Text Maxwell Williams
Photo Alex Freund

WE WRITE THE SONGS

IN A THOUSAND YEARS, DO YOU THINK ANYONE WILL REMEMBER ANY OF THE HAIRCUT BANDS WITH “ICY” GOOD LOOKS OR ART SCHOOL KIDS MAKING “GLACIAL” POST-ROCK? HELL, NO! THERE WON’T EVEN BE ANY GLACIERS LEFT! WHAT ARE MEMORABLE ARE HEART-WARMING TUNES WITH MELODIES THAT GET STUCK IN YOUR HEAD. OVER THREE ALBUMS OF ORCHESTRAL POP, SUFJAN STEVENS HAS HAD LISTENERS LAPPING UP SONGS ABOUT, OF ALL THINGS, THE GREAT LAKES STATES. STEVENS TOOK SOME TIME OUT FROM HIS MUSICAL EXPLORATIONS TO REFLECT ON HIS LATEST DIG-READY 21ST CENTURY ARTIFACT, ILLINOIS.

IS (THE RECORD LABEL) ASTHMATIC KITTY RUN PRIMARILY BY YOU?

My stepfather runs it, and his office is based in Lander, WY where he lives. He has one other full time office person.

HOW DID YOU GET STARTED MAKING MUSIC?

You mean the more business side of music? It was kind of inadvertent. It wasn’t anything carefully planned. It actually can be traced back to when I was in college. Lowell, my stepdad… Well, he’s actually no longer my stepdad. He and my mother divorced years ago. He remained friends with my family because he’s such an interesting guy, and he never had children of his own. Anyway, when I went to college, it happened to be in the same town where his parents lived. He was living with them and taking care of them because they both were terminally ill, and in a roundabout way we would hang out. He was kind of like my foster parent in college. Then he started hanging out with my friends, which was really strange. That was when I started playing music and was involved with several different bands. He was a big fan and would come to all the shows and was very supportive. But then it got even weirder because he started playing in one of the bands. He played organ. That’s when I realized that Lowell is in it for the long haul. He’s really committed. He kept hanging out with all my friends, even after I left the college town for New York and started graduate school.

YOU WERE BROUGHT UP CLASSICALLY TRAINED AS A MUSICIAN, RIGHT?

I studied the oboe. That was my instrument.

HOW HAS BEING TRAINED IN CLASSICAL INSTRUMENTS INFORMED YOUR SONGWRITING?

Well, the training on the oboe was probably more of a detriment to my songwriting, actually, because it is so technical. The kind of instruction you get in music school doesn’t nurture your vision or your voice or your composition or freedom of expression. So I think it sort of informed my songwriting because I started writing songs as a rebellion against this kind of technical training on the oboe. But that didn’t happen until college when I started playing the acoustic guitar. To me, it was a renaissance of the freedom I had when I was a child, when I would just make stuff up and sing and be silly.

STILL, THE SONGS THAT YOU ARRANGE ARE QUITE COMPLEX. WHAT GOES INTO THE ARRANGEMENT PROCESS?

I think that once I left behind my music education and stopped playing the oboe, I was able to approach that kind of classical music and baroque music with an open mind and with a curiosity that one has as a lover of music, and not as an obsessive compulsive performer who will never be successful at the instrument. I had a revelation at one point that all of the training I had and music that I was exposed to was kind of important and exciting.

DO YOU ACTUALLY SIT DOWN AND WRITE OUT ALL OF THE MUSIC?

Not as far as actually playing it. Although, for the newest record, I was forced to labor over staff paper for the horn section and the string quartet, and I wrote a few parts for the oboe. But everything else is just by instinct and intuition, like the piano, the guitar, the recorder, the woodwinds, the flute. It relies on memory a lot more than compositional skill.

WHEN DID YOU DECIDE TO TACKLE THE SEEMINGLY IMPOSSIBLE TASK OF WRITING AN ALBUM FOR EACH OF THE 50 STATES?

It was a casual and somewhat sarcastic proposition that I came up with when I was completing Michigan. At the time, Asthmatic Kitty didn’t have distribution, didn’t have any kind of publicity. I didn’t have any kind of career as a musician. But I understood that this industry is just inflated with musicians, and everyone’s clamoring for attention. So I thought, ‘Oh, let’s just be ridiculous and make some kind of claim, because if anything this will get people to listen to the record.’

DO YOU THINK YOU’LL FINISH ALL 50?

No, I won’t.

CONTINUING WITH HOW YOU D0 THE SONGWRITING, YOU STUDIED CREATIVE WRITING AT NEW SCHOOL…

Yeah, it’s a two-year Master’s program, and I finished a few years ago. So I have a degree. I’m a Master. It’s awesome.

HOW DOES THAT INFORM YOUR LYRICS WRITING?

Well, I think I learned a lot about storytelling, a lot about character development, the mechanics of fiction, and I think that definitely informs my songwriting. I think the songs are abbreviated novels. I generally write more lyrics than I use. I find lyrics in songwriting to be a little restrictive and actually more difficult than fiction, because of line breaks and rhyme schemes and all those other things that get in the way. But, generally, I’m kind of a traditionalist in songwriting. The history of the song is based on the ballad, and the ballad is based on the narrative, and the narrative is based on the epic, and the epic is based on the anecdote. It’s all very interrelated.

DO YOU FEEL ANY SORT OF KINSHIP WITH ANY AUTHORS?

I think what I’m doing, generally - and not very successfully - but what I’m intending to do is develop characters that have some kind of blemish of character or heroic flaw and to convey a humanness and empathy.

CAN YOU TELL ME A LITTLE ABOUT THE SONG ‘THEY ARE NIGHT ZOMBIES!!’? IT’S REALLY CREEPY

That’s basically a litany of ghost towns in Illinois. I started reading about these towns that had been abandoned and some of them have a post office, or a strip mall, or a few homes, and a Dairy Queen, but that’s about it. And it reminded me about the cycle of life and civilizations - how even the major cities of today are transient in the grand scheme of things. You know, in the Cahokia Mountains in Illinois are these mounds that were from the most developed civilization in North America before Europeans came. It was a huge urban center. Something like twenty or forty thousand people lived in this one city, which is pretty huge for an ancient civilization, and nothing’s left of it. We think of ourselves as being permanent. We’re very near-sighted…

I READ SOMEWHERE THAT YOUR NAME MEANS ‘COMES WITH A SWORD’ IN ARMENIAN. IS THAT TRUE?

Not really, no. I was told it means ‘comes with a sword’ in Persian, but I’ve never had that clarified by a translator. I’m always really uncertain about what it means.

HAVE YOU EVER ASKED YOUR PARENTS ABOUT IT?

Yeah. They were in a cult called Subud. The cult leader named everybody. He was a Muslim who then had some kind of spiritual revelation and started this spiritual consciousness group called Subud. It was the practice at the time he was alive to give new members of the cult Muslim names.

D0 YOU FEEL ANY CONNECTION TO CULTS FROM THAT EXPERIENCE?

I’m interested more just for information, but I don’t have any interest in being affiliated with cults.

I WASN’T IMPLYING THAT YOU WERE GOING TO JOIN A CULT, BUT IT SEEMS LIKE SOMETHING INTERESTING FROM YOUR PAST..

I think a lot of kids from my generation grew up in similar environments, but they weren’t necessarily cults. They were more cooperative communities, communes, whatever. I find when I talk about this, a lot of people say, ‘Oh yeah, my parents were involved in this group or that group, or they were into some kind of peace, love, and happiness.’