Interview with Sufjan Stevens: Illinois & Oboes

Interview with Sufjan Stevens on June 16/05:

I’ve been going through a phase of listening to a lot of classical music and that’s actually one of the first things I wanted to ask you about. I have this theory that Sufjan Stevens is classical music for people who think they don’t like classical music.

(laugh) I think that there’s probably a better way of saying that, in that “Sufjan Stevens is the Reader’s Digest of classical music for the modern pop generation.”

So you admit to being very influenced by it in the making of this record.
Oh yeah. Well, I studied oboe early on. I went to music school in Michigan for a year, a kind of intense boarding school primarily for musicians where you spend hours every day taking lessons and making oboe reeds and studying music theory. It was kind of like boot camp for oboists.

But you didn’t go to college for music.
No, no I think I realized early on that it was too competitive, that it was very limited in what you could do. I didn’t want to be specialized in a double-reed instrument - I wanted a broader experience in life. Eventually I learned piano by ear and that sort of became kind of like a passonate extra-marital affair. Every practice room had a piano in it, and I would go through all my scales and arpeggios on the oboe, and then I would sort of glance over at the piano and say, “Well, look at all of those keys.”

When you made that transition to playing piano, and then guitar, did what you were listening to start changing as well?
In college that was probably the first time I started listening to music that would be on the independent market. I started listening to Sonic Youth. I started listening to Blonde Redhead and stuff like that. My friends were all into Pavement and whatever - this was when Nirvana was really huge, and Hole and all that stuff, the Pixies. I was kind of just like marginally interested but it was slowly informing more of my aesthetic. My philosophy but not so much my style because I was still listening to classical music then.

What were you listening to at that point?
I had started listening to 20th century stuff a little more, so maybe that sort of changed my palate. Like minimalists, Terry Reilly, Steve Reich and whatever. Philip Glass. I had heard them before but was listening more seriously because they’re kind of panned in conservative music schools. But oh man, it was all part of my listening experience growing up because it was imposed on me, but I didn’t really start listening to it independently with much conviction until I went to college. I think it had a lot to do with getting out of the music programme, quitting the oboe, because then I was able to approach classical music with much more of an open ear. And an open mind.

Maybe too, you realized that you had something in terms of your education that other people didn’t have.
Yeah. I think that in order to be a writer and a composer you kind of have to get out of the structures of musical academia. Because they don’t really celebrate your personal voice. It’s more of a technical field, and I realized that I wasn’t necessarily a skilled technician on the oboe and that it wasn’t my vision.

What leads you from those early days of teaching yourself to play instruments to this immense project that you’ve set before yourself [making an album about each of the 50 states]?
I don’t know that there’s any kind of clear trajectory from one to the other. It was all there from the beginning. Early on I was interested in big things, big concepts. I loved the baroque opera, the baroque cantata. I loved Wagner, I loved programmatic symphonic pieces. You know the European composers, the Romantics would do these long symphonic litanies on regions and places and wars. That kinds of stuff really engaged me for some reason.

Did you like the Moldau?
Yeah, that’s one in particular that really captivated me. It’s not that I really understood what was going on. At some point a music teacher would explain - talking about movement in music and movement in water - that there’s a geography to composition and there’s a geography in the land, and the ways in which composers evoke these things.

I wanted to talk about your connection to Illinois, because your first album, Michigan is about where you grew up. Why is Illinois the second in the series, and what’s your personal connection?
I think Illinois is a bit arbitrary for me. It had a lot more to do with the nature of the songs I was writing than with my interest in the state or the geography. I’m working on things simulatenously; I’m working on a collection for Arkansas, for Oregon, for Rhode Island and New Jersey. Illinois kind of beat all the others out becuase in the reading I had done I began to establish a sense of the character of the state, which was one that was very robust, resilient, industrious, ingenuous. Confident. And I wanted to write songs that were more embellished, that were kind of more explicit in melody and in tone. So it was really more about the aesthetic that I wanted to develop for the songs. It was more about my perceptions of the character of the place which appealed to my interest in evoking those things, musically.

So you developed these impressions from the history and its character, and the songs followed?
Yes. The first two songs I’d written for Illinois were Chicago and Metropolis, and they were written a long time ago before the concept of Illinois was part of my vision. It’s my inclination to write music - you know, it’s like going to the bathroom or eating. I’m not afraid of running out of material. And there are any number of ways to approach this. It’s a concept and a concept is very malleable. I don’t expect to be doing research or historical surveys for every state. Some of the state records might not even mention any kind of geography or place names, you can be much more abstract or figurative about it. This record was just to prove that I could do the research, with a state that has nothing to do with me personally. I think from here on in I have a lot more leverage. I have a lot more freedom in what I can do, and how I can approach it.

Because you’ve done the ambitious, broad survey.
I don’t know if I have, successfully, but I’ve made the attempt. I don’t know if I really accomplished it from the research point of view. But the project is really less about the 50 states and America, and more about me and my imagination.

Which is what is so beautiful about it. You’re decidedly not coming at this from a straightforward or even formulaic perspective. I think this makes it more exciting for the audience.
I hope so. I think residents of particular states might be disappointed. I have to say that it’s hard to talk about because even the wordiness of the titles is not enough to summarize some of the contents. There’s so much behind everything. I mean, there are 12 verses that I wrote for Jacksonville, and I changed the melody because I felt the original melody didn’t fit all the words. I wrote so many more verses for so many of these songs.

So what else did you write about that’s not in the final version?
Well, initially that song was about race relations. Because Jacksonville was sort of the forerunner for education for disabled people and for women and minorites. They started a lot of schools and colleges for the deaf.

Jacksonville is an actual town, derived from Andrew Jackson?
Andrew Jackson is just kind of a reference, just nomenclature. No-one knows exactly why they named it Jacksonville. Some think it was named after a black preacher who was in the area, and these surveyors who were coming through got lost and asked this preacher where the nearest town was, and helped them out and they asked what his name was. For the abolitionists and for the Underground Railroad it was really important, abolitionists were helping out the black migration from the South to the North, for freedom. Yeha, I’m exhausing myself here, I’m starting to feel like a history teacher.

But I’m interested. I want to read all ten of the verses.
They’re not that great, you know what I mean? I think it’s important to really cut it, cut and edit. Less is more.

You were saying earlier that this is a less personal record in many respects, but aren’t some songs here quite personal?
I think that I incorporate my person and my experience and my affection for things in almost every song. Just about every song is in first person, and a lot of songs are based on real life experiences.

I wanted to ask you about the song “Decatur” - are you talking about your relationship with your stepmother?
In a roundabout way. I had a stepmom. And as children we did everything we could to resist, and resent her, and I think it’s very difficult. It’s a difficult dynamic when an alien parent comes in and starts taking charge. So I think the song is many things; it’s sarcasm, it’s an exercise in rhyme schemes, it’s also a litany of surreal, strange events that actually happened in and around Decatur. At the heart of it is a song of reconciliation between me and my stepmother. I think that every song has three levels: first a historical level; and then the textual level, which is all the wordiness and the mechanics of the sentences; and then the personal level, my own impressions and my take on it.

I wanted to refer to another song which is a product of research: the “John Wayne Gacy Jr.” song. It’s pretty affecting - not just the story behind it, but the fact that you seem to have a kind of empathy - or attempt to seek out the humanity in this person. You conclude with “in my best behaviour, I’m really just like him.”
I’m not so much empathizing with his behavoiur as I’m empathizing with his nature. I guess I believe we all have the capacity for terrible criminal acts, and though I don’t understand how he did what he did and can’t imagine myself doing anything like that, I do feel that we often use criminals and these kind of horrifying anomalies in human naure as moral leverage to make ourselves feel better about ourselves. There’s a real division between what is bad and what is good. I’m saying that I think we all have the capacity to do this. I’m not really sure why I said that because I’m still a little terrified by that kind of confession in the song, and I think it has a lot to do with the previous song, which is a kind of diatribe against civilization and bad art. I think I wanted that somehow to be personified in a story, and for me worked well, because there was the veneer of John Wayne Gacy - he was politically involved, he was well-loved, he was a clown - but then beneath all that was this horror story.

I think it’s very true what you’re saying, that people like him do become a repository for everyone’s fear of how something like that could happen.
Yeah, and I wonder if that kind of alienation and ostracizing people as Other is our way of disengaging with it. We pretend not to understand it so that we can criminalize it or demonize it.

Can I ask you finally about the first track, the UFO sighting?
I saw this in police blogs and you can see cited online too. It was a sighting by a few policeman in Lebanon, Illinois a couple of years ago, so it’s an actual sighting.

I love the likening of that to some kind of experience of God. I have to tell you that the first night I really properly listened to the record, I saw the Northern Lights for the first time. I wondered if you’re making a connection between life from another world, and God.
Yeah, someone else explicated the religious undercurrent here - I refer to the incarnaton and the three stars and someone saw it as the Trinity. Visitors from outer space is often a symbol for spiritual revelation. I didn’t intent that at all, it was meant to be a narrative song. It imposed a kind of religious language unknowingly. For me, it was important to start in my survey from the vantage point of a visitor. So I did it from outer space.

(June 16/05)