! To Michigan” to the mournful “Flint (For the Unemployed And Underpaid)”, which paired elegiac piano with trumpet and English horn.

Not all the ditties deal closely with their locales - the dark folk of “Romulus” details the strained relationship between a child estranged from his mother - but as endorsements go, it proved the utter antithesis of the strident didacticism of filmmaker Michael Moore and the yammering black comedy of Eminem.

Stevens, who was born in Detroit, admits surprise at the fond reception the disc received, from both the media (including a spread in The New York Times Sunday Magazine) and fans. “I’m as confused as anyone else,” he says. “Maybe it had to do with the concept: Narrative songs rooted in a place, a particular region, that were using arbitrary state lines as the guidelines. People found that inviting. It was very personal music, yet generous, sort of symphonic… and maybe a little timeless.”

Illinois is even more ambitious musically. More than 30 instruments and players, including a string quartet, a choir and a brass section, are featured; the arrangements hint at predecessors as diverse as Robert Russell Bennett (who orchestrated 300-plus Broadway musicals, including, appropriately, Oklahome!) and Philip Glass at his most majestic.

Two down, 48 to go…

Stevens did have some preparation for such grand musical ventures. Despite his aversion to singing, he picked up the oboe in sixth grade and joined the school band; three years later, he was accepted into the acclaimed Interlochen Arts Academy, a Northern Michigan performing arts boarding school for high school students. His reviews of the experience are mixed.

“I went in with the thought that I would continue on [through graduation], but after one year, it was so traumatic that I didn’t want to go back,” he discloses. “Plus it was too expensive. Socially, it was very isolated and awkward. There weren’t many freshmen there, and quite a few of them left.” When his family relocated to upsate Michigan, he opted not to return to Interlochen, and though he continued to perform with a woodwind ensemble, finished out his education at a regular high school.

But attending conservatory did open importand doors. Foremost, it imersed him in a humongous repertoire of music that would eventually inform his own aesthetic as a composer and performer. “I was listening to a lot of baroque music, which took into consideration the whole dynamic, the integration of sound,” he says. “Every instrument had some sophisticated part, and there were always several melodies moving at once.” He was exposed to the non-wester chord progressions popularized by the so-called French Impressionist composers such as Debussy, and he pored over homemade tapes of minimalists Steve Reich and Terry Riley.

His year at Interlochen also introduced Stevens to another instument: “I discovered the piano, because every practice room there had one.” Mandatory piano proficiency was not part of the Interlochen program, so the instrument retained some mystery. “It’s fortunate that I never took [piano] lessons, because I wound up with an unusual infatuation with it,” he says. “It was foreign to me, overwhelming and exciting. Physically, it was so big. And it was loud, and you played more than one key at a time.”

In college, Sufjan and his brother Marzuki formed a folk-rock group that bore the latter’s name. By then, Stevens had tired of the oboe and turned his attentions to guitar. Although he characterizes the music he made during this period as “naive,” and “ambitious but unrealized,” he also singles out positive aspects too.

“I learned a lot about composition and songwriting in that band,” he acknowledges. “I wrote some of the melodies for the singer - although I never tried to sing myself - and I learned to play guitar in that band.” And he began to figure out how to accommodate his self-professed “mediocre level of proficiency on different instruments… into the pop song format.”

Eventually, Sufjan found himself writing more material than the band needed, so he bagan recasting some originals a solo pieces. “I bought a four-track and started recording,” he remembers; but, still ashamed of his voicals, he initially guarded these experiments. “It hurt my ears just to listen to myself. I didn’t know what I was doing, my intonation was bad, I was attempting melodies that were out of my range. It was frustrating.”

Nevertheless, many of these early songs, augmented by contributions from the cadre of like-minded musicians that were falling into his orbit, eventually wound up on his 1999 debut, A Sun Came! Despite reservations, Stevens reissued the disc last year so that fans could have a better picture of his evolution.

“I’m not proud of a lot of [that record]. It’s messy, and lacks focus, and tries to do too many things simultaneously,” he allows. “What I do like is that it was all assembled at home, on a four-track, and I was very industrious - probably more industrious that I am now - with what little I had.”

In 1999, Sufjan moved to New York City to study creative writing at the MFA program of the New School for Social Research. He spent hours in front of the computer on his new discipline, but continued making music. “I started writing instrumental songs, and made a conscious decision not to sing, because I felt I couldn’t,” he recalls.

Although challenging electronic music, as practiced by Autechre and the many guises of Richard James (aka Aphex Twin), was in vogue in downtown New York, Stevens didn’t know much about it. (The one band he does mention from that realm is the German duo Mouse On Mars; their use of unusual rhythms and oddball brass arrangements remain an audible influence on Stevens’ compositions.)

Well-versed in the genre or no, in 2001 he made his own foray into it with Enjoy Your Rabbit, a cycle of fourteen electronic instrumentals inspired by the signs of the Chinese zodiac. “I felt electronic music wasn’t really challenging itself, so I wanted to make an electronic concept record that was symphonic as well,” he explains. “That was the springboard for that record - challenging a form that I really knew nothing about.”

The success of Michigan eventually sparked wider interest in Enjoy Your Rabbit. Many of Stevens’ new disciples, however, were startled. “They probably put it in and are disturbed and unsettled by it,” he imagines. “It uses a lot of grating tones and glitch and noise, electronic beats, and there’s no singing. They probably have a hard time reconciling that with my person. But people who listen closely will find there is a certain sensibility to the arrangements and the songs that is also present on my later records.”

While at the New School, Stevens made another crucial discovery: the Danielson Famile. Led by Daniel Smith, this ragtag ensemble of real-life siblings and spouses from southern New Jersey had garnered modest aclaim for their can-do spirit, theatrical presentation, and familial singing (led by Smith’s unusual falsetto). Stevens and another student, keen to produce a music festival featuring artists they liked, invited the Danielson clan to participate in their D.I.Y. event. The Smith siblings accepted. Soon Sufjan was playing regularly as their opening act.

His experiences with the Danielson Family inspired Stevens to expand his own boundaries further. “I learned about taking risks, doing things that were unorthodox, and being resourceful,” he says. “Everyone in that band is just playing whatever they played in the marching band. And then Dan plans a strategy: ‘Just play whatever you can play and we’ll figure out how to appropriate it,’ which has created a style of music that is very unusual and unique.”

He also came to appreciate the importance of presentation. “When I first toured with them, they would wear medical scrubs,” he remembers. “There is a little element of theater involved in their shows; Daniel dresses up as a tree sometimes. So when I started playing live on my own, I realized it was unsatisflying to be onstage in my street clothes.” Consequently, fans turning up to see Stevens in recent years have found he and his band clad in scout uniforms (circa Michigan) and bedecked with white feathers (for his 2004 release Seven Swans). For the shows promoting Illinois, his group will be attired a la University of Illinois cheerleaders.

“I inherited my great-grandmother’s 1938 featherweight Singer sewing machine,” he says proudly. To prepare for inevitable fluctuation in the ranks (Stevens’ ensemble often grows or shrinks depending on what part of the country they play), he has stitched together eight outfits, make and female. “We’re going to try and do some cheers and routines between songs.”

Just don’t expect to see them recreate your favorite choreography from Bring It On, or even the classic pyramid formation. “Oh no,” he insists. “We tried that one at a photo shoot. It was a complete disaster.”

Prompted partially by the catharsis of making Enjoy Your Rabbit, and also by the narratives he was penning for school, Stevens began to return to more traditional song structures. Following classic advice - “Write what you know” - he drew on his midwestern childhood; these compositions would eventually provide the basis for Michigan. But he also found himself crafting others that didn’t fit the project’s strictly defined agenda. Consequently, almost simultaneously, he made a companion record, Seven Swans (released nine months after Michigan).

While Michigan tends to emphasize grander aspects of Stevens’ style, Seven Swans (produced by Daniel Smith) is stripped down: The lyrics are simpler, and the arrangements focus mostly on Sufjan’s newest instrument of choice, the banjo. His increasingly alluring voice is quietly reminiscent of Elliott Smith or Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam. Members of the Danielson Famile provide background vocals and percussion.

But to read some of reviews of Seven Swans, one might think its subtle rhythms had been generated by thumping on copies of the King James edition. Like the Smiths, Stevens is a Christian, and album cuts such as “Abraham” and “The Transfiguration” drew upon Biblical stories, while the title track featured the repeated line, “I am Lord.” This component of Stevens’ work was nothing new, but given his higher profile, critics often placed undue emphasis on its role in his aesthetic, while overlooking genuine developments (such as his increased facility on banjo).

“It’s a little immature, and lazy, as a writer, to be implying these terms as modifiers, assessing and labeling,” Stevens charges. “I don’t think it’s fair to me, personally, or to the religion in general.” Clearly, Sufjan shares more in common philosophically with, say, the Dali Lama than evangelical tyrants such as Pat Robertson. “How could anyone hear the music I write, the art that I’m making,” he asks, “and not recognize that?

“When religions in general, and Christianity in particular, become confused with a power structure, that’s a big problem,” he concludes, apropos of our current administration’s co-opting of the church, and its tendency to spout rhetoric about “one nation under God” to justify all manner of overtures. “The principles of Christianity do not exist in power. The whole point of it is a complete giving up, of yielding, and being of service.”

Although Stevens had some familiarity with the state of Illinois prior to starting work on his latest album - he made periodic road trips to Chicago in college - the resources he had to draw upon were markedly less than those at his call for Michigan. So he did lots of homework.

He began by accumulating as many antique books and promotional materials as he could find from small town historical societies and community organizations. He read the works of Saul Bellow, and, particularly, Carl Sandburg (who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 for a biography of Abraham Lincoln, then another, eleven years later, for an anthology of his poetry). He reached out to friends and acquaintances with ties to Illinois and asked them to submit short personal essays, “sharing as much anecdotal information about the small town experience as they could find.”

Consequently, though Illinois hardly offers a comprehensive history of the state, it celebrates a wide bill of fare, from the Great Godfrey Maze (two-and-a-half miles of paths cut through a seven-acre corn field, open annually from Labor Day till Halloween), to Revolutionary War hero Casimir Pulaski, to the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, which attracted over 700,000 visitors to the Windy City.

There are obvious omissions: the stockyards, the Chicago Bears. “I actually wrote three or four songs about Abraham Lincoln, then didn’t record any of them,” he reveals. “So much of this project was about putting blinders on, and focusing on what really inspired me immediately.”

Hence, the song sure to garner the most attention out of the album’s 22 tracks is “John Wayne Gacy Jr.” Time and again, Stevens’ research brought him back to the state’s emphasis on heroism. He felt the need to temper that, with an Al Capone… or a serial killer. The hushed tune initially seems shockingly sympathetic: “The neighbors, they adored him / For his humor and his conversation,” Stevens sings. When he discloses that Gacy also murdered 27 people, his voice ascends slowly, in an incredibly tender pianissimo, forming three words: “Oh my God.”

“I was just drawn to him because he was very popular in his community, for quite a long time,” Stevens says. “He was very involved in the Democratic party, and was well-loved. I liked the juxtaposition of that, with the horriflying thing that was hidden.” The more he researched his monstrous inspiration, the greater his curiosity grew. “I couldn’t really figure out why that was,” he admits. “It made me uncomfortable.”

Stevens was born in 1975, the Chinese Year of the Rabbit. Individuals under this zodiac sign are purportedly the kind of people others like to be around: affectionate, pleasant, and obliging, but with a tendency to be overly sentimental, even superficial. Does this description fit? “Yes, that is a great assessment,” the singer admits, cheerfully. “Although I’m a little passive-aggressive and critical, too, and slightly subversive.”

Rabbits are also cautious and conservative, making them successful in business, particularly in realms such as theater, law and diplomacy. Still on target? Yes and no. “I can’t act to save my life,” he says. “And I’ve never considered being a lawyer; I’d rather be a street cleaner. But a lot of what I do is very diplomatic. In any type of relationship, there is a degree of diplomacy involved.”

In fact, the course Stevens has chosen requires more diplomacy than is asked of many other musicians. He has no outside management, and, aside from some joint releases with Daniel Smith’s Sounds Familyre imprint, he has released all his albums on the tiny Wyoming label Asthmatic Kitty. Although plenty of outside suitors - labels, managers and other ne’er-do-wells - came courting in the wake of Michigan, Stevens still prefers to call as many of his own shots as possible.

One of his few established business affiliates, booking agent Ali Giampino, discloses hopes that he’ll soon start releasing shorter EPs as part of the 50 States project. Otherwise, at his current rate of productivity, the last one won’t be issued until 2053, making him an astonishing 122 years old.

Yet surprisingly, given his self-professed tendency to be a “control freak,” Stevens would rather see the project completed by other musicians than die with him, should he fail to finish it. “I could easily pass it on to someone else, or commission other people,” he points out.

Regardless of who wraps up this undertaking, Sufjan Stevens will be remembered as an original. At a time when patriotism is wielded as a weapon against U.S. citizens and foreign allies alike, Stevens has found a way to make being a resident of this country a point of pride and joy once more. Like Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Scott Jopin and Van Dyke Parks before him, he takes threads of different, uniquely American musical and cultural idioms, and fashions them into something new. In short, Sufjan Stevens is a national treasure.

Seattle-based ND contributing editor Kurt B. Reighley wrote a feature on Solomon Burke in ND #57. He hopes Sufjan someday writes a song about Washington state so scathingly brilliant that people finally stop referring to “Louie, Louie” as the unofficial state song.