I Am The Knitting King!
A conversation with Sufjan Stevens
Jonny Hunter
Emmie Magazine
Volume 8, Issue 3
03/22/2004

The music world smiled brightly on Sufjan Stevens in 2003 after the slow building of momentum that surrounded his release Greetings from Michigan. The record showed Stephens to be one of the more creative and interesting voices to emerge last year. Stevens writes with varied, complicated, and sometimes odd elements that carry his music to a level far more intriguing than most musicians could hope for.

Far from being a one-dimensional type of guy, music plays only a smaller role (even though Stephens plans to write a record for each of the fifty states) in his life than some might think. Stephens recently graduated from the New School with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, and won the prize for best fiction in 2003 from the New School. Aside from these accomplishments and his musical adventures, Stephens also finds time to teach knitting classes to a group of blind women each week. On top of all that he is releasing a new record this march that has nothing to do with states called Seven Swans.

Emmie: How do you think art should function within society?

Art is definitely a form of communication, and language is just symbols and sounds. Symbolic sounds and written language are just symbols. But art is a kind of symbol that is more expressive and more emotional, I guess. [It's] more about relationships.

It seems immature to me that art would be taken in a manner in which it can change things or that culture will transform through some artist.

That’s true, and that is just the nature and character of post-modernism or post-humanism or whatever kind of culture we are in now. I don’t even know what they call it, but it does seem like there’s not much substance to it. There’s no motivation except to upset somebody or subvert tradition. I think that it’s important to have revelation or enlightenment, but it’s not inherently important because it is not motivated from the heart. It is more motivated from rebellion. I think good rebellion comes out of real conviction. That is kind of bad rebellion, which is just a desire to unsettle things.

How do you see yourself as an artist- more as a writer, or more as a musician?

Naturally I’m probably more of a musician. That was my inclination, from very early on. I was interested in instruments and in music and in singing. I think that music comes much more easily. I feel like I have a natural capacity for song writing and for playing instruments. I’m not tremendously skilled at it but I have the inclination, whereas writing is more of a willful kind of discipline for me. I’ve always felt a real conviction for narrative and storytelling and all of that. I think we all do, we are all interested in telling stories and in telling our own stories.

My training with music is kind of limited. I studied oboe very early on, and I took a lot of lessons and went on to orchestras and ensembles. But I gave it up once I started to find my voice as a musician and as a songwriter. The oboe is an instrument that I don’t like. I was in middle school when I started, and I played up through high school and college. Writing was something I started early. In fifth grade I know I was writing stories but there wasn’t any training. It wasn’t anything I was working at. It was indulgent, just writing mystery stories, adventure stories, or fantasy stories. A lot of adjectives you know. I wrote horror stories. They were really gratuitous with lots of puss, blood, limbs falling off, and dogs biting people in the face. It was pretty grotesque.

Are you working on a book?

I’m supposed to be writing a collection of short stories, but I’ve been taking a break for a while because the music has been taking over a lot of my spare time. And I’m working full-time so I don’t have a lot of time to be writing fiction. When I write fiction it requires all of my attention. I can’t expend energy or resources on music while I’m doing fiction, so I’ve had to take a break, but I do have quite a few stories collected that are related. I’m working on a novel in stories about a community of people who live in this rural area in northern Michigan and they are kind of interconnected through this fundamentalist Christian church that is up there. Even people from outside of the church are interconnected through it. It is just part of this community.

How does your fiction writing interact with your song writing?

Writing stories crosses over into my music a lot. Writing a story is much more set in my mind than writing a song. It’s a fully developed piece and you have a lot more space and time to design a character, to design a setting. Sometimes songs become failed stories. These are stories in which I feel that I didn’t have enough space, or didn’t put enough into it. So it becomes the lyrics for a song. In a song there’s a lot left out, you can only fit so much in.

Was Romulus (a track from Greetings from Michigan) a failed story?

Partly it was. I had written stories about that same theme, but with different settings and different characters. I kind of felt like something was missing in the story form, and what was missing was melody. Putting the words into melody and then a song and its music evokes something that text can’t. That’s the problem with the theme of abandonment- parental abandonment- [is] it is so weighted it is hard to deal with responsibly in fiction or art. It’s not so much that the stories become songs or the songs become stories, I’m using the same elements in both. I do write songs mostly in first person, I noticed that recently. Even if I’m writing from a different persona I still use first person for some reason. More and more I’m writing fiction in third person and songs in first.

So are you really going to do fifty states?

Probably not. It doesn’t seem realistic right now. I’m definitely going to start, and embark on the whole project seriously.

What states have you lived in?

I’ve lived in Oregon, New Jersey, New York and I know a lot about Massachusetts, because my brother lives there.

How do you feel that you can write about states that you don’t know as well?

Well research, the Internet, interviewing friends who live there, maybe spending time in that state. I was just recently in Rhode Island for the first time and it kind of inspired a lot of new ideas for me for that state, and I talked to a lot of people and I’m now consciously asking people about where they are from, what defines their culture, and what kind of history it has. I’m finding that people know a lot about where they’re from. They know a lot about their state and they become excited about talking about it.

Do you have songs written for other states yet?

I have material for New Jersey but I haven’t written the lyrics yet. I have about half of Rhode Island done. It’s going to be a seven inch. I’ve started writing songs for Illinois… with the Michigan Militia and Choir. We’ve been doing songs about Iowa as well. Texas is going to be a difficult task. [It'll be] a big project.

Are you going to do New York?

I would like it if each record had a certain musical style and I would like New York to be rock, punk rock. I would like Oregon to be kind of folky, and New Jersey is movie soundtrack meets Broadway musical.

Greetings From Michigan has some of that musical feel.

I was making a concerted effort to make the songs more upbeat and to be a little more silly. I had been playing with Danielson Famile and I think that really influenced the way I was playing.

Do people think that Michigan is about your own childhood?

I think with Michigan yeah, because that is where I’m from. They read a lot of it as being autobiographical. People will read my fiction as well, and I think that is not very discerning as a reader to assume because there is a first person narrator that it is autobiographical. There is a journal I was published in called Image, I think it is out of Seattle. The story they printed is from the perspective of a girl scout, so that was a real challenge. I spent a lot of time writing this and editing and allowing women who were girl scouts to edit, working on the language, and the tone and all the subjects. Because I don’t know a lot about it, except for what I know from having three sisters. It’s a difficult task; you become a spokesperson for so many people. It’s not reality.

I find that I spend a lot time making up things when I talk to people, just to practice my writing.

Like telling lies. I find that I do that all the time. I tell an anecdote about my childhood and half of it is made up, and I find that fiction is a really wonderful genre because you just make things up. You just use your imagination and you feel like it’s very real and that it’s happened, but it’s made-up. Sometimes I get things mixed up, I try to write from my life and I get all the details mixed-up.

How many records have you put out now?

Michigan was my third record, Enjoy Your Rabbit (2001) and A Sun Came (2000) are the other two. I have two records I released with a band (Marzuki). When I was in University, we didn’t promote it or distribute it. We just sold it at shows. I have three Christmas EP’s as well.

Do you do those every year now?

Well it has been three years now so I feel like I’m going to start it. But next year I want to have a manufactured record. I’m going to take the best songs from the three EP’s and then the other half will be Christmas songs about Vermont, so it will be “Happy Christmas From Vermont.”

What is the motivation behind the Christmas EP’s?

Well the first one I did was for my grandparents and my relatives, so I wanted it to be very listenable, very accessible, but it turned out being very silly as well so it kind of failed in that sense. I just got tired of trying to find gifts for my family. It is hard to shop for my nieces who are teenagers and my grandmother who doesn’t really want anything. Also part of the motivation is to write and record an EP as quick as possible, to involve people, to have as much fun as possible, and I also want it to sound really good. Usually I spend a lot of time on my records, maybe I over edit. But with these I have a deadline…Christmas. I usually only start two or three weeks before Christmas.

When you came to Madison (in late November) you had not even started the record yet.

Oh no, because Denison [Witmer, with whom he was touring in November] is on the record. It was really last minute this year.

And you still wrote some of the songs?

Actually there’s like four originals on there. But you know they’re not real songs. They’re just strumming, and I just made it up on the spot. But Denison sounds great on it.

Were you surprised by the amount of positive reviews on the Michigan record?

When I finished the record, Lowell at Asthmatic Kitty and I knew that there was something really good about it. But we had no expectations because all the records we had been releasing at Asthmatic Kitty hadn’t been huge. It has been really slow, so when this started to get reviews in Pitchfork and CMJ, I was kind of shocked; I didn’t expect people to be that into it. I’m really honored by the reception, and really encouraged. But I don’t understand the logic behind any of it. It doesn’t make any sense to me. At the same time I’m really flattered by it all, and want to be responsible about it. But I also know that we are not validated by other peoples’ opinions, and as musicians we need to be constantly reminding ourselves of this. I know very soon a record of mine will not be very well received, or really won’t be heard or even acknowledged, and I think that we need to be prepared for that because we can’t really rely on anyone else’s generous opinion of us.

So you have another record coming out in March?

Seven Swans, on Sounds Familyre, and Rough Trade has licensed it in Europe.

How would you compare it to Michigan?

I think it’s less emphatic than Michigan and it’s less dramatic, it’s subtler. All the songs come from the same perspective, and the record has more of a spiritual element throughout it that Michigan didn’t necessarily have, and I think that it resolves a lot of things for me. But honestly it is older material; it was record two years before Michigan. I think it is just from a different part of me that I think is really important and really special. But who knows if people will like it?

What do people in Michigan think of Greetings from Michigan?

I think some people find it amusing because they’re familiar. The first time I played in Michigan was somewhat of a disaster. It was a very large theater, I think there were almost two thousand people there, and I was opening up for Over the Rhine. It was somewhat awkward for me. This is not the type of music that should be played in front of thousands of people. It was a challenge because people weren’t familiar with the songs or me and I was wearing my Michigan Militia outfit; which was a big mistake.

What’s that outfit look like?

Its basically looks just like a cub scout uniform with a Michigan patch, and I wear an American flag bandanna and sometimes I wear a Boy Scout cap. People found it really amusing; there were people laughing in the middle of the songs. There were amusing parts of the songs, but nothing that would generate a laugh track. It wasn’t really a failure, because to me personally, I’m very funny. I’m not that serious. It’s just that I’m so used to people taking me seriously that I get used to that, so occasionally when people are laughing in the middle of the songs it is a little startling.

How often do you knit?

Well once a week we try to get together for our knitting group but that has been really erratic because I’ve been really busy and out of town a lot. I try to knit or crochet once a week. I was working on these granny squares and my goal was to make one a day, but that ended when I ran out of yarn. Then my Grandmother taught me how to make these wash clothes and it is a really special design.

Once a week on Mondays I teach this class for blind knitters. Occasionally I will bring projects for them to knit, and I brought these (He pulls a small knitted Elf out of his box) and a lot of them they don’t follow the directions, or they do but they get it a little bit wrong, and some of their elves look so awesome. A lot of them don’t like the way I did the eyes; they made these huge big eyes that they made themselves. One woman made over thirty of these. She went crazy just made them and started selling them, 10 dollars apiece.

Do people find it weird that you knit?

I think some people find it weird, especially if I go home. I had some knitting in Martha Stewart because a friend of mine works for her and they do a lot of stories on knitting, probably once or twice a year. So I did all this knitting for the magazine, and I made the mistake of telling my step mom and about it, so now everyone in knows. That is kind of what I’m known for, that I knit for Martha Stewart Living. I do so many other interesting things, things that I’m proud of, I kind of get annoyed, so I kind of don’t knit in public anymore. I just started to get really insecure about it, and people just assume a lot about it.