The states of his art

By Richard Cromelin

Aug. 7, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

SUFJAN STEVENS and his six backing musicians are wearing identical green T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Come on Feel the Illinoise” as they play a short set of his songs for a Southern California audience. The question is, why synchronize the wardrobe when they’re performing on the radio?

“I think it just helps us to feel kind of unified,” Stevens says after the recent performance on KCRW-FM’s “Morning Becomes Eclectic” program. “It puts us in the attitude of respect for our audience. I think it’s important on every level to have a kind of attitude of unification in some way.... I don’t really have that naturally, I’m not a great performer, so we have to do everything we can, do the exercises, to prepare.”

Actually, Stevens can be an enthralling performer just standing there singing his songs, but you can see why he’d want some self-help rituals to grease the tracks. At a time when the indie-rock world is serving up such spotlight-savvy figures as Arcade Fire and Bright Eyes to an eager audience, one of the genre’s most acclaimed artists this year is a reluctant, road-shy singer-songwriter who’s wary of his growing success

Stevens is an odd fit in the freewheeling pop world: a Christian with a Persian name (pronounced “SOOF-yawn,” it was bestowed by the leader of the sect his parents belonged to when he was born), an intense, thoughtful manner and a predilection for solitude.

As he talks softly on the eve of a U.S. tour, Stevens, 30, seems more the novelist he originally set out to become than a bandleader who soon will be basking in sellout crowds’ adulation on the concert stage. There’s a formality and a seriousness in his manner, along with periodic traces of dry humor.

“I think you should be suspicious when there’s a lot of interest in what you’re doing,” the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based musician says firmly, sitting in a small lounge at the Santa Monica radio station. “You should kind of check it at every level. Are they interested in what I’m doing because of my proposition to do the ‘states’ records, because it’s a gimmick? Or are they really interested in my songs and my music?

“I think we should all be measured by our work and not measured by our propositions and not measured by our advertising. ‘Cause there’s a huge discrepancy between what’s advertised and what’s being sold, what’s being created.

“It does seem like there’s a little more interest now. I’m really honored. But I wonder if a lot of it is ultimately very distracting to a person’s work and privacy. So I’m a little worried about that -- though I know I don’t have to worry about these things in the way, I don’t know, that Cher has to worry about it.”

Of course Cher never promised that she’d record an album about each of the American states, as Stevens did after his 2003 album “Michigan” began to get some notice. It was meant as an attention-getting gimmick, but the idea caught his imagination, and now it’s taking him to parts unknown.

While “Michigan” revealed its unifying theme to Stevens only after he had assembled some diverse songs he’d been working on for a couple of years, the more ambitious “Illinois” was conceived from the start to fit the concept.

The product of extensive research and painstaking methodology, it has a musical palette that sweeps from the brassy bravado of stage musicals to solo folk outings of austere intimacy. Its subjects range from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago to Superman to Abraham Lincoln to the ghost of Carl Sandburg to serial killer John Wayne Gacy.

These historical and fictional figures are balanced by personal episodes from Stevens’ own experience, such as “Casimir Pulaski Day,” a wrenching account of a young friend’s death from cancer.

“It’s really about a sensory experience and getting fully involved and fully entrenched in the pageantry of Illinois,” Stevens says of the album, which he released on his own label, Asthmatic Kitty.

“But then also being slightly suspicious of that, and what does it mean and what is all this advertisement about the world’s fair and great architecture and about great presidents and great generals and farming and industry and things like this -- like what is behind all that?

“There was a kind of veneer and propaganda I was up against. And once I scrutinized more deeply into the character of Illinois I found that there’s actually some terrible, awful things that went on in the state.

“The history is really a series of possession and genocide and selfishness and greed and the marking of arbitrary borders and dividing people, kicking out indigenous cultures for modern cultures. And I found that there’s a kind of horror story in our own history, which is who we are and where we come from.”

The album’s U.S. sales figure of around 20,000 doesn’t pose a threat to Stevens’ small-scale comfort zone, but his rising profile can be measured in other ways.

His current concert tour has played to mostly sold-out rooms, and Metacritic.com, a website that gives records, books and movies a numerical score based on published reviews, rated “Illinois” 91 on a scale of 100, the website’s most favorably reviewed album of the year.

Rolling Stone noted that “the music draws from high school marching bands, show tunes and ambient electronics; we can suspect Steve Reich’s ‘Music for 18 Musicians’ is an oft-played record in the Stevens household, since he loves to echo it in his long instrumental passages. But he holds it all together with his breathy, gentle voice, reminiscent of Neil Young circa ‘After the Gold Rush.’ ”

Ryan Schreiber, editor in chief of the prominent indie-rock website pitchforkmedia.com, which took the unusual step of rerunning its “Michigan” review to call more attention to the artist, says, “There’s something about him that spans audiences. It’s got the sort of teenage romanticism at the same time it’s got this forlorn world-weariness and this sort of adult perspective as well. Lyrically it’s an all-encompassing thing.”

Isolated, in good company

IN the geography of indie rock, Stevens might seem to be wandering in a wilderness all his own, a place of historical epics such as the states records and spiritual meditations such as his 2004 album, “Seven Swans.”

But though he says he feels “a little isolated,” he’s actually in the good company of a growing subgenre of musicians with a pronounced literary underpinning.

There’s the New Mexico-based Handsome Family, whose lyricist Rennie Sparks holds a master’s in creative writing and has issued books of her short stories. New Englander Joe Pernice of the Pernice Brothers is an ex-grad student and a published poet, and the ranks of word-aware, narrative-conscious acts are swelling with the likes of the Decemberists, a group of epic yarn-spinners from Portland, Ore., and the surreally slanted Fiery Furnaces, like Stevens a Midwest-to-Brooklyn transplant.

“I think a lot of people who dream of being writers in this day and age end up writing songs,” observes the Handsome Family’s Sparks. “It’s the only real popular form of short story or poetry we have. People who couldn’t be bothered to read a whole book can listen and love a little short story within a song.”

“I do wonder if people aren’t just interested in music that has meaning,” Stevens suggests when asked why he’s attracting an audience. “Because there’s been kind of an exhaustion through forms and genres, like rock and electronica, doing away with melodies, and I think maybe we’re always interested in songs -- folk songs, hymns. Whatever. Patriotic songs with strong melodies. It’s kind of the basis of what I’m doing now, just focusing on traditional songwriting.”

And Stevens has found that his most satisfying songs, the ones that are concise and straightforward, only feed his original ambition.

“They show me how much I want to start writing fiction again.... I think it’s possible, but I think I need to take a sabbatical. Writing is a much more difficult, much more sophisticated form than songwriting. Because it cannot be immediately satisfying, it doesn’t appeal to the senses the way music does. It requires an investment through the years, and I think therefore it asks for a lot more work, a lot more discipline.”

Stevens, who names Anton Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor and Saul Bellow among his favorite authors, grew up in northern Michigan, and after college he moved to New York to study writing at the New School for Social Research, aiming to be the Faulkner of the Great Lakes State. He later taught writing at adult night school and held day jobs in the publishing business.

His musical education was spare. He studied oboe for a year as a child and fell in love with baroque music, especially opera. At home he heard folk and pop music by Ry Cooder, Nick Drake, Neil Young and the Beatles from his stepfather’s record collection, but as a teenager it was just ‘80s Top 40. He says he’s never owned a stereo.

Still, he always dabbled in music, and he released a couple of experimental albums, “A Sun Came” in 2000 and “Enjoy Your Rabbit” in 2001. When “Michigan” generated offers for tours and requests for interviews, he felt compelled to make a full-time commitment to music. He quit his job as a designer at Time Inc.’s children’s books division and a month later found himself on tour in Europe.

Staying in his range

WITH the acclaim escalating, he can expect the sharks to be circling. You don’t get a four-star lead review in Rolling Stone without catching the eye of major labels who’d love to snap up your potential.

But Stevens says he’s not too distracted by that.

“Most people know that I’m very comfortable and happy with my work right now and with my relationship with my label. I’m like incredibly pragmatic. I’m very utilitarian about how I do everything, and I like to make sure that I’m not working beyond my means, and I’m not ever being pushed to do things that are unnatural or that are out of my range.”

That sounds good, but is it really pragmatic to commit to a project that figures to occupy you for 48 more years, assuming you turn out your state albums at an annual rate?

“Everyone seems really concerned for me now about the prospect. They use this word ‘daunting’ all the time,” says Stevens, who now seems to be backtracking a bit, musing about franchising the idea to other bands.

“Of course I’m not gonna finish it,” he says with a hint of a smile.

“But I think it’s a good exercise for now. Maybe 10. I’ll do 10. Let’s say that.”

Contact Richard Cromelin at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

A range of feelings in a Midwestern setting

Some excerpts of the whimsical, fanciful and sometimes impenetrable lyrics from Sufjan Stevens’ “Illinois”:

When the revenant came down

We couldn’t imagine what it was

In the spirit of three stars

The alien thing that took its form

Then to Lebanon, oh God!

“Concerning the UFO Sighting