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Sufjan
Stevens’s Ambitious Trip Through Heaven and Earth
by Christopher
Stratton
Maybe
you’re not a member of the shoe-gazing indie music underground,
but you like tunes that rise above the lowest common denominator.
Maybe you don’t attend creative workshops to learn how
to be a better writer, but you appreciate good fiction. Maybe
you’re looking for something musically that’s
a little different, eclectic perhaps, spiritual definitely,
but not saccharine, not contemporary Christian—just
lived out, incarnational. Something
like Nick Drake, Brian Wilson, Neil Young and Flannery O’Connor
all rolled into one. Maybe you’re looking
for the music of Sufjan Stevens.
Sufjan
(pronounced Soof-Yawn) Stevens is the biggest artist to hit
the underground music scene since the Shins revitalized the
post-Nirvana world at Sub-Pop records. Growing up in Detroit
he learned to play the oboe and myriad other instruments in
the school band. But words were his passion, and after college
he moved to New York to write a novel. When the novel failed
to materialize, he started writing songs. The rest is history.
A
few years ago he was nothing more than a creative writing
grad student at the New School in Greenwich, this year his
5th album, Illinois, is topping out most of the critic’s
“best of 2005” lists, and he’s playing the
Lincoln Center in New York.
Sufjan’s
music is a wonderfully eclectic melding of old time folksiness
married to instrumental styles as wide-ranging and varied
as Celtic pipes and near Eastern sitars.
Miraculously he manages to take all these disparate elements
and make them work, a rare feat for any artist, let alone
one so young and new to the game. Discordant horns, off-time
rhythms, finger picked banjos, a cacophony of old styles wrapped
in luscious melodies —old wine in new wineskins.
Yet to attempt to define his style is by the reduction of
language to do it injustice. He is not another post-college
acoustic duo. He is not another cookie-cutter bohemian. Like
all great artists, he’s an interpreter of the styles
that came before him, and a synchretist that makes the music
his own.
His
first album, A Sun Came, showcased a mastery of many
different instruments and his uncanny ability to steal, blend
and reinvent genres, but it lacked a certain cohesiveness
and unity that left some songs standing well on their own
with others stranded in a wasteland of hodgepodge. The brilliance
is all there, but the refinement is lacking.
One
gets the sense that Stevens knew this himself as he launched
into his second ambitious project, a cycle of instrumental
songs done on a computer with no vocals, and titles that followed
the signs of the Chinese Zodiac. Though his idiosyncratic
melodies flow through the work, it’s clearly an experimental
piece and only of historiographic value. It wasn’t until
his fourth album, Seven Swans, that Stevens hit his
stride. With its stark banjo intro, plaintive lyrics, permeating
spirituality and multilayered-sing-in-the-round crescendos,
Seven Swans indelibly establishes Sufjan’s
trademark style. But it was his third project, Michigan,
that set him on a course that would permanently cement his
reputation.
Michigan
is the start of one of the most ambitious album projects undertaken
by any artist in recent memory. Able to claim Stevens as a
native son, Michigan represents the first of the 50 states
Stevens plans portray in album form. Boswell wrote the life
of Johnson, Sufjan wants to write albums for each state of
the Union.
Not
the great American novel he set out to write as a grad student
in New York, but perhaps one of the great American pop music
movements ever attempted. It’s hard not to be cynical
about the scope and presumption of such an endeavor by a young
artist, but if the first two albums in the series are any
indication, it will be a trip worth taking.
From
stories about the dispossessed workers in Flint, Michigan,
to the state motto and landmarks, to the story of John Wayne
Gacy in Illinois, and even a nod to some indigenous insects,
the state-inspired albums perfectly allow Stevens’s
fictional/lyrical gifts to flourish. In a way, the albums
are geographical tone poems focused on whatever knowledge
he has of the areas filtered through bountiful literary references.
Saul Bellow and Carl Sandburg make appearances on Illinoise,
and many other references pop up along the way. One can only
hope Stevens has enough drive and enough years left to finish
the task. The characters and soundscapes he is now free to
articulate as a result of this project allow him to evoke
a small panoply of life in a way that is sacramental.
Spiritually
speaking, Stevens stands at the forefront of a widespread
movement of young people looking to live out their faith sacramentally
(Seven Swans represents the gifts of the Seven Sacraments
of the Holy Spirit), willing to persist in the face of the
mystery of God and fully engaged with the world through art
and liturgy. He writes as a believer not willing to accept
the easy answers, as one who knows the failures of sin, the
silence of God and the complications of belief. The work often
has the tone of a Lamentation or a Psalm.
Oh
the glory that the lord has made
And the complications you could do without
When I kissed you on the mouth
Tuesday night at the bible study
We lift our hands and pray over your body
But nothing ever happens
Oh the glory that the lord has made
And the complications when I see his face
In the morning in the window
Oh the glory when he took our place
But he took my shoulders and he shook my face
And he takes and he takes and he takes
—“Casimir Pulaski
Day”
And in my best behavior
I am really just like him
Look beneath the floorboards
For the secrets I have hid
—“John Wayne Gacy,
Jr. ”
As
an Episcopalian who is a bit embarrassed by the institutionalization
and commodification of most church culture, Stevens stands
in line with artists like Dorothy Sayers and Flannery O’Conner,
who considered excellence at their craft the primary discipline
of a Christian. One
gets the impression that Stevens doesn’t want to be
a mouthpiece or a preacher, but rather that he wants to be
someone who lives and looks for God in the doubts, the stories
and the musical movements of the Spirit.
His
light is not under a bushel, it’s lived out in his words
and music. It’s difficult not to heap effusive praise
on an artist that takes his craft so intently and ambitiously
while also managing to glorify the Lord, but when you realize
that’s what Christians are called to do in this world,
you settle back into the fact that Sufjan Stevens is just
another human like you or me, with one small proviso—he
has a huge gift for writing songs. I for one am looking forward
to the journey ahead as seen through his art, and the many
states left to interpret.
©2006
Christopher Stratton
To
learn more about Sufjan Stevens, visit the Asthmatic
Kitty website. For further listening, the author recommends
the following titles, which can be purchased at amazon.com.
These links are provided as a service to explorefaith.org
visitors and registered
users.
SEVEN SWANS
ILLINOISE
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