MY FAVORITE THING
Sufjan Stevens discusses his sewing machine.
By Amy Gray
Photograph by Donald Bowers

“I’m always trying to get rid of stuff,” says singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens. “This is an exception. It’s one of the few things that I value,” For Stevens, who hit a critical gold mine last year with his widely acclaimed album Illinois, which featured his goose-bump-inducing blend of folk and rock, finding his favorite thing was indeed a process of elimination. His Singer Featherweight sewing machine somehow stood out to him among the anarchy of objects — knickknacks, junk and family heirlooms — that cluttered his family home in Detroit. The machine was a gift to his great-grandmother. But while it has braved four generations, he says, the art of sewing hasn’t. “My mom didn’t really sew at all,” he says.

Stevens grew up with a homemaker father and a mother who “did all the working.” The “hilarious irony,” he says, is that she worked as a home-ec teacher and then as a home economist. ”She would go to people’s houses and teach them how to cook and organize their homes in a way that was more efficient and more livable. Yet she had absolutely no interest in doing it herself. It was funny.”

He eventually learned to sew in junior high. In home-ec class. But it was in college that he really came into his own as a sewer. “I designed my own line of clothing, or basically shirts. I didn’t have a buttonhole maker, which meant everything had zippers. They were really ugly.” He now uses the machine for simple repairs and more modest sartorial endeavors, like making the cheerleading outfits for his last tour. “The most complicated part was probably the cheerleading skirts. When we were making them, there were no girls around, so I had to try them on to make sure that they were symmetrical.”

Stevens says sewing is akin to his musical pursuits. “Sewing is a repetitive task. For me that’s very meditative, and so is the task of making music. This machine has a particular sound that the motor makes that is almost trancelike. These older industrial machines, they have this kind of rhythm and tone that’s almost primordial. It’s different from iPods and computers and things with computer chips. It’s more human, maybe.” While he says he hasn’t recorded the sound of his Singer yet, either for posterity or for his music, he recognizes its timelessness. “I mean, it outlived my great-grandmother. It’s definitely going to outlive my grandmother and my mother and myself, so this thing is gonna be around longer than I am.”