Pocket full of stars
Words: Kicking_K
Photography: Sarah Bowles

Sufjan Stevens is a man on a mission

If you know only one or two things about Sufjan Stevens, the first will probably be that he is making a series of albums to represent every (United) State, an undertaking that he cheerfully acknowledges may last his entire recording career. A self-confessed (and successful) gambit to gather media attention has become a genuine challenge.

“Do I have any concern that the concept may overshadow the content?” asks Stevens. “Is the manufacturing and promotion of ideas more interesting than what they actually represent?

“Well, this is the great tragedy of modern civilisation, isn’t it?”

signs and wonders

It’s an epic, eccentric quest that started, naturally enough, with his own point of origin. On Michigan (2003), each song takes a location within the state as a focus, each location another chapter in his history, shuffling back and forth in time even as he skips across the map. Along the way, he borrows characteristics of the voices and perspectives he encounters, myths, stories and memories, folklore culled from the oral record, and historical events scattered through the narrative drift like so many signposts.

His own experiences are mixed down at the level of just another thread in the bigger picture - an unusually humble and wildly unfashionable approach when the singer-songwriter has become a watchword for a solipsistic and often exhibitionist introversion. As he puts it in a characteristically rhetorical email:

“Storytelling in song has become extinct. Or, more likely, it has been reduced to a vague plotline, set with archetypes, modified by cliche and language that exploits rather than evokes. There are no particulars or sensory details. This is because much of popular music is advertisement, and the work of the advertisement is to captivate the lowest common denominator through gimmick, jingle, flash and flourish.”

On Michigan, he turns to traditional sounds that retain some non-standardised individualism, a sense of the hands that made them - and he plays most of these instruments himself, from banjo to oboe, xylophone to “wood flute and like-minded whistles”, captured at home on a portable eight-track and later transfigured via the newfangled majesty of ProTools.

There are rarely silences between the tracks - more often the musical movement is akin to a screenwipe, a cinematic blur that better captures the idea of scenery passing by. We move from the downbeat solidarity of ‘Flint (For The Unemployed And Underpaid)’ - a thinning crowd of depressed piano keys and sighing brass in search of a real voice - to ‘Oh Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head’, in which the congested rhythms and clash of parts come together in a pretty, cacophonous reimagining of the city’s bustle. The glockenspiel sparkles of ‘Tahquamenon Falls’ further suggest the thought that’s gone into an ambient, environmental attempt to somehow evoke the small worlds it covers.

By sidestepping through America, the songs escape a definite position in the kind of linear chronology that orders movements and breeds scenes. There is a suggested reconnection with something that lies beneath the comfort blanket of mass culture.

“It’s important to approach all material, as a writer, with a sense of awe and wonder, regardless of its familiarity. The work of the writer is in upending conventional ways of seeing things. This is inherently more natural when your subject is, in fact, foreign and unfamiliar. We are encouraged to look at the world, be it the New Jersey Turnpike or the Himalayas, with our mouths dropped, our ears cupped, our senses synchronised.

“There is the backyard, the suspension bridge, the waterway, the mountain range, the continent, the ozone, the celestial wonders, the universe, God inscribed in everything. But at the crux of it is a very small thing called you.”

beginning to see the light

If you only know one or two things about Sufjan Stevens, chances are the second is that he is a practising Christian who isn’t afraid to let his beliefs impact upon his work. “If someone asked, I would say that I was born again. I would look you right in the eye and say it.”

In 2004, he made this plain with the release of Seven Swans. The album was not part of the ‘50 States’ project; Stevens instead turned to songs about the Transfiguration, about Abraham - biblical miniatures evoked with the barest of means - a tender minimalism that somehow makes a few keys, strings and voices billow out like backlit clouds. It’s quite a trick, kind of awe-inspiring - which, I suppose, is the point.

I ask him if it bothers him that much of his audience here in the indie demographic would have no comparable faith, however much they might like his music.

I want to know if it worries him that he might be patronised, that people might be attracted to his spirituality more as an angle, a kitsch accessory than any shared sense of meaning.

I feel a strange unease sometimes when I catch myself singing along to a lyric celebrating something I haven’t believed in since before I hit double figures. “He will take you, if you run / He will chase you / ‘Cause he is the Lord…”

Maybe I’m trying to provoke him.

He doesn’t sink to my level.

“I don’t think much about who listens to my music. I make no judgements against a listener based on his or her beliefs, or lack thereof. I’m honoured that anyone cares at all.”

I should have let it go at that. I know he’s sick of answering questions about his religion, the way one biographical detail leeched attention from his work. The low point is when he writes, tension tightening his lines: “I don’t think I need to convince anyone. I find all this talk a waste of time.”

all good naysayers, speak up

I feel the need to ask him questions about his religion, because, seen from a long way away, the rise of the Religious Right in the US, and its enshrinement in the White House with the Bush administration, is one of those bewildering differences in American and British culture, as wholly alien as the gun laws. The pro-life, pro-death penalty senators attempting to roll back gay rights and affirmative action. The creationist pseudo-scientists advocating an end to stem cell research. The rise of Christianised creative industries that create bestselling thriller-cum-tracts about those left behind after the Rapture, and the inevitable films of the same showing not in cinemas but 200,000 churches.

Nowadays, there’s a Christian answer for every mainstream musical genre - from nu metal through hip hop and all points in between. And, while the domestic music industry is in a period of relative stagnation at the moment, sales of CCM - Contemporary Christian Music - are marching onward.

“I don’t know anything about CCM. I’m not an evangelist. I’m a songwriter and a storyteller. If that story happens to be about Christ, then perhaps, in some odd semantic way, the song could be termed ‘evangelical’. I gladly accept that. I also sing about divorce. And murder. And adultery. I sing about chickens and war and bathrooms. In my mind, the gospel is not something to pander and pawn off like a diet soda drink. There is no product. There is no selling point.”

Seven Swans was not embraced by the CCM media. Sufjan Stevens never will be. For all his undoubted sincerity and lyricism, he just plain ain’t orthodox enough for a culture which mistakes openness for doubt, and doubt for weakness. Most CCM lyrics switch between quasi-fascist machismo, bastardised echoes of scripture and abject abasement, with only a seventh-generation riff in between.

“CCM is an easy target, as is Britney Spears, or Ashlee Simpson,” Stevens states. “I wouldn’t waste your time committing criticism to these things. I’m bothered by the advancement of CCM as much as I’m bothered by the prevalence of McDonald’s. It’s a terrifying phenomenon, but it really has nothing to do with me, so I leave it alone and let it live its own ugly, miserable, rich life.”

If you only know one or two things about Sufjan Stevens, the third should be that the first two things are less important than you’d think - more useful to a media which exists to sort and order than as any genuine key to understanding his work. Indeed, it’s the clash between the size of the pigeonhole assigned to him and the complexity and expansiveness of the work itself that provides the best testing ground to uncover what we actually have here.

Michigan’s shuffling of the narrative deck represented an intimate, homespun yet ambitious and sophisticated attempt to capture the ambience of a place in a way that transcended the limited perspective afforded by the straight ahead first-person confessional.

The recently released second album in the ‘50 States’ series, Illinois (a place of which he has much less personal experience), sees him further refine his methodology. He assembles the material here almost entirely from letters to friends in the state, and from the public record; he also plays freely with techniques that are more often seen in literature, such as writing in character and the conflation (or contrast) of public fact and fictional experiences.

The occasional hesitant, unformed qualities of Michigan have ripened into a style that is quite capable of everything from cinematic soundtracks, bittersweet stories and even satire, from ‘They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back From The Dead!! Ahhhh!’ (an inspired reimagining of Judgement Day as a zombie flick complete with cheerleader pastiche) to a close-up portrait of serial killer John Wayne Gacy Jr. Arrested in a whisper, Stevens’s voice creeps about above a subdued nocturne, recounting the facts of the case with some horror - but judgement is reserved. Nothing could be further from Old Testament/CCM ideology.

Enlisting a troupe of musicians (pictured above) to colour his compositions live and on record has allowed much more flexibility in composition and arrangement - leaving the concept and mood free to dictate the sound. Illinois happily meanders from pseudo-jingoistic battle hymns to trilling, fanciful mini-symphonies before cutting right back to just the two of us - simplicity and solitude.

to walk alone with you

Of course, I regret bugging him so relentlessly about which particular church he frequents. He’s right. It really is just one element in a grand attempt to complete an anachronistically modernist project.

But I also think he underestimates how important it is to us in ‘Old Europe’ (Donald Rumsfeld, 2003) to have an example of a different kind of American Christian. Because it’s not the liberal, progressive people quietly living out their faith, who have come to represent the soul of a nation on the international news.

And, as the Religious Right advance their agenda in Congress, I’m glad that, somewhere in the streets or prairies, scribbling in a back seat or reflecting by a riverside, Sufjan Stevens will be there, documenting and celebrating the 50 states, his faith not a scriptural straitjacket but a mode of feeling, an empathic connection, an exploratory urge:

“This is what it means to be born again: to fully and completely disengage with the preconceptions and preoccupations of the adult world and its religions, to dismantle all laws - of physics and society - and yield yourself to the birth canal, and what comes after, in which everything begins to shake and tremble with all senses fully turned to the centre of the universe, the creator, God the Father, in whose cultivation we begin to know and understand our true selves, our real selves, as a reflection of God’s image, his creation, like newborn babies, full, fresh, suckling, elated, laughing at everything. But honestly, I have no idea how this relates to my music. I hate talking about this stuff.”

As for what comes next:

“I have some broad musical ideas, an overarching vision that could very well be summarised and theorised, but even then, it is a futility of language to describe something in the future tense.”

On the positive side: “We can certainly have a substantial conversation about this 20 years from now.”

“I’d like to spend less time talking about God and more time being in God’s presence, I think that would put an end to this conversation, once and for all.”

Amen.