American Baroque
Sufjan Stevens’ working-class symphony
by Saelan Twerdy
July 21, 2005

After the surprise success of Michigan, his 2003 album about his home state, Sufjan Stevens got a little excited. Fired up by atlases and tourist brochures and good old-fashioned American wanderlust, he began to talk about documenting every state in the union in album form, a fifty-part stars-and-stripes symphony that could be his life’s work. Then he went and recorded an album that had nothing to do with geography and was, in fact, mostly about Jesus: last year’s excellent Seven Swans. So consistency might not be his strong point. In any case, songwriters as interesting and unpredictable as Stevens don’t come around very often, and with the release of his new album, Illinois (two down, forty-eight to go!) he’s got people talking again.

If the subject of Stevens has ever arisen in your home, perhaps you’ve wondered how to properly pronounce his given name. “You say it soof-yawn,” he patiently explains. “It’s Persian.” The plot thickens. How did this Midwesterner get a name from the Middle East? “Well, my parents were in this cult at the time, so it was actually the cult leader, Babak, who named everyone’s babies, not them.” The story of Sufjan, is would seem, is even more exceptional than it appears. Unfortunately, he’s not willing to elaborate, and I decided not to push my luck.

The list of Extraordinary Facts About Sufjan Stevens goes on, however. For one thing, he plays an uncanny number of musical instruments, and he claims to be self-taught. “I don’t play them all well,” he laughs, “so it’s less impressive than it sounds. I studied oboe a little in music school, and it was easy to learn to play the recorder after that. Piano, I learned mostly by ear. My sister took lessons, so I borrowed her books. By then, learning guitar wasn’t too hard, and once I could do that, the skills transferred pretty easily to banjo and bass. The last thing I learned was the drums. Other things, like the vibraphone or the xylophone, I just picked up along the way.”

Another strange thing he picked up along the way, one that’s been the backbone of all his songwriting endeavours, is his passion for concept albums. Prior to conceiving his Herculean Fifty States project, Stevens was using a Casio keyboard and a 4-track recorder to compose miniature symphonies for the nine planets, the twelve apostles, and the four bodily humours’some of these songs are collected on his first solo record, 200’s A Sun Came, which was released by Asthmatic Kitty, a label that Stevens started with his stepfather Lowell. Stevens explains his interest in grand narratives: “Well, I studied writing in college, and I think it has to do with what I was reading: Blake, Wordsworth, Faulkner. Songs of Innocence [by William Blake] is all about society and development. I took a lot of painting classes, as well, and you often study the famous painters: still lifes, figures, artists who limit themselves to a certain genre or style. Working within limitations, in a series, is a good strategy for developing your craft. I also really like Baroque operas, things that have a libretto, some kind of narrative component where you’re meant to read a story along with the music. Or romantic symphonies about a battle, or a river. Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf is one of my favourites.”

Somehow, Stevens managed to draw all these disparate sources together. His songs are working-class symphonies, part chamber-pop, part-folk epics that weave intimate stories and quirky characters into a bigger picture of broad social forces: industrialization, capitalism, and faith. He even finds time for instrumental interludes (though they often have titles long enough to be stories in themselves), some of which venture quite ably into the territory of ambient minimalism. “I love Terry Riley,” he affirms, “and [Steve Reich's] Music for Eighteen Musicians is one of my all-time favourite pieces.” Stevens is apparently as knowledgeable about avant-garde classical music as he is about literature and history (he converses eloquently about recently deceased writer Saul Bellow), but for such an accomplished writer of pop songs, he has little to say about today’s popular music. “Doing research for Illinois, I listened to a lot of Benny Goodman, swing,” he says. “I do listen to a lot of contemporary pop music, but I don’t know how much it influences what I do.”

On the subject of his faith, Stevens prefers to remain silent. “It’s one of the reasons I don’t like doing interviews,” he confides. “I lose my sense of identity and meaning and conviction, saying the same things over again. I don’t feel qualified to discuss apologetics every time someone wants me to. I mean, music is transcendent. We write songs to express things that we can’t express by other means.” Expanding on his distaste for the business of promotion, he says, “I wish every interviewer just got one question. But it would have to be really interesting, something we could talk about for twenty minutes. I could just put up the answers to my ten most-asked questions on a website and then devote every interview to a more interesting conversation.” I ask him what he’d like to talk about today, if he could talk about anything. “Ornithology,” he replies immediately. “Here in New York, all we have are pigeons. They’re scavenger birds. When I see a cardinal or a blue jay, it’s really exciting. So I’d like to talk about that, about birds. Pigeons just aren’t very magical.”

Sufjan Stevens
w/ Liz Janes
Richard’s On Richards
Sunday, July 24