HIFTING
SOUND
48 Rolling Stone UK • April
sufjan stevens
TO EVOLVE AS AN ARTIST IS OFTEN ANY MUSCIANS GOAL — SHOWING GROWTH AND FINESSE WHILE STILL MAINTAINING AN ELEMENT OF CONSISTENCY. IN HIS LATEST WORK, FOLK MUSICIAN SUFJAN STEVENS EXPLORES THE POSSIBILITIES OF branching out. The last time we saw Sufjan Stevens performing on these shores, in November 2006, he was tossing inflatable Superman and Santa figures into a rapturous crowd at the Barbican. Fringed by silver tinsel and backlit by votive candles, he wore a boy-scout-meets-Blake’s-7 tunic, a home-made bird mask and decorative butterfly wings, all of his own design. If his name was not unusual enough to start with, he had introduced himself and his band to the audience as “Chief Eagle Majesty Snowbird and the Butterfly Kite Brigade”.
Sufjan Stevens 49
WHERE IS
CHIEF EAGLe majesty
This was not just a show: he had created a universe, and provided a celestial soundtrack too. At the core of most songs was a banjo and a voice seemingly as frail as those butterfly wings. A small army of backers, dressed in matching tunics, supplied strings, horns, drums, keys and vocals to create cacophonous and joyful music-making — like Bottom’s Mechanicals having a particularly psychedelic Midsummer Night’s Dream. Stevens was a folk singer but only because a more adequate genre had not yet been coined. Stevens himself came across as a little shy, but his colossal ambitions were already obvious. His most recent record, Illinoise, had topped many lists as the best of 2005 and won the Shortlist Music prize, the US equivalent of the Mercury prize. He had recently embarked on a self-assigned project to research, write and record an album for each of the 50 American states. This was clearly a deranged endeavour, but everyone agreed, if there was one person who could pull it off, it was him. And yet it would be five years before we saw this prolific overachiever in the UK again, with a fly-by tour that starts at London’s Royal Festival Hall on Thursday. In the intervening period, much has changed. He has shelved the Fifty States Project without recording another note of it. In music he has released since, gone are the pared-down, transcendent harmonies, replaced by, to one critic’s ears, the sound of “an orchestra having a nervous breakdown”. Stevens remains arguably the most brilliant, certainly the most restlessly creative American musician at work today, but where is Chief Eagle Majesty Snowbird now?
50 Rolling Stone UK • April
One morning, a couple of years ago, Stevens woke up in a sweat. He felt intensely lethargic and had pins and needles in his mouth, his hands and feet, rushing up his arms and legs. He was experiencing extreme adrenaline surges in his chest, almost as if he had been poisoned. He went over what he had eaten, but what he was feeling was otherwordly. “This was really supernatural,” he explains now, his eyes wide. “It was like I was possessed.” The illness passed in a few days, but a month later it struck again. Stevens started to see a succession of doctors, from straight-up physicians and holistics to neurologists, psychologists and psychiatrists. Meanwhile, he couldn’t climb stairs or queue at the bank or be in any room with lots of people and noise. He became hypersensitive to stimuli: after steering clear of movies for three months, he sat down to watch Wes Anderson’s animation Fantastic Mr. Fox but it was such a sensory overload that he had to take a Xanax in the middle of it (Stevens assiduously points out that he reviewed it subsequently and found it “beautiful” and reported “no negative response”). Around this time, Stevens began to find solace in the work of outsider artist Prophet Royal Robertson, a paranoid schizophrenic whose paintings were dominated by monsters, superheroes and his “adulterous whore” wife who left him after they had 11 children. Robertson wouldn’t be many people’s choice of life coach, but the artist, who died in
snowbird?
Sufjan Stevens 51
1997, became “a companion” for Stevens. With his help, he The apocalyptic mood deterred some, while there was much began to navigate the strange cosmos of soundscapes he speculation over the naked, uncharacteristically explicit lyrics: had created in search of a follow-up to Illinoise, which had “I’m not fuckin’ around!” is belted out 16 times on “I Want become, in his words, “really monstrous and hazardous in its to Be Well” (it is, not surprisingly, a record fixated on health ambition”. Melodies started emerging through the electronic and wellbeing). One epic-length track slipped through, the and synthesised noises and songs came down from 20-odd 25-minute closer “Impossible Soul”, and some anointed it as minutes to more manageable, if not quite radio-friendly, lengths. genius while others decried its neurotic narcissism. Of course, All of this is a potted and barely satisfactory introduction it was probably both. to Stevens’s seventh album proper, The Age of Adz, named after ‘Hi, I’m Soof-yann,” says Stevens unnecessarily as we meet a piece of Robertson’s artwork, which was eventually released at the door of his Brooklyn studio in mid-March. He looks, I last October. It quickly became Stevens’s best-selling record, should point out, in rude health, with the kind of upper-body but also his most divisive (imagine Kid A-era Radiohead). tone and musculature that is unexpected or even excessive
“Hi, i’m 52 Rolling Stone UK • April
SOOF-
in an indie musician. He is smartly turned out, his dark hair tightly cropped. “There’s an old Italian barber in my building that I’ve walked past a thousand times, but today I thought, ‘I should get my hair cut for the Observer,’” he says. “But it’s so severe, like an army haircut.” He shows us – me and a photographer – into the two-room space and, while a piano tuner finishes up, there is a chance to snoop around. There is a nice Bianchi single-speed bike, a few books and lots of microphones, but very little for the amateur psychologist to grab hold of. When we sit down in his sparse office, overlooking a power plant and, today, a rather monochrome East River, I say that I was hoping for more private
effects. “I don’t really have a domestic inclination,” he says. He looks a little wary, perhaps remembering why he gives so few interviews, then continues. “Even my apartment has a semblance of a storage facility. It’s just stacks, there are no bookshelves, just books and piles of stamp collections and weird little sewing and knitting projects.” (That’s right, knitting: hats and scarves for the most part and the odd sweater that he makes in his crochet club. What of it?) At present, his apartment is swamped with construction paper, glitter and pipe-cleaners as he assembles a stopframe animation of Royal Robertson’s art. He has spent the last six days making models, photographing them, moving
-YANN.”
Sufjan Stevens 53
them infinitesimally, photographing them again. Eventually the footage will provide a backdrop for one song in the live shows. This painstaking project is typical of Stevens in two main ways: first, there is almost no limit to his willingness to micromanage any task (he also plays most of the instruments you hear on his recordings); and second, he is enviably adept at whatever he turns his hand to, whether film-making, fiction writing or cross-stitching neo-futuristic tabards. “I’m pretty involved in everything I do,” he admits, “which isn’t always efficient and doesn’t necessarily make for the more successful product. But I do feel that, in that sense, everything I do has a comprehensiveness to it.” Stevens owes some of his polymathic talents to a rather chaotic upbringing. Born in 1975, he was raised with six siblings by his father and stepmother in Michigan; they were “eccentrics, hippies, spiritualists” whose idea of a Christmas present, Stevens once noted, was “a home enema kit or a toothbrush made from recycled newspapers”. His imaginary friends were Peter the Ox, Dora the Talking Skeleton and Herb the Dietician. If he wasn’t so funny about it, you would be tempted to call Childline retroactively. He went to a Steiner school until the age of nine, when he was pulled out because he still could not properly read or write. “I wasn’t dumb,” he was told by a new teacher, “I was just old world, 19th-century, understimulated.” “We were always on the brink of domestic and financial disaster, bankruptcy,” he remembers. “I think my parents were more capable than we imagined them, but they didn’t put on a very good display. Whatever they did, they didn’t cultivate trust, so we always thought that everything was about to fall apart.” Stevens released his first solo record in his teens but, after a year when he “ate ramen noodles, fist-fought, drank too much”, he returned to his studies in literature and music engineering. He went to a creative-writing school in New York, worked as a graphic designer and in the late 1990s founded an independent record label called Asthmatic Kitty with his stepfather. His first album to achieve mainstream
54 Rolling Stone UK • April
note was the progenitor of the Fifty States Project, 2003’s Greetings from Michigan, a paean to his home state. It was followed by the soaring Seven Swans in 2004 and then, a year later, by the startlingly ambitious Illinoise. To research that album, he read everything about the state of Illinois he could find (from Saul Bellow to local crime reports), studied the lives of its most famous citizens (Abraham Lincoln, notorious “Killer Clown” John Wayne Gacy Jr) and toured its beauty pageants and pig races. This was part music project, part oral history, reimagined by a precocious Henry David Thoreau. At this time, few musicians in the world could match Stevens for his intensity, productivity and consistent excellence. Illinoise was 22 tracks and 74 minutes, and he still had material to send out an only marginally inferior 21-song, 75-minute album of “also-rans” from the sessions called The Avalanche. All of which makes the five years between Illinoise and The Age of Adz more of a mystery. Raised expectations may account for some of the delay and there were piecemeal offerings (the five-EP “Songs for Christmas”; The BQE, a quixotic orchestral suite honouring his local bypass, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway) but, even prior to the illness, there is evidence that Stevens was experiencing a major wobble. He bemoaned, among other things: being bored with himself, his voice, his whole approach; feeling embarrassed by the nostalgia and reckless naivete of his older songs; fearing that the album, as a concept, was now obsolete; and loathing the idea of sharing his music with anyone because something personal is irrevocably lost in the process. He even threatened to walk away from music entirely. How does he feel about those comments now? He gently worries the zipper on his hooded sweatshirt: “I went through a period of questioning motive and function and now I no longer have the privilege of questioning. I just have the privilege of celebrating my music and sharing it,” he says stiffly. “I don’t really want to get caught up in that self-doubt any more. I’ve always been really insecure about what I do, but those existential conundrums are really circuitous and —
Sufjan Stevens 55
THE SPECTA PERFECTLY what’s the word? — unproductive. You know, I don’t think my music is important, I don’t think it’s changing the world, I don’t think it’s art. I just think it’s music. It is what it is.” Stevens has not been sick for more than a year now, and still has no idea what caused the mystery ailment, but he is thankful for his health every day. Now 35, he claims to embrace all new opportunities and live every day to the fullest — and then laughs when he realises he could be reciting the sentiments of a Hallmark greetings card. “But there’s meaning in all that,” he insists. The corny sentiments mark quite a departure for an artist whose finest work has been more like dazzling short fiction than conventional lyric-writing. But Stevens has lost interest in creating characters and telling stories as he did on Greetings from Michigan and Illinoise — he has no idea why. He is fully aware that the new material is alienating for many fans raised on the smart homilies and lush orchestration of his previous work, but his solution is uncompromising: “Don’t listen to the record; don’t buy it.” “In terms of craft, the new songs are kind of weak,” he concedes. “The language is lazy sometimes, they meander and there’s not this resolution. But I really liked being a bit abstract and sloppy and more sensual.
56 Rolling Stone UK • April
“It’s very hormonal, a lot of this stuff feels like a second puberty,” he continues. “It’s way more self-obsessed and leans towards masochism and solipsism and paranoia and anxiety. I’m a very self-conscious person, I think we all are, but I’m especially not very comfortable in my body. I always feel really weird and awkward on the street or on the stage. It has nothing to do with circumstances, it’s just an ongoing psychological state, like white noise.” The new live show — at least as it has been performed in the US — tracks Stevens’s metamorphosis from banjorocking boy scout to Sufjan 2.0. He starts the set in handsewn wings with the title song from Seven Swans, but sheds them as material from The Age of Adz and last year’s “All Delighted People” EP takes over. There are synchronised dance routines and neon costumes inspired by Tron, while the spirit of Royal Robertson infuses proceedings with a futuristic, hallucinogenic aesthetic. The evening concludes with a halfhour rendering of “Impossible Soul” as Stevens and his band cavort around the stage in Day-Glo visors and aluminiumfoil blankets, while balloons cascade from the ceiling. In a way, the spectacle perfectly encapsulates Stevens now: confounding, mesmerising and, as Hallmark might have it, living every day to the fullest.
ACLE ENCAPSULATES STEVENS NOW: CONFOUNDING, MESMERISING, AND AS HALLMARK MIGHT HAVE IT, LIVING EVERY DAY TO THE FULLEST.
Sufjan Stevens 57
TUCKER LOVE TYPOGRAPHY 2 — SPRING 2014 KCAI