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 solid grasp of U.S. geography feels about as relevant as the Hall of Presidents these days, and yet Sufjan Stevens wants to create a full-length album for each of the fifty states. So far he's finished two: Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lakes State and Illinois. No easy task, and a bit of a shtick, but listening to Illinois, you can't help but feel that a bit of the Prairie State somehow really is floating around in his delicate narratives.There's a song about John Wayne Gacy, Jr., a song about Superman, and a song about the Columbian Exposition, all quite random topics linked only by their collective point of origin. Like Sarah Vowell, Stevens unearths the quirks in otherwise academic Americana, giving us the social studies class we never got in junior high. On Illinois, he finds beauty in such unlikely locales as Peoria, Decatur, and the Sears Tower. — Will Doig When I was eighteen I took my mother's car and drove it through most of the continental U.S. It was amazing to me that all these disparate cultures and landscapes are considered part of the same country. Washington is all lush and verdant, but in New Mexico everything is red. Louisiana feels like the jungle, and North Dakota is like the moon. I've been to forty states. I've lived in three or four of those, and I'd say I'm quite familiar with maybe ten. But I've been traveling a lot more lately because of touring and because of my interest in geography. What state that you've never been to would you most like to visit? Mississippi and the Delta states are so foreign and mythological to me. I'm definitely going to take a road trip down there. I think many Americans have a strange yearning to explore the deep South because of a perception that it's exotic and even a little dangerous, like a developing country. Do we needlessly fragment our national identity by dividing up into fifty little personified cantons? I am surprised at how arbitrary our allegiances are as far as our state borders. It's like our affiliations with sports teams. If you live in southern New Jersey, you're a Phillies fan, but if you live in northern New Jersey you're a Mets or a Yankees fan. I find that a lot of these allegiances are insubstantial and are often based on whim or peer pressure. If state borders are arbitrary, why make an album for every state? There's a lot of propaganda in what I'm doing. There are a lot of gimmicks. Especially on this record there's a lot of promotion, like the font that's on the cover and using Superman and other icons and a lot of exclamation points. The grandeur and the pageantry of the songs — it's like a Broadway musical. So I guess I'm borrowing that kind of sensibility, that self-inflated pageantry of Aaron Copeland and patriotism and Americana. But hopefully there's something deeper than that. Some of your songs don't make any sense to me at all. This is from your liner notes: "Chicago, in fashion, the soft drinks, expansion, oh Columbia! From Paris, incentive, like Cream of Wheat invented, the Ferris Wheel!" Are you trying to be cryptic? It depends on the song you're talking about. It might be intention, it might be a failure in communication in the song, or it might just be a misunderstanding. Communication is very complicated. It's not just a two-point trajectory. I think sometimes it's best to let things remain mysterious and ambiguous. My attitude toward writing is based on narrative technique, so if my songs are just musings then I guess they're failed narratives. Perhaps it's more that you're documenting the moods of these regions, and that's why they don't read like a simple narrative. Maybe I'm rendering them through my own attitudes and my own moods, and kind of using myself and my psychological characters to portray an emotional environment with a lot of projections. That's certainly possible. They say in creative writing workshops that you should approach geography with the same interest with which you would approach a character, and a lot of times the landscape becomes a protagonist or antagonist in the story. I think I come from that faux-naturalist position, probably because I was born in Detroit and then raised in the country. That must have been disorienting. When we moved from the city to the country it felt like we'd gone back in time. People were moving more slowly, driving cars that were outdated, but there was also a greater freedom, and I think that was exciting as a child, to go fishing and boating and swimming. I couldn't really do all that stuff in Detroit. We went fishing in the Detroit River and all the fish had diseases. Even just saying "the Detroit River" sounds sort of silly. I'm picturing a slow moving current of fossil fuels. But the funny thing about Detroit is that the natural world is taking over again. Recently there's been a rise in bird habitation in abandoned lots in downtown, and ornithologists are flocking to . . . no, sorry . . . ornithologists are coming to Detroit to bird watch, and there are wild peacocks and pheasants in downtown Detroit. So because Detroit is decomposing, it is possible to live the rural lifestyle. Have you ever been to Flushing Meadows in Queens? It's the same sort of thing. They had the World's Fair there in 1964 and they never bothered to tear down a lot of the structures, like the big atomic globe. They're still all up in that park, all those symbols of optimism and non-cynicism and "better living through chemistry" are up there rotting away, covered in vines like they're being pulled back into the earth. It's so cool. This country really bought into the idea that the industrial revolution would save us. In some ways it was necessary because of our size and to meet the needs of supply and demand, but in other ways it's a real detriment to society and our well being and our health, and looking back I see that things like the World's Fair were a precursor to promotional architecture, to advertising, and media and commerce, and the real discrepancy between reality and hyper-reality. But in ways that I can't really put my finger on, your music also seems to celebrate that lack of cynicism from way back when. Do you think it has something to do with your Christian faith? I'm kind of suspicious of classifications, honestly, especially if they're imposing a religious or cultural thing. I would avoid using any type of religion, especially Christianity, as a modifier, because in some ways it's kind of our way of alienating something. In some parts of America Christianity is pervasive, but in others it's become almost shameful, like if you're a Christian you don't think for yourself or something. A lot of the types of people who listen to your music might look down upon Christianity. Well, it's like, how do you have faith in something that doesn't seem very popular? But that's the fundamentals of belief. When we get in an elevator or cross a bridge, we put a certain amount of faith in the engineers and architects who designed this, and in that sense, I think we're very religious people. Except that Christianity is such a politically loaded thing these days. Now when someone says the word "Christian," I don't think Jesus Christ. I think Bill Frist or Focus on the Family or something. I think once you get involved in that kind of church, whether it's Islam or Christianity, the harder task is distinguishing between what is the culture, what is the institution, and what are the actual fundamentals of the faith. I have a hard time approaching reggae music because of its cultural connotations. I have a hard time approaching commercial rock and even Muslims because of all the cultural connotations. I think we're required to be slightly more enlightened where this is the description and this is the reality of the belief. Do you mean you think we're unrealistically expected to be able to relate to everything and anything? Well, at least to be able to accommodate everything, and to approach it for the fullness of being what it is. I think we're all very opinionated and prejudiced when you get right down to it, and I'm very suspicious of my own prejudices so I'm constantly checking it. How about prejudices in relation to your faith? Do your Christian beliefs influence your politics on such topics as gay marriage? The gay marriage thing is such a big deal now, but I think it's completely messed up because it has nothing to do with love or marriage anymore. It's totally about differences of opinion and it's being used to divide people. But what do you personally think? Is gay marriage okay? I don't make any political claims at all. I don't want to talk about that. I notice you don't have a lot of songs that concern love or sex in general. Is sex not a big part of your life? Not necessarily. It doesn't mean that I'm not capable of loving or having sex, of course. I just think that in my creative vision I'm preoccupied with other things, and I think a lot of these songs about love and sex out there are so vague and abstract and meaningless. But yeah, I don't think I write typical love songs because it's been done. But I'm open to new things. I think what I do musically is sort of more scholarly and maybe slightly more intellectual than your typical pop music, which sounds so presumptuous, but when you're using literary allusions and history your work is going to have more of a scholarly feel. That was the point of this record from the very beginning. n°
© 2005 Will Doig and Nerve.com. |
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