The State of his Art
Geographically-minded singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens releases a collection of outtakes from his breakthrough album, Illinois.
By Alan Di Perna

Just about a year ago, singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens made a big splash among critics with the ambitious and idiosyncratic Illinois. The second in a projected series of albums on each of the 50 states - 2003’s Michigan was the first - the record is a stirring bit of American comprised of imaginative and musically eclectic songs inspired by the history and prominent residents of Illinois. Such was the appeal of the album that Stevens has now released The Avalanche: Outtakes & Extras from the Illinois Album (Asthmatic Kitty).

A hallmark of Stevens’s approach is the contrast between his gentle tenor and dense orchestral arrangements - with most of the instruments played by Sufjan - that differ from song to song. At the heart of the music is the artist’s strummed and fingerpicked acoustic guitar and banjo.

Stevens studied literature and creative writing in college, so it is not surprising that he approaches songwriting as a storyteller. “I just find that I am conditioned to hear narrative in melody,” says Stevens, who often packs what seems like an entire novel into a few minutes of music.

“My focus on the states,” says Stevens of his unusual project, “is really is just a device - an arbitrary way of categorizing and creating guidelines. I guess I could have just written about regions instead, or on different ethnic and immigrant groups. The state thing is just a vehicle for my desire to tell a deeper story about mankind. I don’t think it’s even wholly or exclusively American. It’s about bigger things.”

GUITAR WORLD ACOUSTIC: Was the material on The Avalanche originally written on acoustic guitar?

SUFJAN STEVENS: More than half of it was. I go back and forth between acoustic guitar, banjo and piano for songwriting. But I don’t own a piano, so when I write at home it’s usually on the acoustic guitar.

GWA: You are proficient on many instruments - strings, reeds, brass, keyboards. When did the acoustic guitar enter the picture?

STEVENS: I was classically trained as an oboist, and I played a lot of piano for fun. But it wasn’t until the summer before my second year in college that I got into the guitar. A good friend of mine loaned me a nylon-string Ovation, and I spent every day that whole summer - three hours a day after work - strumming that thing. Up until then, the guitar had seemed so foreign to me.

GWA: You do a lot of fingerpicking on The Avalanche. Anyone particularly influence you there?

STEVENS: I remember listening to Leonard Cohen, who plays nylon-string, early on. And when I first heard Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, in high school, I was mesmerized. It was actually before I started playing guitar, but even then I was blown away by the nuances in his strumming patterns. I couldn’t believe how many different syncopated notes, tones and gestures he could create just within the space of a measure. Once I started playing guitar, I went back to that record and it really influenced the way that I play today.

GWA: It sounds to me like the guitars on the acoustic version of “Chicago” on The Avalanche are double tracked. Is that something you like to do?

STEVENS: They are double tracked, and I do usually double the basic acoustic guitar part, or I play an accompaniment part that’s capoed a little higher. A lot of times I start with a repetitive picking pattern and then add chord changes or different picking patterns on top of that. It really stems from how I learned to play guitar, which I did with a little Tascam four-track in front of me. I would record a picking or strumming pattern that had one particular rhythm, then overdub a different pattern with a different rhythm and see how they related to each other. I was able to quickly and easily learn about rhythms, overtones and harmonics that way.

GWA: You have three different takes of “Chicago” on The Avalanche. The one labeled “Adult Contemporary Easy Listening Version” sounds like you have the guitar capoed way up the neck.

STEVENS: It is. I capo a lot - you’ll notice that if you see me play live. It’s not unusual for me to capo at the 9th or 10th fret. When I play the acoustic I want it to sound more like a harp than a guitar. I like to have a very warm, round tone. I don’t use a pick. Just my fingers, even when I strum.

GWA: What acoustics did you use to record the songs on Illinois and The Avalanche?

STEVENS: I don’t actually own an acoustic guitar, which will probably strike people as odd. I used my brother’s Seagull guitar for the album. It’s kind of a cheap acoustic.

GWA: Let’s talk about your lyrics for a bit. Is there a connection between your songwriting and your training as a fiction writer?

STEVENS: They’re pretty related. I’m really interested in characters, settings, sensory information and details that augment the movement of the song or story. But I haven’t written fiction in a long time because I’ve been so distracted by the songwriting.

GWA: I notice that you reference Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” quite a bit on The Avalanche.

STEVENS: I think I got a little out of hand with that [laughs]. I think it’s because a lot of songs on the album are about the process of immigration across Illinois, which of course led to the slow elimination of Native American culture. It’s strange to travel around the country and come across bridges, lakes, rivers, monuments and cities with Native American names. Yet there are no Native Americans left in the state of Illinois. That got me thinking about “This Land is Your Land,” which is kind of a populist anthem about how the working man has as much right to this country as anyone else. I actually wanted to use some of the lyrics from the song, but we couldn’t get clearance from Woody Guthrie’s publisher. It’s infuriating, because the song was written by this iconic American folk singer who had no particular interest in capitalizing on the commercial success of his music. Yet only a few decades down the road, there’s a company that has taken possession of his song.

GWA: You grew up in Michigan, so it makes sense that it was the first album in your series on the states. But what about Illinois? Do you have some personal connection there?

STEVENS: I don’t really have a personal connection other than that I’ve always been sort of in awe of Chicago. I had a lot of strange experiences there when I was in college. With Illinois, I wanted to make a record that was really epic and robust, with a lot of pageantry. The state just seemed “right,” what with the Abraham Lincoln connection, the Chicago World’s Fair and the city’s being an important urban center of the Midwest. It just seemed to represent big ideas and progress - civilization, a great place to dream.

GWA: When you settle on a state, do you study its history and find ways to hang songs on that?

STEVENS: Honestly, this is still so new to me that I don’t really have a method. I didn’t do any historical research for Michigan; it’s all based on memory. I wasn’t even fully conscious of writing about the state. I just recognized two thirds of the way through that this collection of songs was about Michigan. But Illinois was obviously the result of conscious planning. I did a lot of reading and research, historical surveying. I wanted to create an epic song cycle that was based on written material and history. I wanted to distance myself emotionally from the material and write as an historian would. But this wasn’t a very efficient approach because I wrote too many songs and got too involved in the material. It was very exhausting. I think the next few records in the series are going to be much more specific, less panoramic. I am more interested now in looking at small things. Being very microscopic.

GWA: I’ve read that you draw inspiration from folk and outsider art. Anyone in particular?

STEVENS: I’m a big fan of Howard Finster, a folk artist from Georgia who was very idiosyncratic in his voice, his style and the information he used. He concerned himself with very grandiose things - the New Jerusalem and heaven and hell. I am also infatuated with Henry Darger, who was an outsider artist from Chicago. I make reference to him on The Avalanche, and to this enormous novel that he wrote about three sisters and their adventures in fighting armies of adult men who want to thwart and kill them.

GWA: Are you still planning to do albums on all 50 states?

STEVENS: Yeah. And if I haven’t concluded the project in my lifetime, I’ll definitely pass it on to someone else. Start a franchise, farm it out to other songwriters. I would like this to become a collective project involving a lot more people than just myself. In this country we’re in dire straits - economically and environmentally - in so many ways. There’s a kind of sickness in terms of commerce ruling everything. I think there are great economic benefits from that, but I also think there are ramifications that could be pretty serious down the road. The whole thing could very well implode. So maybe what I’m doing is embarking on this project thinking, “Let’s start making a record, take account of what’s going on and what’s happened in the past. Let’s try to create a collection of stories about who we are. A testament of stories.” And I think that has to involve a lot of people.