Sufjan Stevens
The American folk-pop troubadour sees a new desire for meaningful music

Courtesy of P-vine

Most rockers prepare for their trips to Japan
by learning how to say “arigato.” Sufjan (pronounced Suf-yan) Stevens is boning up for his first visit by reading The Japan Journals, 1947-2004, the latest book from noted critic Donald Richie.

So don’t expect Stevens to be writing any of the Deep Purple-style “My Woman in Tokyo” numbers that have been a staple ever since bands started crossing the Pacific to perform here. “It’s such a different landscape that I don’t have a personal story to inhabit,” Stevens articulates on a crisp early winter morning from his Brooklyn, New York office. “It’s all impressions through media and stereotypes. And I don’t often trust enough of that information to work into a song.”

Stevens first gained fame for his concept albums Michigan (2003) and Illinois (2005), moody collections of folk songs and delicate instrumentals that mixed stories of his economically troubled native Midwest with paeans to the region’s scenic spots. Though the 32-year-old has threatened to release one album for each of the America’s 50 states, his latest piece is The BQE, an exploration of New York’s infamous Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The 30-minute work had its sold-out debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November, where it was performed for three consecutive nights as part of the Next Wave Festival.

What interested Stevens in an expressway? “I live very close to it. I’ve spent a lot of time driving on it,” he says. “It’s a real cumbersome expressway: poorly designed and falling apart. [It] was intended to provide an interchange of traffic through a collection of neighborhoods, which required plowing through some of them. So it’s interesting to look at that scar in the landscape of villages and see how it affects homes and families around it.”

The BQE is imbued with passages that highlight Stevens’ deft touch on instruments ranging from the banjo to the oboe, but it’s his social and spiritual concerns (he’s also a regular churchgoer) that have led to him being dubbed one of the leaders of the current folk revival. “I think a young audience is turning on to folk,” he says, warming to the subject. “There is a real desire for music of value and meaning, and that feels timeless and important.”

The current fascination with the life and music of Bob Dylan is one aspect of the revival that Stevens counts himself part of. “I never listened to [him]. I never liked him. And I’m part of this new movement of appreciation. I was interested in nuance and sophistication, and Bob Dylan’s music to me sounded extremely aggressive.

“But folk music was entrenched in the people’s movement and politics, and it was invested in the setting and the landscape, physical as well as political. It was about a dynamic of people, and so when folk started to influence pop, pop then decided to have a platform. There’s an anecdote about Bob Dylan meeting The Beatles and telling them that they should stop writing only about girls and start writing about important things. Their music was politically altered after that.”

At the same time, it’s hard to avoid the view that without the intensely rich instrumentation and arrangements of Stevens’ music, he would be just another singer-songwriter. “The songs are fundamentally folk songs, but they have very romantic aspirations,” he explains. “They reach for greater things, greater landscapes. The music becomes panoramic, and then the fundamentals, the voice and guitar, are the personal, human element.”

Stevens is the first to admit that his music may sound pretentious to some. “For me, ambition can be a flaw, because my arrangements can overextend themselves. So it’s about cutting away, editing, distilling, simplifying and really getting at the heart of the song. I’m working at not hiding behind ornamentation.”

Despite being surrounded by opinionated New Yorkers, Stevens says it’s difficult finding someone who will look at his music with a steely eye. “It’s hard to get critical feedback in music circles, because it’s such a subjective medium,” he complains. “I’ve worked in fiction-writing circles, and it’s a much more pluralistic, democratic environment; people are more open to feedback. In music there isn’t that assumption that you can speak openly and critically about someone’s work. I don’t know why that is. Maybe it’s because a song gives the impression that it’s something personal and sacred and that it shouldn’t be criticized.”

Raised by parents who were members of an inter-faith spiritual community called Subud, but now a “conventional Christian,” Stevens for his latest project solicited Christmas songs through his website, then traded the rights to those songs for one of his. The idea grew partly out of his concern for the copyright issues currently bedeviling the music industry, but mainly because he says he wants to create a new generation of holiday songs.

“It stems from the tradition of gift-giving,” he says. “Giving is to relinquish, and gift-giving isn’t about that any more. It’s about consumption. So in some ways it’s just participating in that, but the real motive behind it is to generate a new canon of Christmas carols, and so far we’ve received over 300 entries. Some are really absurd, some are sappy, and some are really fun and subversive and weird.

“They’re all trying somehow to participate in a kind of tradition of Christmas music, and it’s obvious from the process that it’s difficult work to create sacred, liturgical or even profane Christmas music, because there’s so much of it. [It] can get really dark and meditate on God, because it’s about birth and death. There’s millions of depressing Christmas songs.”

Club Quattro, Jan 22. See concert listings (popular) for details.

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