Sufjan Stevens
By Melissa Maerz
Photograph by Erin Patrice O’Brien
Abracadabra Superstore NYC

“Man, I would have had more fun getting into character if I’d called this one Arkansas.”

Sufjan Stevens has never committed a crime while dressed like a clown. The soft-spoken 30-year-old Michigan native hasn’t even used a four-letter word in one of his hyper-orchestral songs (unless you count Lord: he’s a Christian man). Yet, in the ballad “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.,” an introspective piano-and-guitar ode to the Chicagoan who killed more than 30 young men in the 1970s, Stevens makes an unexpected confession: “In my best behavior, I am really just like him.”

“People are always asking what made Gacy what he was,” Stevens says as he watches moms play with their babies in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. (He moved to New York City in 1998.) “But we’re all monsters. By nature, humans are deceptive and selfish and manipulative. I don’t see that as any [better or] worse than killing someone. I don’t have a prioritization of sin in my mind.”

Not exactly the sunny world view you’d expect from a guy who says he liked to draw kittens as a kid. But Stevens seems to need bleak epiphanies: One of his literary idols, Southern writer Flannery O’Connor, often created characters who undergo a crisis of conscience that connects them with the divine, he explains. That also occurs on his sonically upbeat chamber-pop album, Illinois (Asthmatic Kitty), the second in his 50 States Project (see 2003’s Michigan), in which the Prairie State serves as a crossroads for the conflicted - not only for hometown giants like Abraham Lincoln and Superman, but also for those who died in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 or lost their jobs when steel mills shut down.

“The best way of knowing your characters is to understand them in conflict, when they’re forced to make decisions that don’t necessarily follow their own will,” Stevens says. In his elaborately titled songs, that may also be the best way for the faithful to understand the white-robed dude upstairs. Still, Illinois isn’t just about God’s country. All of Stevens’ swelling string sections and jubilant choirs are a tribute to resilience and progress, and yes, even optimism.

“I believe that towns and communities are supposed to bring people together,” he says, “but our relationships are usually about two forces of will not wanting to compromise. True love is about surrendering in complete service to another being. And I don’t think that can happen - at least not on this planet Earth.”