10 of the bestSufjan Stevens This article is more than 6 years oldSufjan Stevens – 10 of the best
This article is more than 6 years oldA master of what he called the ‘strummy-strum acoustic guitar song’, Stevens’ affecting music tackles issues as tricky as abandonment, death and Christmas with family
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1. We Are What You Say
With his wavering voice and penchant for high concept experimentation, he has had his fair share of detractors, yet few artists elicit the level of affection enjoyed by Sufjan Stevens. Perhaps because he manages to bare his soul while revealing so very little. His music is as intimate as it is elusive and just as often told from the perspective of a 1970s serial killer as from his own. His debut album A Sun Came, written and recorded while he was still in college, was an introduction to his scattered, impulsive musical style and his distinctively delicate vocals. The medieval hues of bombastic opener We Are What You Say aren’t representative of what is to come, but no single track is. The second is restrained and acoustic; on the third, his voice sounds as if it’s being whispered through a megaphone; then there’s a 15-second spoken-word interlude – complete with helium effect – about conjoined twins attached at the head. The album, which he released on his own label, Asthmatic Kitty, hitchhikes enthusiastically through genres and styles, never settling on one sound.
2. For the Widows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in Ypsilanti
An experimental album of lyric-less electronica inspired by the animals of the Chinese zodiac might sound like a surefire recipe for mainstream success, but somehow Stevens’ second offering, Enjoy Your Rabbit (2001), failed to catapult him to fame. It was with his third, Michigan (2003), that his career and reputation stepped up a gear. Featuring songs inspired by places, events and people relating to Michigan, it was the first of what Stevens dubbed his 50 States project, through which he planned to release 50 albums inspired by each US state. In the end, he managed only two. “The whole premise was such a joke,” he told Paste in 2009, “and I think maybe I took it too seriously. I started to feel like I was becoming a cliche of myself.” Nevertheless, Michigan is an exceptionally ambitious record. For the Widows in Paradise … showcases his ability to craft rich stories from a snapshot, inspired as it was by a high-school football trip to the town of Paradise. “I noticed there were all these single mothers and women and grandmothers, but there weren’t any men,” he once told an audience, “and so I had sort of devised a story in my mind that they had all died in the war and that the women were all widows. But they were really a very happy and optimistic community and they all seemed to be working together, and it was, like, women of the world take over.”
3. To Be Alone With You
With his fourth album, Seven Swans, Stevens did what few artists outside country music are willing to do and wore his Christianity on his sleeve. The album explores stories from the Bible, as well as Stevens’ more personal relationship with his faith – though he’s coy about the subject in interviews: “I feel like I’m doing a disservice to myself, and to my convictions, in speaking publicly about these things, because they’re too easily misconstrued. I find in music there’s a space and a language I can use to express things in ways I can’t describe conversationally. And it always leads to some kind of discussion about politics.”. Although To Be Alone With You is ostensibly (though not too overtly) about Jesus, many of Stevens’ listeners prefer to excavate from its lyrics an implicit queerness: “You gave up a wife and a family / You gave your ghost / To be alone with me.” It’s an interpretation fuelled by the ambiguous sexuality in a number of his later songs, too.
4. Casimir Pulaski Day
With the second album of his 50 States project, Stevens turned his attention to Illinois. “I wanted it to be kind of a historical survey,” he said, “but I didn’t want it to be heavy with information; I didn’t want it to be too political, and I didn’t want it to be too didactic.” You certainly wouldn’t learn much about Illinois from the album – its many local references are too specific, comprehensible only to those who already know it well – but it hardly matters. For those looking for it, the quirks and minutiae of Illinois run through the album. For those who aren’t, it pulses with the more universal themes of love and loss and existential angst. Casimir Pulaski Day houses all three. It’s named after the Illinois state holiday honouring Polish-born war of independence officer Casimir Pulaski, but you don’t need to know that in order for its opening lines to hit you like a punch in the gut: “Goldenrod and the 4H stone / The things I brought you when I found out / You had cancer of the bone.” The song recalls Stevens’ childhood friend, whose death fell on the same day as the state holiday. If Seven Swans revels in faith, Illinois addresses it with less certainty, a doubt that spills into anger in the song’s final moments. “All the glory when / He took our place / But He took my shoulders and He shook my face,” the song concludes, after Stevens has cried in the bathroom as his friend slips away, “And He takes and He takes and He takes.”
5. John Wayne Gacy Jr
The album’s most straightforward song is also its most profoundly disturbing. Its subject is Illinois’s infamous “Killer Clown”, so called because he dressed as a clown for fundraisers and children’s parties, and sexually assaulted and murdered at least 33 teenage boys in the 70s. Stevens takes us through Gacy’s childhood, his local popularity, and his violent crimes then, as if unwittingly recoiling from the horror of it all, he draws out a languished, falsetto “oh my God”. The most shocking moment comes when he empathises with Gacy. “And in my best behaviour,” he concedes at the song’s close, “I am really just like him / Look beneath the floorboards / For the secrets I have hid.” The song, he says, is “a remark about potential more than anything else. We’re all capable of what he did.”
6. That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!
Never one to do things by halves, in 2006 Stevens took the Christmas album tradition and ran a marathon with it. At just over two hours long, his five-EP box set Songs for Christmas comprised 44 songs, both traditional and original. Recorded over six years and originally given as gifts to friends and family, the set sandwiched faithful renditions of songs such as Joy to the World between Did I Make You Cry on Christmas? (Well You Deserved It!) It was wistful, banjo-led 2003 ballad That Was the Worst Christmas Ever! that he most regularly performed on his 2006 tour, while throwing inflatable Santas into the audience. After its opening lines conjure scenes of festive idyll, things quickly take a less blissful turn: “Our father yells / Throwing gifts in the wood stove / My sister runs away.” Merry Xmas everybody!
7. I Want to Be Well
In the five years between the release of Illinois and its eventual follow-up, The Age of Adz, Stevens suffered from both a mysterious chronic illness and a growing unease with his own artistic identity. The illness, a viral infection that affected his nervous system, made it difficult for Stevens to even climb stairs, and rendered him hypersensitive to loud noises. It was debilitating – but so was his growing psychological angst. The BQE, a live mixed-media project undertaken in November 2007 (and named after a road the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway), crippled him in a way he couldn’t understand. “In all honesty, that piece is what really sabotaged my creative momentum,” he said. “It wasn’t Illinois so much. I suffered sort of an existential creative crisis after that piece. I no longer knew what a song was and how to write an album. It overextended me in a way that I couldn’t find my way back to the song.” He had become disillusioned, too, with his own sound: “I was sick of my voice and I was sick of the strummy-strum acoustic guitar song.” This disillusionment can be found in every pore of the frenetic Age of Adz, which plugs each gap with convulsive synths and drumbeats, channelling Arthur Russell but with very little of his minimalism. I Want to be Well is manic and unsettled, its gaudy electronica sporadically injected with woodwind trills that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Disney film. “Illness likes to prey upon the lonely,” he sings, surely a reference to his own ordeal. “Wave goodbye, oh, I would rather be, but I would rather be fine / I want to be well, I want to be well.”
8. Futile Devices
For all the “hysterical melodrama”, as Stevens himself called it, of The Age of Adz, Futile Devices is by far its most restrained track. “In terms of craft, the songs are kind of weak,” he once said of the album. “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.” The language of Futile Devices isn’t lazy, but it relays Stevens’s frustration at its limits. “And I would say I love you / But saying it out loud is hard,” he muses, before admitting: “But you are life I needed all along / I think of you as my brother / Although that sounds dumb.” In the end, he gives up trying to articulate it. “Words,” he concludes, “are futile devices.”
9. Should Have Known Better
“I’m wondering, why do people make albums any more when we just download?” Stevens asked back in 2009. “Why are songs like three or four minutes, and why are records 40 minutes long? They’re based on the record, vinyl, the CD, and these forms are antiquated now. So can’t an album be eternity, or can’t it be five minutes? I no longer really have faith in the album any more.” And yet his 2015 album, Carrie & Lowell, followed these conventions more closely than any of his previous releases. At 43 minutes long, and with no track much longer than five minutes, it was, for Stevens, radical in its conformity. Musically too, it seemed Stevens had fallen back in love with the “strummy-strum acoustic guitar song” – and thank goodness he did. Named after his mother and stepfather, Carrie & Lowell is his most intimate album and, to many, his best. Should Have Known Better sees Stevens try to unpick the grief he felt after the death of a mother he barely knew.
10. The Only Thing
“The only thing that keeps me from driving this car / Half-light, jack knife into the canyon at night,” confesses Stevens in the opening line of The Only Thing, is looking at the constellations of the stars. In contemplating his own self-destruction, Stevens tries to comprehend the self-destruction he witnessed in his mother, who suffered from depression and schizophrenia and walked out on him when he was barely a year old. “I’ve always had a strange relationship to the mythology of Carrie, because I have such few lived memories of my experience with her,” he told Pitchfork. “At the time [of her death], part of me felt that I was possessed by her spirit and that there were certain destructive behaviours that were manifestations of her possession.” There’s a desperation, too, to protect her from her own fate: “Should I tear my heart out now? / Everything I feel returns to you somehow / I want to save you from your sorrow.” He’s still asking these questions as the song ends – nothing has been resolved, but there’s a catharsis in simply asking them. “This is not my art project,” Stevens says, “this is my life.” But what art he has made of it.
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