Private America
He began by recording portraits of the 50 US States then took off to become the banjo-plucking Super-Anti-Hero for a new movement in folk chamber-music. “We’re hunter-gatherers,” Sufjan Stevens tells Graeme Thomson

Photographs sy Denny Renshaw

IT’S A FEISTY 80 degrees in Brooklyn, but the borough - save for the heavily perspiring Scottish scribe in its midst - remains characteristically chilled. Sufjan Stevens wants to meet in the Fix Lounge, which turns out to be a cobbled-together bar-cum-living-room in the back of a record shop in Williamsburg, just over the East River from Manhattan. It’s full of skinny young gentlemen with moustaches and pretty girls doing their best to pretend they’re not, all of them snapping open their silver Apple Macs and adjusting their frankly ill-advised headgear to the soundtrack of sad, sweet electronica.

Verily; this would seem to be Sufjan Stevens’s world. A rising star in that hip, word-of-mouth orbit which is home to the likes of Bright Eyes and Devendra Banhart, Stevens made his first record, A Sun Came, on a four-track in 1998 while still a design student in Holland, Michigan. He has followed it up with several more, including an instrumental album based on the Chinese signs of the Zodiac, but it is for Greetings From Michigan (2003) and (Come On Feel The) Illinoise (2005), the first two instalments of an insane/ambitious undertaking to make a record about every state in the US, that he has become widely known, indeed perhaps even just a little notorious.

Although Stevens is wearing a black T-shirt with the outline of the 50 states etched upon it, he seems already to be shuffling away from The Grand Project. Having escaped the Fix Lounge, we’re sitting cross-legged on the grass in McCarren Park and, as Brooklyn unwinds around us, Stevens maintains that the whole thing was “kind of a hoax to begin with. I wouldn’t take it that seriously.” Any mention of the notion that it’s tempting to see the concept as a means of gaining as much media attention as possible causes him to look up sharply; like a child who has just been sprung with his hands in the till.

“I guess that is one way of perceiving it,” he laughs. “But to be fair, it was more a matter of indulging in an odd, speculative rock dream of embarking on this epic object. I allowed myself to entertain it socially and publicly; but I think it’s like deciding you’re going to have a baby: you talk about it, then you get pregnant, then the baby is born, and you talk about what school it will go to and what he or she will grow up to become. All those things are in the future tense, and that’s kind of where I am at right now. I’m really excited about the prospect of what this child will become, but not wanting to coax and coddle it too much.”

Just like his records, a conversation with Stevens often holds the threat of rain clouds of pretension bursting overhead, but he is sure-footed enough to chase them off with intelligence, sweetness, eloquence and sincerity. His rambling titles - A Short Reprise for Mary Todd; Who Went Insane, But For Very Good Reasons and One Last “Whoa-hoo! For The Pullman are characteristic - would suggest a certain penchant for wackiness and self congratulation, if it weren’t for the fact that the songs themselves are so damned mysterious, heartfelt and beautiful. A classically trained oboist and pianist, his music sits somewhere between folk, choral, prog and chamber music, while the words ping-pong between biography, autobiography and social history, sometimes heading off into something more esoteric altogether.

What isn’t apparent from listening to his albums are the dollops of doubt and self-deprecation that Stevens harbours. He makes his music in the shadow of a number of collisions: between the flailing bare knuckles of folk music and the gloved precision of classicism; between “proper” prose writing and silly old songwriting; between his Christian faith and his artistic nature. The result is that, to his ears, everything he does seems a little compromised. The euphoric reviews for Illinoise, in particular, haven’t left him convinced of the worth of his work.

“Right now I’m really frustrated with how I’ve been writing,” he sighs. “At the time, I thought the last record was incredibly sophisticated and successful, but now I’m not so sure. The challenge that I have now is to really dig deeper and to make music that is more permanent and feels more eternal, and I don’t think I’ve done that yet. You just kind of live with this burden of knowing you’re not as good as you could be; that you can always practise for another hour. I’m starting to feel the pangs of that a bit. It causes a lot of grief because I end up not respecting my own music, and that’s a real problem.”

BORN IN DETROIT IN 1975, Stevens experienced what sounds like a colourful upbringing. Ris forename - pronounced Soof yahn - is Persian and was apparently given to him by the leader of a religious sect his mother and father belonged to. His parents split up when he was very young and his mother married Lowell Brams, a “weird, loner, beatnik pseudo-hippie guy from the ’60s”, who handed down a love of blues music, John Fahey; Nick Drake, Judee Sill and Joni Mitchell, as well as Love, The Beatles and the Stones. The music captivated him, especially The Beatles, which he describes as “magical. It’s like children’s music. Very comforting.”

His stepfather cultivated in Stevens a love for interesting, melodic music. And although the marriage failed, a lasting friendship has endured: Brams stayed in touch with the children and remained close to Stevens when he went to college, driving him and his band to gigs, lending money and buying dinner when times were tight. Nowadays, he is Stevens’s co-conspirator on his own Asthmatic Kitty record label, which releases all his records.

Stevens left Michigan for New York in 1999, with A Sun Came already completed. He studied creative writing at the New School of Social Research in Manhattan and worked until a couple of years ago as a designer, for Time Warner’s publishing arm, amongst others. “I have so many other skills!” he cries, not quite jokingly. Throughout the conversation there is a deep, undisguised frustration that he is a “mere” popular musician rather than an author. His mind is certainly programmed to think like that of a writer. Illinoise - he knew next to nothing about the state - was the product of months of research, reading everything from Carl Sandburg to police blogs, while he talks about “gathering material and reinforcing plausibility in the narrative,” not a sentence you’re ever likely to hear Shayne Ward, or indeed Phil Collins, utter.

Aside from the 50 States Project, the other aspect of Stevens and his music that has been much discussed is his devout Christian faith. He is understandably reluctant to talk about it in too much depth, having discovered that it motivates a lot of questions that he finds odd and unanswerable. His music certainly expresses a certain euphoria and wonder at the mysteries of the world, yet you would struggle to define it as specifically religious. Stevens’s own take on it is that “if you believe in an omnipotent God, you yield yourself to that God, and of course everything you do is about that relationship. My songs are always about that, but they’re also about aliens from outer space and serial killers and pre-marital sex and all these other things that make up the world we live in. To me, it’s all about life and life is all about God.”

He can just as easily be seen to be part of a community of musicians comprising Bright Eyes, Devendra Banhart and Antony And The Johnsons, a group defined as much by their differences as their similarities. What unites them is a folk base, a sense of a shared artistic aesthetic and a certain intellectual ambition, allied to a willingness to skid all over the place in pursuit of their influences. Alongside a love of The Beatles and label mates the Castanets, for instance, Stevens cites New York downtown free-jazz bassist William Parker and saxophonist Daniel Carter as direct inspirations.

“It’s really difficult to perceive music now in terms of groupings and communities and genres, because everything is so cross-pollinised,” he says. “A lot of musicians today are taking in ideas and concepts from all across the board. It is a hunter-gatherer’s ideology: you just take what you can get and bring it all together. It requires an openness to different methods of making music.”

FOR STEVENS. THE METHODOLOGY is key. It’s easy to forget that, for all their lushness and structural complexities, he has produced all of his records himself, using first four-track and then recently moving on to eight-track and Pro Tools. Most of the music is still recorded in his apartment in Brooklyn, but rather than regarding this as a limitation, he views it as a spur to greater adventurousness; an invitation to push himself and stretch beyond the confines of his surroundings.

“I was directly inspired by the knowledge that a record like Sergeant Pepper was recorded on two synchronised four-tracks. In terms of production values, I felt really motivated to use the limited resources I had to the best of my ability. I don’t think much has changed. Most musicians today have access to so much technology on their own and are very educated musically; very easily influenced by what has already been done, that I don’t think there is enough adventure. I don’t think generally we challenge ourselves enough. You have to constantly remind yourself to take risks.”

Inevitably; he feels he falls short of his own standards. He struggles to see an overarching theme in his work - “It’s all pretty hit and miss for me,” - but is sure one will eventually emerge, perhaps when he is on his deathbed. Right now it’s all about storytelling, uncovering interesting tales peopled with interesting characters, constructing a meaning in a song, which evokes something tangible. He writes primarily on piano, but also scratches out his simpler songs on banjo and guitar and admits to “a tension between folk and classical, between high art and low art”. He worries that his music is too simple or populist in the literal sense: that it’s too much about people and less about more eternal, enduring things.

“I’m starting to look further beyond the folk tradition and deeper into the history of music, focusing on the masters of a certain instrument or a certain style,” he says. “Maybe what I’m having a problem with is that popular music has such a low standard. Maybe my music belongs in a different standard. Once you start writing for an ensemble, then you’re suddenly measured by the standards of the history of classical music and then I know pretty well, judging by my amateur composition skills, that I wouldn’t measure up in that tradition.”

He is, nonetheless, contemplating music for a string quartet. Who knows where else this bubbling sense of creative frustration might lead him? He hasn’t been composing much lately, concentrating more on the business side of the record label and his “funny little family” of artists. Relieved to be taking time away from self-analysis, Stevens feels he needs a little perspective. He was recently offered $250,000 by a beer company to record a song for a commercial, and has been pursued for film soundtracks. Generally, he graciously declines such offers.

“I don’t think I have commercial aspirations, because everything that I aspire to be has to do directly with my work and my art,” he ponders, before returning to his recurring theme. “I’ve been trying to be more present tense, to enjoy what I’m doing and value the blessings and privileges that I have. Being a musician is like living in a fantasy world. I have a hard time grasping it. In fact, I don’t even say it. When you fill in those cards at the airport and they ask for your vocation, I still write ’student’ or ‘designer’. ‘Musician’ just looks so… unofficial!”