Stevens puts his typewriter to a more musical use.

In the obscure backrooms of my memory, there is a gauzy portrait of me drumming pots and pans on the kitchen floor. I am a bumbling infant, top-heavy, lower-lipped, thumb-suckling, encountering gravity for the first time, buffered by an afghan laid out on the linoleum, banging the consequential music of kitchen utensils: a chopstick on a glass lid, a plastic spoon on a rice steamer, the tap dancing of a whisk on a box of spaghetti. This is my first performance. I am eleven months old. I am a drum major. I am a ragtime rhythm section. I am a wild animal knocking rocks on the hard shell of mother earth, the prehistoric paradiddle. I am nerves and muscle gaining strength.

SUFJAN STEVENS was born in 1975 in Detroit, Michigan. His career as a singer-songwriter began in the folk-rock band Marzuki and has grown quickly since his debut solo album in 2000. In 2005, Pitchfork Media named his most recent album “Illinois” as the editor’s choice for best album of the year, and the 2006 PLUG Independent Music Awards awarded named Stevens Male Artist of the Year.

“You’re giving me a headache,” my mother says, leaving for the neighbor’s vacuum next door, and a sip of schnapps. I am within earshot. My sisters are in the bathroom, taking a bath, mumbling underwater, getting the towels wet. I do my best drum fill, singing lead, atonal, and lose my balance, flopping over sideways. When my head hits the floor, I hear the knock of a bowling ball against ten pins, the white teeth of God punched out. My mother runs in, drawn by her shrieking son and his soundless gasps of breath cutting between everything else.

“There. there,” she says, picking me up. “It’s nothing.” She sings, “There is sorrow, there is joy, oh the lonely little boy,” bouncing me on her arm, shifting her weight from one leg to the other. I do not know it then, but she is planning her escape. Front door, Parker Street, taxi cab, Greyhound, Amtrak, the golden promise of California, where she does not have to bear the bad-tempered music of her children any longer.

Five years later, in Detroit, after my parents have divorced, my father finds relief playing bongos over Motown records in the living room. He is smoking pot and drinking cans of Miller beer at noon. He has developed bad habits. I come in wearing his work shirt to my ankles and pretend to play guitar. This involves hands and feet.

“What are you playing, pump organ?” My dad laughs.

“Louder,” I say. “Faster.” The traffic on the street outside joins in with car horns and an occasional fender bender.

My father, only 25, is already bald. He wears an apron all day, on which he wipes his hands. He uses it to hoist the drums between his legs, He doesn’t miss a beat until my sisters run in to tell us our calico cat has been hit by a car. We run out to the sidewalk and see the semblance of an animal, smeared with blood and bone. It is a gruesome thing, a faceless, shapeless corpse, and it sends me sobbing and gagging on my father’s pant leg. “Not to worry,” he says. “That cat had it coming. Let’s get you an ice-cream cone.”

In first grade, at school, we are given wooden recorders with leather cases. One week in the winter, when the snow falls for six days and the hardware store runs out of stock on shovels, we knit sleeves for our recorders. Mrs. Williams shows us the fingering chart on the wall, held up with tacks on corkboard. She does a chalk drawing of Bach. The recorder book has other children’s names from previous years written inside: Jerry Dane, Colleen Smith, Jordan Knight. We have to sing a song, in unison, before we play it. We are 17 kids, some puffy-haired, some fidgeting in our corduroy pants, some lisping, some losing teeth, some who wet their pants at naptime, like Cindy Season, who pees when she is nervous. One time I tried to kiss her in the coat closet, where the cotton sleeves rubbed my ears, and the scarves brushed my head, and the cold smell of outside lingered for days. In the darkest corner of the closet, urine running down her stockings, she pushed me away, with her hands on my chest, as if she were moving furniture. “Look what you made me do,” she said so matter-of-factly it felt like a tight shirt around my neck. In recorder class, we sing “Are You Sleeping, Brother John?” And then we play it, badly.

In sixth grade, Ms. Zeisler tricks me into playing the oboe. I want to play the trumpet, the trombone, the royalty of brass. The king and the queen. Look in the mirror, she says. Your lips, your overbite, your jaw. You have the mouth of an oboist. I resign myself. I learn to let go of all my fantasies. But then it comes in the mail – the most inconsequential of instruments: plastic black, screws and levers joined to silver keys, the impenetrable double reed, which feels like a straw against my tongue. There is nothing noble about it. At recess after band class, I kick like a calf, hitting my teeth on the slide so the front tooth bends and turns brown, giving me a headache that sends me home sick. At home, I drink a bowl of broccoli soup with a straw. I am flushed and nauseous, red around the eyes. When I start coughing, my father gives me a cabbage leaf for my chest. I go to bed sucking the oboe reed like a Popsicle. In my fever, I dream of an orchestra of oboes, each one tuned differently, the terrible sound of death, the requiem of ducks and ghosts.

In college, I wear sandals with socks, cut the edges of my jeans and grow my hair. One week it is in braids; the next week it is greased and gelled. I try baseball caps and bandanas for the first time. A friend from California shows me how to hacky sack. Another friend lends me a guitar with nylon strings and a plastic back. The neck is bent, but the tuning pegs look plated with gold. I buy a chord chart, mystified by the grid of fingerings. I hold the instrument like it’s a small child, a newborn, wiggling and kicking in my lap. I have two left hands, stumbling with the simplest of chords. Right brain and left brain begin to fuss and fight, but after two months they come to terms. They hold hands. There is a cosmic wake. I walk around with a serious look on my face, the guitar on my back. The universe looms large. I am an octopus of opportunities, strumming A-major with all the conviction I can muster. Unlike with the recorder or the oboe, I am free to sing. I make up melodies. I sing poems. I grumble and hum over a litany of chords, enjoying the freedom of speech. From now on, the oboe stays in the case, under the bed, beside the National Geographics, where it sleeps with the histories of mummies.

Write what you know, I am told, so I look around the room and serenade the laundry hamper, the soda cans, the psychology textbook. I sing about the loneliness of oboes, the cabbage leaf: loose teeth and Cindy Season, who has since been in and out of rehab, or so my sisters tell me in the gossip columns they send twice a week, handwritten. I write a song about my first grade teacher, Mrs. Williams, her hands brushed with chalk, the knitting needles we made from wood. I sing about my father’s bald spot, the apron, the record player, our dead cat, the glorious noise of Detroit, the Eastern Market. I sing about my mother, the loneliest of oboes, who had left us years ago, hands cupped over her ears to keep out the orchestra of her children, the music of everyday life which was too much to bear. In this song she is dishwasher, table-maker, diaper-changer, traitor, fugitive, tie-dyer, bead-maker, pipe-smoker, 12-step programmer, living one day at a time, with one eye on life and one eye on the conductor with his hands raised to death. This is the song that will be translated into other languages, passed down from generation to generation, sung in unison, a cappella, by monarchs and gypsies and single mothers all around the world. This song will find its home in the hymnals of churches. This song is sung in the loneliest of bedrooms, behind closed doors, by young men and women who fear they are the last ones on earth.