The God of Small Things
Sufjan Steven’s lush musical folk tales just might make him the savior of rock ‘n’ roll - but that’s not the only reason to worship him.
By Eviana Hartman
Illustration by Kevin Christy

Sufjan Stevens is sitting in his unassuming apartment in ungentrified Kensington, Brooklyn, talking about kites. “I’ve started making them out of newspaper and string,” he says earnestly. “I’m a bit impatient, so a lot of mine turn out a little lopsided. You’ll be more successful if you just go to the store and buy a four-dollar plastic Care Bears kite. They are perfect; they’ll fly in any amount of wind. The smaller kites from China take more skill to fly, but when you get them up there it is so much more satisfying. Oh my god, I must be boring you.”

For a guy whose last album was 2005’s compulsory purchase for indie-rock snobs, Stevens sure isn’t one himself. Illinois - the second effort in his planned series of albums about all 50 states, after Michigan - brought dorky exuberance and epic, orchestral musicality to a genre glutted with skinny jeans and even skinnier guitar arrangements. Stevens spun fantastical tales about “abolition grain trains,” midnight visits from Carl Sandburg’s ghost, and even serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Jr, against a lavish backdrop of marching-band brass, folksy banjo, and ruinously beautiful piano; the album was instantly hailed as a masterpiece everywhere from Pitchfork to The New York Times. As it turns out, there were 21 tracks that didn’t make the cut - Illinois was originally planned as a double LP, though that might have been too much of a good thing. This summer, Stevens will release a “gift to my fans” - the outtakes from that magical four-month deluge of creativity, aptly named The Avalanche, including everything from three alternate versions of “Chicago” to the Stereolab-esque “Dear Mr. Supercomputer.” “It was sort of like when a pregnant woman discovers she’s carrying quintuplets,” Stevens says of the songwriting process. “It just augmented the experience and responsibility so much more.”

Despite such talk, Stevens never set out to be a rock star; he moved to New York to get an MFA in fiction writing; and work as a graphic designer for children’s books before the runaway success of Illinois - his fifth album - made his destiny manifest. “I have to reckon with the fact that I am a failed writer, which is frustrating,” he says. “But my music has become a forum for my fiction writing because I’ve started to incorporate narrative in my songs, and I think my songs have a literary trajectory.”

Stevens, it must be mentioned, is a devout Christian - a subject he refuses to discuss with the press. I ask him why: “Well, that’s a manipulative question,” he says with a laugh. “When something is so sacred, it feels disrespectful to speak frivolously about it in a public forum. I think that’s why.” Stevens is equally reticent about his politics, though he will allow, in lieu of a response, that he’s reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. “There are no heroes in this book, even Abraham Lincoln. Don’t read it all at once: it’s terrifying.”

Stevens is at heart a historian, a storyteller in the tradition of Faulkner and O’Connor. In his songs, it’s the ephemera of the forgotten - a church group praying for a young woman’s soul, the devastating sweep of a Midwestern tornado - that tell the greatest tales. “It’s just as cool to be from Peoria, Illinois as it is to be from New York City,” he says. “I am validating the small town, song by song.” Perhaps that’s why Stevens has connected with his listeners on a deeply emotional and mnemonic level: Who else would receive gifts from fans of school pennants, travel brochures, and books about Georgia curiosities and the New Jersey Devil? “There’s a pervading sense of disillusionment and self-deprecation in the U.S. because of the contemporary political trauma that were experiencing - kind of a lack of unity,” he says. “Maybe I’m compelling people to be proud to be American again.”