Shaken Stevens

For over four years, the talk on Sufjan Stevens has been the same – angelic of voice, one of the most gifted songwriters of his generation, the man who once set out to make a record for each of the fifty US states, missing presumed indifferent. It’s not that he had disappeared completely. He was still around, working on soundtracks for New York expressways, popping up on stage with The National. But if you craved a proper follow-up to Illinois, it wasn’t forthcoming. Boredom or creative inertia was presumed, not the total collapse he speaks of today.

“Something chemically switched in me where I really lost that ambition,” says Stevens. “I started to get sick of myself, my voice, my music. I felt like my music was a disease and I had this kind of ailment. I didn’t work on anything for a long time. It was really traumatic. It took me a couple of years to get back in the saddle.”
Anyone paying attention will have noticed his discontent last year, when he wondered out loud in interviews whether there was any point in creating music at all.
“I lost faith in the album,” Stevens says of the time. “I felt like everything I had done previously was phony and fake because it was so constructed. Who am I to construct this pastiche over the course of a 60 minute album? I had lost all my bearings – I didn’t know what a song was anymore.”
He retreated away from the spotlight and busied himself with the work of others.
“I was very self-conscious, trying to suppress my own voice. But I feel like I’ve come out of that. I think I have a much healthier relationship with my work now and the new material is a response.”
The response comes in the form of the long-awaited, and predictably brilliant, The Age Of Adz. He’s tense but confident about how it will be received.
“It’s like after you give birth and you can start showing your child around to your friends. It’s daunting because I have to start playing these songs and I’m not even sure how to go about it.”
The album retains Stevens’ sweet voice and mercurial way with song, but is shorn of much else we’ve come to expect from him. Synthesizers and drum patterns are prominent.
“I got rid of a lot of the usual suspects – the banjo, the guitar and the piano,” he explains. “This record is more about experimenting with the process of sound generation. I was basing a lot of the songs around a sound, without melodies or lyrics until the very end. The lyrics were less invested in a script and more in an emotive response.”
Steering clear of the album concepts and character sketches that made his name, Stevens now sings about himself.
“I wanted to avoid the literary specificity that I’ve used in the past. I was just singing based on instinct. There’s a lot of heavy, weighted abstractions throughout the album – love, loss and loneliness. I actually use the word ‘love’ over and over again. This is the kind of language that I wouldn’t have allowed myself to use in the past, but I’m starting to find a little solace in the clichés.”
He clearly wants to make his presence felt once again.
“For now I’m being very near-sighted. I’d like to tour more this following year. I’d really like to get back out there.”
Despite all this, it seems he will forever remain slightly ill-at-ease in the spotlight.
“I appreciate the recognition I’ve gotten but I’m not comfortable with all the attention,” he agrees. “I love the challenge of interpreting the music live but... I don’t like all those people looking at me! I’m extremely self-conscious. That’s why when I tour I bring a lot of people on stage – so there’s other stuff to look at!”
Perhaps as a kind of camouflage, he readily admits that his music is still very referential: “Yeah, I’m just a man who is extremely impressionable!” This time around, he draws on the apocalyptic imagery of late American artist Royal Robertson – allusions to his poetry and prophecies run throughout the record.
“I started to shape the album based on this cosmic aesthetic and he became a casual reference point,” Stevens explains. “He was really troubled. He had schizophrenia, kicked out his family, lived alone in his trailer, his house was destroyed by Hurricane Andrew.”
It sounds like Robertson’s doomed life story fitted Stevens’ dark mood at the time. He laughs.
“Yeah! The pseudo-existential dilemma I was experiencing – it’s the cliché of the artist living in isolation creating work at the expense of his well-being and his family. I had to recede from everything and suffer that isolation for a short period in order to get through it. Unfortunately Royal didn’t have the resources or the friends to – he really suffered. But he loved his work. He created it for himself and was entrenched in it. That’s sort of a heroic story, right there.”
Luckily for us, back from the brink, a new chapter in the story of Sufjan Stevens has just begun.

The Age Of Adz is out now on Asthmatic Kitten.