Sufjan Stevens : Taking It One State At A Time

by Noah LoveThere's a good chance that Sufjan Stevens will be remembered one day as the most prolific songwriter of our time. Illinois, his current record, is just the second in a planned series of 50 LPs about the American states. Whether he finishes the records or not is something only time will decide, but one thing's for sure, Stevens' star is quickly rising, with his records getting rave reviews and his shows, where he's been known to tell long personal anecdotes and perform a reinterpretation of the "Star Spangled Banner," quickly selling out.
    We caught up with Stevens to talk about the new record, touring and the concept of the American road trip.Chart: Time-wise, the "50 States" would realistically take up the rest of your life.
Sufjan Stevens: Yeah. I mean, I'm not going to spend the rest of my life doing this, but in terms of material, I'm never going to run out. It's really convenient.
Sufjan Stevens I suppose it's a lot easier to get a record out at a one-a-year pace when you do a lot of the instrumentation and production yourself.
Yeah, that's true. It's more work, but it's more efficient as well.What are the challenges you have getting all of that done?
I think it requires a great deal of mental juggling, having the capacity to arrange based on speculation, whereas if I was in a band or an ensemble, I could write the parts out and then we could try it out right there. The way that I work piece by piece, I write as I go and one melody might instigate a counter melody and the emotional nature of a song might inspire the lyrical content. It's a lot of trial and error.Do you learn a lot of the instruments that you have to play or do you have enough of a music history that you've known them for a long time before you play them?
Some of the instruments I know really well, like the oboe I know really well. The piano I learned early on by ear because my sister took lessons and that's the instrument that I'm probably the most comfortable with, the most proficient with because it's such an arrangers and composers instrument. The guitar and the banjo are what I do most of my writing on. That's what I know well. I didn't learn the drums until college and that was just on a whim. I think learning the drums helps you with so many other instruments in terms of co-ordination and rhythm. The mallet instruments are closely related to the piano, the flute and the recorders are all similar fingering to the oboe, even the saxophone, which I'm just starting to learn now, has similar fingering to the oboe.You did a lot of research with Illinois. Where in that work did the song "John Wayne Gacy" come from?
My step-dad remembers that and he was mortified when I told him I wanted to write a song about it. I guess it would be like writing a song about Jeffrey Dahmer. Because that was before my time I don't really have that recollection with the kind of reverberations it caused throughout the country and Chicago specifically, but I did see his name coming up a lot and there were a few crime novels written about him and I guess I just succumbed to the obsession Americans have with criminals. In my inquiry, in my scrutiny, I wanted to find out why he did what he did or how it happened and that was the running rhetorical question in why was I writing about his life. And then I felt a real challenge to humanize him. I wanted an anti-hero, because I had Chicago and Carl Sandburg and Superman and industrial capitalism, all these grand, abstract heroes that were very mid-Western and robust and resilient and I wanted something to counteract that and for some reason, John Wayne Gacy seemed like the best person to use.You couldn't go more anti-hero than John Wayne Gacy.
No, it's pretty horrifying and it's gross and it's really upsetting and I do think that artistically it's a big problem to go into that subject. I was aware of all that and I tried at every level, at every point of writing the song to really monitor my language and my vantage point, but at the same time it was strongly heartfelt and it came from my convictions — something within me was motivating me to do it and I couldn't ignore it and I had to do it. I just felt like I had to do it, no matter what the result was.You've said that the record is supposed to be like an imaginary road trip and there's a very definite landscape in the music and I'm wondering where that comes from?
I think the road trip is the quintessential American vacation. The automobile is the centre of gravity for Americans. We do a lot of flying and going overseas more, but there's still so much driving. I come from a working class family and we didn't have the money to go overseas or even out of the state, necessarily. Our road trip every year was to Wawa, [Ontario] in Canada or we would drive from upstate to Detroit or to Windsor, [Ontario], where we had family. We just loved getting in the car and seeing things at 65 miles per hour. I think it's an important experience as an American.You do a fair amount of introduction to your songs at your shows and I think this really rubs off on the titles of this record. Where did the idea to the extremely large titles come from?
Yeah, I think a lot of it is my sense of humour and I really wanted to be more explicit about my own sense of humour and irony on this record. I think a lot of it too is just being a little uncensored or being able to hone in on the title of the song so I used a subtitle. Or it's feeling like a song isn't really a song and that it doesn't deserve a title, it's more of an icon or a trinket, so I didn't want to honour it with a title, so I would give it a summary.
   But most important, this record is about the language that we use to prescribe meaning to history and the actual events and the experience within the event immediately and then there are subsequent anecdotes, which turn to summaries, which turn to narratives, which turn to history, which then are inscriptions and paraphrases in history books and that's our understanding of the world prior to our own experience through the written word. I think that it's a really terrific challenge for language and generally it's a completely different thing and I guess I'm just sort of acknowledging that there's the song, there's the story and then there's the terms we used to describe the story.There's a music critic who said on a web posting that he kept looking at the titles and thinking that the music couldn't measure up to the titles.
(laughs) Yeah, that's the problem with history is that the history itself never measures up to our understanding of it. American history, there's such a discrepancy between the events in American history and then America's understanding of its own identity with the patriotism and the nationalism. They're two different things.When you were here last you seemed overwhelmed by the response because you were being booed in the States. Do you think it's because people don't want to see the "Star Spangled Banner" reinterpreted?
Maybe. I don't think I've ever been booed, but I've seen people a little dumbstruck or not really sure how to react. The first time I did the national anthem was on the July 4 weekend at a show here in New York and we had people take flags. We started singing it and their first instinct is to put their hands on their hearts, but then I have this extended verse at the end that's really a diatribe against militarism in the U.S. and they were just really confused. Some people put their flags down, other people put their hands down. Some people just kept going with it. I think generally, people from Michigan find it amusing. They didn't quite understand that it was earnest. Then I realized after the fact that probably a lot of it wasn't earnest and that they were acknowledging something that I wasn't willing to face.