“Religion was never meant to be used as leverage,” he says with disgust. Nevertheless, it pains him to see the way faith is thrown around in today’s politically divisive culture. “I don’t want to be the face of my religion,” Stevens says. Like fellow religious indie rocker David Bazan (Pedro the Lion’s frontman), Stevens’ relationship with his faith is an extremely personal affair, one that he has no interest in foisting upon others. Though he avoids being defined as a Christian musician, if you hunt through his lyrics, though it isn’t always opaque, faith is often quietly present. Instead, his approach to his state-by-state project is diffuse and almost reverent as he tries to create a patchwork of sound that somehow defines something American.Īnd he’s not just an American, but a religious one. In his world, red and blue states don’t exist. I can’t understand that.” By complicating and enhancing the dialogue, Stevens hopes to create a more meaningful discussion. In America, the “increasing obsession with binaries worries me,” he says. Simplistic analysis just ain’t Sufjan’s thing. Part of what seems to have driven Sufjan’s 50 state project is cultural inquiry – an exploration of identity.
In 2003, he released Greetings from Michigan. Stevens recently announced his intention of making a record for each of the 50 United States. The extravagancies of the song titles, of course, are indicative of Illinois’ general wild-eyed ambition. I could list them, but it’d basically take up all the space for this article. Other songs are listed as having Parts I and II, and yet another rocks eight exclamation points and a bit of onomatopoeia. One song, a two-minute instrumental rendering of the Black Hawk War, has a title that is 53 words long. The song titles indicate that there are some big ambitions at work here. And the overall sound is gorgeous and powerful – complicated string arrangements, multi-part choral harmonies, dramatic horn parts and, sometimes, just the quiet, almost acapella back and forth between a male and female voice.
#Sufjan stevens michigan zip serial
A prairie fire near Peoria, a UFO sighting in Highlands and John Wayne Gacy, the infamous Chicago serial killer, all make appearances. To find his stories he interviewed friends, read books and pored over police logs. Sufjan mines the history of the state, he converses with its poets, he engages with its cities, and he grapples with its mythologies. On Illinois, Sufjan uses 22 tracks and more than 30 instruments (he plays all of them!) to create a broad, panoramic musical postcard of the state. “I’ve always been interested in the working class,” he says, and tracks on this most recent LP include “Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts” and “To the Workers of the Rockford River Valley …” While the latter track is entirely instrumental, the former speaks of a “steel man,” whom Sufjan interchangeably refers to as a “real man”: “Only a steel man came to recover / If he had run from gold, carry over / We celebrate our sense of each other / We have a lot to give another.” Particularly with his latest album, Illinois, Michigan native Sufjan takes a page out of Woody’s play book. Woody never had any stomach for explicit politics – this is, after all, the man that once said, “Left wing, chicken wing, it don’t make no difference to me.” Still, his Jacob Riis-like fascination with and empathy for the working migrant poor set against the Dust Bowl and the emerging Popular Front gave his work an inevitably radical, political cast. Sufjan Stevens (pronounced “soof-yahn”), a singer songwriter of the indie folk persuasion, reminds me a bit of Woody Guthrie.
I think it means ‘comes with a sword’ or something like that.” “Sufjan,” says the man himself, “is one of those charmingly militaristic Armenian names.
Music, Geoff Aung, Columbia University, Aug. Taking cues from Woody Guthrie, an indie favorite sets out to musically chronicle every state in the nation.
0 kommentar(er)
