Words Adrian Pannett
Pictures Paul Heartfield

Face it. We’ll never catch-up with everything. Just as the collective age of us pre-MP3 collectors rises exponentially in line with our collective cynicism, there will always and forever be something new, something forgotten and something left-behind to taut our ears for our hard-sought spending money. This writer has nightmares about being ninety-three years old, on a deathbed in a house that borders on being more of an audio-library than a living space, croaking to himself, “Oh I can’t die ’til next Monday, there’s another Giant Sand reissue coming out that I have to buy…” It’s a grimly surreal prophecy for sure, but not an unlikely one. Just when you thought there were no more ready-made back catalogues to plunder from, no further old/new readymade talents to produce them, and of course, no space left in which to stuff your towering piles of recorded artefacts; along comes someone like Sufjan Stevens. Four albums old, fresh-faced and brimming with an ensnaring sense of imagination, Stevens has brought this prematurely matured music-lover yet another step closer to losing the patience of his bank manager and his loved-ones.

However, there are worse ways to drive yourself over the edge; after all, you can’t inject, snort or smoke CDs and vinyl can you? And Sufjan Stevens is an addiction worth taking up. First ‘arriving’ on British soil earlier this year, with his rather stunning fourth full-length, ‘Seven Swans’ (Rough Trade), Stevens has brought the art of singer-songwriting back from the brink of Neanderthal-like boredom and regression. Fusing a love for ambitious neo-folk arrangements, beatific male/female vocals and songs imbued with insight and intrigue, ‘Seven Swans’ is one of 2004’s most subtle treasures, and certainly destined for many a discerning end of year of top ten. What’s better still, is that while the next Stevens LP might well be delayed by a need to service his new European fanbase with extensive touring, there are three other older albums in his catalogue to keep us busy in the interim. Working backwards, you’ll find 2003’s mighty ‘Michigan’. Set for a benevolent belated European release via Rough Trade this summer, ‘Michigan’ is the magical missing link between The Silver Jew’s poetic working class storytelling, the kaleidoscopic sonic visions bequeathed upon us by the Lee Hazlewood/Brian Wilson/Jim O’Rourke lineage and the respectful knowledge of a learned American scholar.

If you’re feeling braver, there’s the esoteric electronica of the sophomore ‘Enjoy Your Rabbit’ from 2001 – an instrumental song-cycle about all the signs of the zodiac, no less. Whilst ‘Enjoy Your Rabbit’ is probably not the easiest or most essential entry-point into the Stevens catalogue, it should at least help to stave off any future pigeon-holing. If you want to see how it all began though – besides listening intently to past Stevens collaborators like The Danielson Famile – then you could do far worse than pick up his 2000 debut, ‘A Sun Came!’ Very recently reissued in newly reconfigured form on
Asthmatic Kitty Records, ‘A Sun Came!’ is the ultimate expression of mind-bending ingenuity with a four-track and a room full of instruments. Packed with bountiful bucolic loveliness, mountains of mad-eyed experimentation and oodles of meticulous melody making, it’s astonishing that Stevens’ bushel has kept him so well hid until now. Bleary and weary from months of back-to-back touring and promotion for ‘Seven Swans’ and ‘Michigan’, our tracks amicably intertwined at a quarter past sound-check time, in the graceful environs of West London’s Bush Hall.

Have you been taken aback by the warm reception that you’ve had from UK and European audiences so far this year, both on tour and with release of ‘Seven Swans’?

I think so, yeah. It’s a great honour of course and I’m just kinda overwhelmed by it. It really has less to do with me and more to do with the people who are putting out the records – Rough Trade, and the promotions people. They’re doing a fantastic job and people seem to be enjoying the music, so…

Does that mirror the response you’ve had at home?

It seems that overall the response to the records, and the songs, has been pretty positive; which is really encouraging because I’ve been writing music for a few years and I haven’t really been doing it publicly until recently. It changes the dynamics of it I think.

‘Seven Swans’ is a relatively stripped-down and sparse affair compared to its three predecessors and it’s the shortest album you’ve done at forty-five minutes – compared to the seventy-plus of your first three. Were you intentionally going for something a little more ’straight to the point’?

I think so. It was the first record [that] I didn’t record, and I collaborated with a friend of mine, Daniel Smith from the Danielson Famile. He recorded it, engineered and produced it, and he made a lot of the creative decisions. It was his vision to record songs that were less arranged and more suited for my voice. That was his sensibility.

Were you comfortable to hand over the reins like that?

You know, I went through a whole range of responses. Initially I was really resistant to it and really nervous and anxious about sharing this music. But I really trust Daniel’s aesthetic and his sensibility and, as the project went on – and it really took a few years to do just because it was very casual – and our relationship developed, I feel the songs and the recordings seemed to develop into something that was really different from what I would have done. And I think it’s really important for me to do more of that, because I am very insulated when I write and very independent about it. And that produces a kind of sound that’s very distinctive to what I do in my voice, so it’s very nice to collaborate.

Is there an underlying conceptual thread to ‘Seven Swans’ as with ‘Michigan’ or are the songs much more loosely connected?

You could probably make that assessment more than I could, being a music critic. To me I see it’s about the pursuit of things that we love and our desire. Wanting things and not being able to have them. Wanting connection with those things and having a relationship with these things and these people. I see that as a theme in it. I dunno.

Speaking of things we love; is there any significance to your cover of REM’s The One I Love, which you’ve been known to perform live?

Sometimes I do that. I’m not a big REM fan but I like the melody and I like how simple it is and how direct it is. It’s nice to start an evening with a song like that because it’s just expressing my gratitude to the people there and, often, because I’m doing a lot of songs in my set about Michigan, I dedicate the song to Michigan, the one I love. I don’t really cover anything, I only know two songs. It’s not my style but I kinda like the idea that it’s REM because REM seems kinda old-fashioned now and washed up [laughs].

What is the other song you cover?

I sometimes cover this song, The Lakes of Canada, by The Innocence Mission. It’s an incredible song…

You’ll be pleased to know The Innocence Mission will feature in this same issue…

Oh gosh, I’m a big fan of theirs. I think Karen Peris is a great songwriter. I think she gets away with a lot of sentimentality that other people can’t get away with, because of her conviction. I think that’s really, really cool.

It’s a question I wasn’t going to ask, but as you’ve mentioned The Innocence Mission and their conviction, how important is your faith to your music?

Oh, man…

Is that too broad a question?

Yeah and, to be honest, I could talk to you about it personally, but I don’t like talking about that stuff in the public forum because, I think, certain themes and concepts and themes and convictions are meant for personal conversation. But I think it’s a good question especially because of so much of the subject [matter] on ‘Seven Swans’. It’s a question I imagine The Innocence Mission get a lot because they’re Catholic, they sing a lot of liturgical Catholic-influenced songs.

Perhaps if you could talk about one or two songs, in particular Abraham and The Transfiguration?

Well those are really straight out of biblical narrative and they’re pretty much taking the text itself and reworking it into the framework of the lyrics. They’re very literal, there’s very little artistry in the actual lyric writing because it’s all verbatim. I like doing that, I like taking other texts, including the Bible, or English romantic literature; sometimes I borrow from that or Walt Whitman, or William Blake, and just rework them, almost verbatim, into a song. And that’s what I did for those two songs. Those are really exercises, they’re not even real songs. Do you like how I answered that without revealing anything about myself? [laughs]

One of the most pleasing things on both ‘Michigan’ and ‘Seven Swans’ is the use of female backing vocals – they remind me of early Leonard Cohen recordings. Are you a fan?

Yeah, there’s a song called Oh God, Where Are You Now? on the ‘Michigan’ record and, after we released the record, I heard a Leonard Cohen song that has the same whimsical backing vocal. I see that after the fact. I kinda understand the limitations of my voice and the intonation, and my range is very narrow, and I’m not a great singer. So the more I record the more I like to collaborate with other singers and using harmonies. I think a male vocalist and a female vocalist together creates a really wonderful warm and affectionate sound; I’d like to do more of that in the future.

Why did you elect to reissue and expand your first album so soon, particularly now when there seems to be a surplus of your music being released? Were you unhappy with the original mastering etc?

It does seem like an onslaught of product and I’m a little cynical of that, a little suspicious. I’m really wanting to monitor what I’m releasing and that first record is the – how do I come up with a diplomatic way to say this? – it’s the least interesting to me musically, but it’s the most interesting in terms of my progress, because of how unfocussed it is. Initially we had just run out of copies. We only made a thousand and it took us years and years to sell them. We were just going to reprint it but we didn’t have the original artwork and I wasn’t happy with the original master, so we just decided to do new artwork, to remaster it and we thought if we added two new tracks that would be a nice bonus for people. But I think it’s a lot like ‘Enjoy Your Rabbit’ – it’s for the person, the listener, who’s interested in my entire range because that first record really reveals a lot about my clumsiness and my ambition. It’s not a very forgiving record and it’s all over the place.

It’s very full-sounding for a record cut primarily on four-track. Did the restrictions force you to be more ambitious – to test its limitations?

I think so and I feel now, the older I get and the more I do this professionally, the more resources I have and that really scares me. So, I have to impose standards and restrictions on things that I do and I think I’m going to have to continue to do that. The four-track was a great palette, or whatever, because of how straight-forward it was. I used it for years and years, I recorded a lot of music on it. I’ll probably go back to it because it’s kinda challenging and I’m getting lazy, you know? When I record digitally and use Pro-Tools I can cheat.

Does the element of surprise that new fans may experience when picking up your second album, ‘Enjoy Your Rabbit’, amuse you? How would you expect people to react to an instrumental electronica record from someone they’d consider primarily an acoustic singer-songwriter?

Yeah, it is a little bit of a joke when I tour by myself with the banjo and then I have this record for sale. And I am curious to see who buys it and what they think of it. I wasn’t explaining it at first and, as I’ve toured more and more, I felt I owed it to the consumer [laughs) to put a disclaimer on it that it's an electronic record. But I think it is in the same aesthetic and style and vision as my other records. It's just using different tones and different resources, but it's got the same sensibility; it's still really hyper-arranged, melodic music. It's just more electronic and it's more movie soundtrack.

In my review of 'Michigan' I make comparisons to Van Dyke Parks' 'Song Cycle', Jim O'Rourke's 'Eureka' and Stereolab's 'Sound Dust', Would you accept any of those albums or artists as primers?

Van Dyke Parks, no, because I'm not familiar with his music. Definitely I listen to Stereolab and I find their arrangements and the sophistication in the musicality and the arrangements and the time signatures really exciting. I like Jim O'Rourke's production more than his music. He's recorded some Sterealab I think, or done some engineering. I like most of the records where he's producing but not writing necessarily, I like his style.

How do you manage to layer the sound as much as you do without things becoming cluttered? Is that instinctive?

That's a really difficult balance I think. It's really about listening; keeping your ears open. And being sensitive to frequencies. I always hear a secondary melody or some contrapuntal bass-line or another rhythmic thing going on and I always want to force it into the song. Sometimes what you have to do is put in as much as you can and then spend the next few days editing and taking back. It's kinda like how a sculptor works in that they have this raw matter that they're working and chipping away and shaping it into something. It's really taking something out to create a form and I really see a lot of that same style in how I arrange and produce.

Do you take a similar approach to your lyric writing? Do you write an abundance of words and then edit over time?

The lyrics, unfortunately, probably don't get as much attention. And I think sometimes my lyrics are a little too obtuse and abstract and I really should be using more specific language. And with narrative songs it comes much easier because I've had a lot of experience in fiction workshops and it's something I love to do. So then I use the principles and mechanics of fiction writing, which is to brainstorm, to free-write and then shape and edit from that to create an interesting narrative.

Given the large quantities of songs on 'A Sun Came!' and 'Michigan' [even more with the new editions] and the different styles you’ve thus far presented your music in, can we assume you’re a prolific workaholic, or had these songs been building-up over a long period before you had the opportunity to release them?

I’m definitely slowing down and, I think, just the business of it inhibits you. And I find that I’m writing less because I’m doing more promotion and more touring. So I have to find a balance. But I think it’s really important for me to be involved in the business of it because that’s a social side of the music and I think it’s good for my social well-being or whatever to be working with other people, and to be accountable to a label and accountable to the promotions team and accountable to other musicians when I tour. That’s the good part of it but I am writing less and less. But when I do write I often record, so I’m producing music even at my slowest point – I feel I’m still productive. I don’t know [laughs].

A common dilemma for a music writer is knowing that you’re inhibiting productivity in some ways. You – the musician – arrive in a city, load in, sound-check and then have your picture taken and sit down with a writer, when you’d much rather see some of the world that’s instead reduced to a fleeting blur. Yet it’s fair to say without this part of the game there
are people who wouldn’t discover your music.

There’s an awful lot of editorial chatter [laughs] in music journalism. There’s an entire language that’s used for the scrutiny and assessment of recordings. Which is a little bit ironic because music is its own language, you know, and evokes things and says things that can’t really be reduced to straight-up narrative, and I think that’s what’s so exciting about it. So it’s an even mare difficult task, I think, to write about music.

You moved from Michigan to New York. What inspired you to leave the place you seem to love?

You know I’d actually moved to New York for graduate school and I’d gone to a masters programme for writing for two years. And that’s what drew me to New York, was the University there. You know Michigan is a beautiful place to grow up, it has a beautiful landscape and it’s great for children; but it offers so little for people in their twenties and thirties. And it’s just not culturally very stimulating and interesting. Same parts are great – Detroit’s really interesting, and the landscape is wonderful. What’s so appealing about New York is the variety there and the energy there. It’s constantly changing and it’s challenging and it’s very confrontational. It’s also a very goad place to work and do music. I think that’s why so many people go there.

Do you regret making public your intention to make a record for each of the United States?

Did I actually say that I was going to do that? [laughs] I think it’s becoming a myth, a terrible mistake.

Would you like to dispel that myth right now?

Yeah, I’m definitely not doing the fifty States records…but I am as well. For the sake of the myth I am. It really was a gimmick, a proposal to… get attention [laughs]. Now I’m trying to shield myself from too much coverage. But yeah, I do regret saying that. But I don’t even remember saying it. Somebody tied me up and put a gun to my head to say it.