Foreward
Divided States
By JUDE ROGERS
Sufjan Stevens: earnest, Christian, not frightened of a challenge.

Bob Dylan did Highway 61, Chuck Berry Route 66, Jack Kerouac covered life on the road, and various author types have taken a tilt at the Great American Novel. But a song cycle about the 50 American states sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it? The project started by a 30 year-old songwriter could have been art-school navel-gazing nonsense but, two records in - the gorgeously sombre Greetings From Michigan and the riot of noise and instruments that is Illinoise - show that Sufjan Stevens has much grander plans. “I want to do a musical about South Carolina. A travelogue on Wyoming. I’ve so many ideas about the Garden State, New Jersey”

There’s echoes of the Beach Boys, Steve Reich, Paul Simon and Leonard Bernstein in the music and the lyrics are full of folklore. In Illinoue alone, we’re told about UFO landings, prairie fires, John Wayne Gacy’s murders, Abraham Lincoln’s wife’s descent into insanity and the blues of Jelly Roll Morton. The detail is mind-boggling.

Stevens is a gentle-voiced, earnest young man and devout Christian, with the added bonus of film star good looks, who spends four to five months researching each record, collecting anecdotes and bits of dialect from libraries in each region. He even has a time chart with slots for research and recording.

“It all started in sixth grade. We had to do oral reports on the history, the agriculture, the economy, the people of a state. I picked Oregon, because of the tales about Bigfoot and the mysterious landscapes. Years later, I thought about that project and how history is perceived so differently from person to person.”

Stevens was born in Michigan, and that particular record was based on personal recollection. But he found the closeness a burden.

“I’d rather ask other people and use texts. Only then can I find out America has changed so much.”

How does he see it today?

“We’re a country based on immigration. There’s no consensus. That’s still buried.” Stevens’ parents, a Lithuanian father and Greek mother, were embarrassed by their working class roots and pursued the American dream wholesale, his father changing his surname and taking up golf. They nltimately sent their son to a boarding school music academy, an experience that traumatised him but also made him an excellent oboe player. His experiences of his parents’ poverty and his own privilege have made him obsessed with the country’s attitudes towards class and identity. “The American Dream’s all about pride and integrity in really vague ideas and notions and possibilities. The possession of everything but still the freedom to have it all. I’m obsessed with exploring that.”

He’s not pushing Louisiana up the list after recent events in New Orleans, but he reckons there’s a record for everywhere, even Iowa. It’s a mystical approach - he’ll just “open his mind and see what happens.” But with 48 states to go, will he really do it?

“I guess I won’t finish it. But there’s a misconception that nothing happens in some places. Flannery O’Connor said that if you survive a childhood, you’ll have enough to write about for the rest of your life. I want to dig into everybody’s pasts from every bit of the country and get the stuff out, like Kerouac, Faulkner, even Aaron Copeland. Nothing’s isolated or irrelevant. Really I just want to tell stories.”