Interview by Jennifer Pappas
Photography by Denny Renshaw

Sufjan Stevens has been one of the most innovative and frenetically productive songwriter/storytellers on the music scene since his humble beginnings in Holland, MI folk-rock band, Marzuki. For that band, he played guitar, percussion, and the recorder, and then would supplement this output alone in his room, practicing on everything from the bass to the piano to a toy Casio. It wasn’t too many years before he would declare his desire to write an album for each of the 50 states in 50 years. Sound impossible? Maybe not for a man of his many talents.

While enrolled at Hope College, Stevens began piecing together what would become his debut solo album, A Sun Came. The album was released in 2000 on Asthmatic Kitty – a homemade label created by Stevens and his stepfather. The album fell into oblivion; and Sufjan fell into New York’s New School for Social Research, enrolled as an MFA student in the writing program.

Always a storyteller, Stevens sought to press the stories rattling about in his head onto paper – sans the vibraphone, oboe, and guitar. Several years and half an epic later, Sufjan, “tired of words, words, words,” reseized his musical inclination and penchant for the heroic and produced the entirely electronic Enjoy Your Rabbit. Each song on the album is based and titled after an animal in the Chinese Zodiac and was released with absolutely no text except for a tiny contributors listing printed behind the disc.

The album, uncommonly gripping and dreamlike, requires a concentrated listen and inevitably found itself lost, critically, between praise and confusion. One reviewer commented with genuine, unembarrassed reflection, “It took awhile, but after a few listens, I began to detect the order buried beneath the chaos… Soon it was apparent that these were actual songs, with real melodies and structure.”

Confusion became the most commonplace reaction, but Stevens was inspired by the outcome of Enjoy Your Rabbit – a work nearly two years in the making. At the persuasion of friends and family, Stevens went back to the proverbial drawing board, determined to produce a record a bit more accessible, something to sing along to, something with words.

In a triumphant return to a quieter self, Stevens seamlessly yo-yoed back to his student days as a fiction writer, compiling the material and stories that were to become the jumping off point for his largest epic to date: The 50 States Project. Using old source material, unfinished short stories and new found research, Michigan dropped in 2003. From its first gentle chords, the album drew a timbre universes apart from the brash, hectic synesthesia of Enjoy Your Rabbit. With this release, Stevens truly began coming into his own – and announced the 50 states project.

Despite his ambitious declaration, what followed in early 2004 was not the second installment to 50 states, but the lush and immaculately composed Seven Swans. Arguably his most beautiful album and inarguably the most spiritual, Stevens gracefully inquires into the realms of love, faith, truth and beauty without ever sounding trite or even sentimental. As the album unfolds, the lyrics and composition become a practice in watching one’s chest swell and drop like a pendulum gone awry – the emotional climax coming in the fourth track, “To Be Alone With You.” The album also proved to be the calm before the storm; a quiet segue into the hoopla that would inexplicably follow the 2005 release of Illinoise, the sequel to what many perceived to be only a gimmick – albeit a good one.

The result was no gimmick. With songs more ornately grounded in the history of the state in addition to musical production tightened to the point of near perfection, Illinoise was a raucous, melancholy, melodic feast to be reckoned with. It was the highest rated album of 2005 according to the Metacritic Review. It received laurels from nearly every magazine that reviewed it. Paste Magazine named it the best album of the year, as did Pitchfork Media, and just for good measure, Stevens was awarded the Pantheon Prize that year for albums selling 500,000 copies or less.

Not a man without humor, Stevens responded by including the following text in the liner notes of Mews Too: An Asthmatic Kitty Compilation, “Sufjan Stevens is not going to write a record for each of the 50 states after all,” although this text was later replaced with the equally interesting, “Sufjan Stevens can fold a fitted-sheet.”

But whether there is ever to be a new edition to the 50 states project or not, the ferociously productive Stevens is back. His newest release is subtitled, Outtakes and Extras from the Illinois Album! Shamelessly compiled by Sufjan Stevens. And it’s true, all true! Stevens has pulled together 21 new or altered songs about the state of Illinois in a whirlwind of history, glockenspiel, and the perpetual self, a follow up 2005’s Come on Feel the Illinoise.

Your music contains an underlying theme of faith – or lack thereof – in today’s culture. What compels you to write so often about that lack of faith?

I think we live in a modern world that is entrenched in material things, the possession of things. We live in a very corporal, material world and yet, there is a history to our world that reconciles with a divine order. Our history has a religion to it; there is a mythology of creation. And there is a sort of physical, metaphysical explanation for everything that’s around us. Yet we live in a civilization that puts its faith in money and economy and physical objects. And in a modern, sort of enlightened world, we no longer have to reconcile with divine things. I think that’s an incredible conflict to be in. In some ways, there’s this modern, educated, enlightened person, but surrounded by the worship of things – junk basically. We condescend to kind of primitive superstitions – like a belief in god. And yet our junk, it does nothing for us. It doesn’t really save us. It’s just thrown away, discarded and buried somewhere in a landfill.

The aspect of research to your work is quite similar to the process of fiction writing. How do you feel about all the precursory work that goes into a project like Illinois and the Avalanche?

I think sometimes it’s more interesting to me than the product. The process of managing source material and sort of applying it to a song and then rendering it through my own history and my own imagination. That whole process is more satisfying sometimes than the song itself. I unearth a lot more material than I actually use, obviously. It’s not typical of me to do research. I’ve done many records and I haven’t done research for all of them. The Illinois record is almost exclusively based on found material – written histories in books and novels. I’m not sure I’ll be approaching it the same way for the next record.

Do you think the research aspect and the pull to unearth ephemera comes from your start as a fiction writer?

Yeah. Or even before that, when I was doing book reports in high school or when I was taught how to use the card catalog at the library. There’s a certain kind of tradition in our educational system of research, of going to the library and taking out books and compiling data, and then you know, obsessing over the technique of footnoting and attributing quotes and data to other sources. I don’t know – it’s crazy but I love that kind of stuff, I’ve always loved writing. I think I’m inherently a storyteller, so almost everything I write has a narrative trajectory.

One technique you interweave into the Avalanche and Illinoise is the sporadic placement of small instrumental songs with whimsically descriptive titles. Is this your way of progressing a narrative without lyrics?

Yeah. I Sometimes worry that lyrics get in the way. That the song as a melody or an abstraction is already telling a story. So just a sequence of notes can evoke an entire novel, they can express an entire narrative shape without ever using a single word.

You’ve mentioned in earlier interviews that you felt that you were taking a risk, focusing your efforts on Illinois, a state you actually never lived in. Did it surprise you, the wealth of material you got out of it?

Yeah, I never thought that I would get two records out of it.

Well over 50 songs, with probably a handful that you still didn’t use in the Avalanche.

[Laughs.] Yeah, there are out takes to the out takes… It was definitely a shock to discover so many things to write about. I’m not sure why there is such a proliferation of songs. I don’t think I’ll ever write this many songs about one particular subject, ever again.

“Pittsfield” comes near the end of the album, and is reminiscent of “Casimir Pulaski Day” from Illinoise. It’s similar in a tone, one of alienation, and also one of the most narrative songs.

Yeah, “Pittsfield” is probably the most personal song on the Avalanche. It’s based a lot on my life growing up in a big family where there were a lot of chores and we were always being asked to contribute to the household. To do work and wash the dishes. Work was an important factor in our life, and now that I’ve grown up I have a different understanding of work. It’s not so much about physical exertion but about applying skills to particular tasks. It can be an abstract task… I don’t want to get too Marxist on you, but that song is kind of a rumination on work in the house, you know and chores – that was really important growing up. I wrote a series of verses for that song and then sort of transplanted them in this little town in Illinois that’s very similar to the small town where I grew up in Michigan, after we moved out of Detroit.

Well, it’s obviously contributed to your ability for you to be so productive.

Yeah. It’s still very self-conscious, from that perspective, because it’s a song about how much work we had to do and how much I rebelled against that. But then I realized as an adult and as a songwriter, that I have somehow, in me, the inclination to overwork myself that my father had. And I’m just applying it differently. So he would spend five hours mopping the floor and I spend five hours on a vocal line in the studio.

Has this project become any easier the deeper you’ve submerged yourself in it? How feasible is the 50 States project to you now that you’ve got three under your belt?

It’s definitely made me more confident, as a songwriter, but it hasn’t made the project any easier. It’s still a daunting task. Also because I’m approaching each state and each record differently. Illinois, I based a lot of my efforts on civilization and society, cities and on civic pride. So I think for my next project I want to focus more on the natural world and on landscape and on animals, the things that are outside civilization and outside recorded history. I think that alone creates all kinds of challenges, and I don’t feel that I’m prepared at all to do it. But at the same time, I feel more confident as a songwriter, you know, I’ve generated over 50 songs for Illinois. For one state.

You’ve said before that you don’t consider yourself an entertainer or a performer. With the recent success and recognition, has that changed at all?

Definitely. I’ve learned how to reckon with the fact that when I’m on stage, I’m entertaining people and so I’ve had to buttress myself and my band with entertainment values. A lot of that might have been over-extended, but I think that I’ve had to sort of deal with the fact that that’s what I am on some level. I think I’m actually a songwriter, obviously, but secondarily when I get on stage in front of people, I become a performer. I like the social aspect of being on stage in public with other people. There’s a certain kind of communication you’re having with your back up singer, with your drummer, with your bass player. it’s not direct conversation, it’s a musical communication and the weird thing is, you’re doing it in public. It’s really kind of cool. And then, of course, there’s the communication that you’re having with the audience. It’s pretty surreal.