Sufjan Stevens - A Minstrel Roaming the States

It may seem a foregone and almost inevitable premise, when setting out to describe any contemporary songwriter, to observe that in the 2000s it's hardly the easiest thing in the world to establish oneself in a non-trivial way within the sprawling, variegated landscape loosely traceable to the new American folk. Such a statement could serve equally to fuel overly hasty praise, based solely on technical-formal elements, or to justify overly indulgent reflections on artists working in a musical field where it seems almost impossible to demand anything radically "new" and personal.

Well, this premise turns out to be entirely superfluous and misleading when the artist in question is Sufjan Stevens, an author capable of scrambling mental categories and combining multiple musical oxymorons, always leaving latent, in the listening of his work, a taste for surprise, conveyed by a fresh, childlike playfulness that is never artificially constructed with the calculated intent of achieving a bizarre result at all costs.

In fact, there is very little that is apparently bizarre about Sufjan Stevens, from any point of view: the way he presents himself and his biography have nothing that might let the persona overshadow the artist. He seems, if anything, the classic "boy next door", easily placed within the stereotyped image of the quiet American suburban family, whose themes, like those concerning the Catholic faith, often recur in his compositions, into which he manages to pour, admirably, the genuine simplicity of his approach to life, even before his approach to music.

Sufjan was born in 1975 in Detroit, Michigan, and spent his childhood in the secluded setting of the Lower Peninsula, the strip of land between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. His multifaceted musical sensibility and natural talent emerged early on: it seems that as a child he already amused himself composing little Mozartian sonatas on toy keyboards, and by the time he was barely an adult he had already, as a self-taught musician, successfully tackled a great number of instruments — from banjo to oboe, from guitar to vibraphone, from piano to bass — which he still masters and continues to play today.

After a brief stint in an obscure band called Marzuki and a collaboration with the Danielson Famile, Sufjan began his solo career in 1999 with the album A Sun Came.

While Stevens' extreme prolificacy was already evident from his debut, exemplifying his tendency toward very long albums, the musical character of his early work is quite different from what would come later: A Sun Came is in fact a collection of lo-fi pop songs, written during the last part of Stevens' time in college and inspired by a crooked, at times scruffy songwriting style. Yet already across the album's seventy-plus minutes, a wholly unconventional musical identity begins to emerge. While certain passages might recall comparisons with the Beck of that era (just listen to "A Loverless Bed" to hear it), A Sun Came displays a remarkable variety of sonic solutions and already outlines the compositional and instrumental richness that would soon become one of the defining traits of Sufjan Stevens the multi-instrumentalist, even before Sufjan Stevens the singer.

The underlying thread of a work that ranges from college-radio indie with echoes of Pavement and Sebadoh in "A Winner Needs A Wand", "Demetrius" and "The Oracle Said Wander", to the soft, slightly mournful, intimate touches of "Rake" and "Dumb I Sound", ends up even being the vaguely Oriental atmosphere that surfaces, often unexpectedly, amid flutes and percussion in many of the tracks.

Taken as a whole, A Sun Came is an uneven work, in which Stevens, despite more than one naive misstep, experiments with an artistic vocabulary so broad in scope as to seem almost unmeasurable — one that, beyond a few timid and rather predictable nods to indie-rock, could be described as a strange blend of lo-fi singer-songwriter fare and folk-psych remnants with a pronounced vintage flavor. On this album, the young Sufjan undoubtedly shows notable compositional versatility and a great range of expressive registers, but his many ideas end up rather muddled and hard to manage, just as his artistic identity still remains undefined — though the tracks that hold up best are precisely the most stripped-down ones, almost just voice and guitar, in which Sufjan puts his far-from-outstanding vocal abilities to use in a hushed, intimate delivery, innocent and disenchanted at once ("Kill", "Happy Birthday" and "A Sun Came", along with the already mentioned "Rake" and "Dumb I Sound").

But while the author's natural inclination toward a simple, crystalline folk already peeks through on his debut album, objectively not even the sharpest and most optimistic critics could have glimpsed in A Sun Came the exact seeds of Stevens' future artistic dimension, let alone his precise stylistic placement. The same holds true, even more so, for his second album, Enjoy Your Rabbit, written and recorded in New York, where he had meanwhile relocated. Like its predecessor, Enjoy Your Rabbit is a very long album, though its features are far more cohesive throughout, however surprising: it is in fact a concept album made up of fourteen instrumental tracks inspired by the Chinese zodiac, in which Stevens does not develop any one in particular of the many different styles present in embryonic form on A Sun Came, but instead dives headlong into an extravagant electro-glitch sound, built entirely on rickety keyboards and vaguely noise-like dissonances, which almost seem to be poking fun at Jim O'Rourke ("Year Of The Monkey", "Year Of The Dragon"). Here and there across the album's nearly eighty minutes, between sickly ambient passages ("Year Of The Ship", "Year Of Our Lord") and deconstructed videogame melodies, one can nonetheless glimpse that the author of such sonic bric-a-brac is anything but a staid, solemn avant-gardist: just consider the orchestral touches of "Year Of The Rat" and "Year Of The Boar", the cartoonish lounge atmosphere of "Year Of The Dog", and the piano that opens the more than thirteen minutes of "Year Of The Horse", soon torn apart by a varied arsenal of synthetic sounds and disturbances.

Enjoy Your Rabbit remains, in the end, a transitional episode in Stevens' career, something more than a mere divertissement, which would almost not be worth considering in the growth of his artistic personality, if not perhaps for having soon steered him away from such electronic experiments — not bad in themselves, but ultimately rather predictable, and in any case enough to make him realize it was time to completely change course, abandoning his electronic dabblings at their first unsteady steps.

Having moved past this interlude, Stevens decides it's time to get serious: after crafting and recording a handful of new songs in a DIY fashion across various, often impromptu locations, and with the crucial support of his stepfather - who had followed and encouraged his musical talent from the very beginning - he turns their home-production outfit Asthmatic Kitty into a proper label, so as to officially release the new material and give it wider distribution.

The result of Sufjan Stevens's artistic creativity and renewed entrepreneurial drive is Michigan, his first truly "mature" album, through which his multifaceted sensibility begins to find sharper artistic definition. Alongside the album, conceived as a loose concept piece dedicated to his home state, the project that would first get Sufjan Stevens's name circulating in the American indie scene was born - hugely ambitious and a little mad: to complete a sort of musical tour of all fifty US states, each honored with its own album or EP. But setting aside its place within that conceptual masterplan, Michigan is an album that never stops surprising, conjuring a whole range of musical and emotional sensations, from the very first piano note of the crystalline, deeply despondent ballad "Flint (For The Unemployed And Underpaid)" to the last note of "Vito's Ordination Song", a bucolic love song not without its musical-theater flourishes. Over its generous hour-plus running time, the record holds fifteen gorgeous musical watercolors in which Stevens renders, with extreme grace and in his invariably melancholy tone, desolate post-industrial landscapes, gray urban frescoes and placid, clear-skied glimpses of nature.

As the subjects of his description shift, so does the expressive register, with styles and echoes - often worlds apart from one another - alternating throughout; and yet their emergence, even in certain passages, feels so spontaneous that one would never suspect any premeditation on the author's part. He's capable not only of alternating between, but even of folding into a single song, hushed Drake-esque ballads ("For The Widows In Paradise, For The Fatherless In Ypsilanti", "Holland") and jazzy arrangements worthy of John McEntire ("All Good Naysayers, Speakup! Or Foerever Hold Your Peace!", "Oh Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head! (Rebuild! Restore! Reconsider!)"), as well as of moving from disarming minimalism - a few notes of piano and/or banjo - to genuine bouquets of instruments, horns, vibraphones, xylophones, all balanced together in an almost orchestral equilibrium, the product of an evidently obsessive, painstaking craft in building each track.

But beyond the ever-shifting echoes present in many of the tracks (from classic American singer-songwriter fare to hints of easy listening, to sonic reworkings reminiscent of Tortoise, The Sea & The Cake or Jim O'Rourke), the common thread running through Michigan is the revelation of a shy, delicate author, rooted in a light, dreamlike folk dimension, yet still capable of striking deep chords and conveying sincere emotions, genuine in their simplicity. His fervent creativity almost never risks scattering itself, even in the more elaborately constructed songs, which nonetheless betray ambitions of a certain compositional grandeur ("All Good Naysayers, Speakup!", "Oh Detroit!", and also the nearly symphonic nine-minute coda of the initially soft choral lullaby "Oh God, Where Are You Now? (In Pickeral Lake? Pigeon? Marquette? Mackinaw?)"). Yet it's the seemingly simplest ballads that truly define the figure of a modern, thoroughly uncommon songwriter, whose fragile, romantic folk, with its thousand variations on a theme, is backed by a candid, almost carefree disposition, utterly free of any intellectual pretension.

The more pronounced folk dimension found, alongside many other elements, on Michigan is pushed even further on the following Seven Swans, the shortest and most "compact" album in his discography: twelve songs for just over (so to speak) three quarters of an hour, almost no mile-long titles, and relatively homogeneous musical traits, all rooted in a spare folk-country sound built mainly around the banjo, which sketches and accompanies shy ballads or grand "hymns" to earthly - and above all otherworldly - love. While it's probably best not to dwell too much or speculate on this from a strictly musical standpoint, it's worth noting that Seven Swans (tellingly produced with the help of Daniel Smith of Danielson Famile, and released on his label, Sounds Familyre) is an album packed with biblical references in its lyrics, and steeped in a vaguely gospel flavor in some of its episodes, helped along by the delicate choral harmonies that punctuate nearly every song here and there. Stevens's vocal abilities, noticeably improved by this point, let him deliver demanding yet spare lyrics with lightness and total freedom from rhetoric - now whispered in rapt, inspired contemplation ("Abraham", "Size Too Small"), now charged with a certain joyous biblical fervor, most evident in the last two tracks, "Seven Swans" and "The Transfiguration", true hymns in which the grandeur of the arrangements unfolds, alternately, into a celestial gospel crowning an opening of just voice and banjo, or into a graceful instrumental polyphony truly capable of lifting the spirit.

But the whole record carries a conceptually symphonic imprint, evident right from the hushed choirs and subtle crescendo of the opening "All The Trees Of The Field Will Clap Their Hands", as well as from the graceful, almost minuet-like gait of the following "The Dress Looks Nice On You". Step by step, track by track, Seven Swans goes on to reveal many small gems in which its author's deeply personal touch frames passages of melancholy intimacy ("To Be Alone With You", "We Won't Need Legs To Stand") that truly don't flinch from the most demanding comparisons to Nick Drake or Elliott Smith, or even reinterprets, through his own sensibility, the most traditional country-folk on "In The Devil's Territory", first cloaked in a soft reading before flowing into harmonic solutions built on minimal chord repetitions and a few subtly psychedelic touches - never out of place, though.

There's no shortage either of songs with more "electric" leanings and more complex harmonic solutions, like "Sister", suspended between quiet intimacy and a kind of grand crescendo soon dissolving into the shy, muffled dialogue between Stevens's voice and those of Elin and Megan Smith; "A Good Man Is Hard To Find", whose driving rhythm still comes across as light and far removed from the naive, indie-leaning rough edges of his early work; and "He Woke Me Up Again", whose easy melodies confirm the author's instinctive nature and his great ability to never take himself too seriously. Once again, it's freshness and simplicity, paired with a masterful expressive immediacy, that stand out as the hallmarks of an artistic personality now fully mature - remarkably versatile in musical range, yet never "cold" or overly cerebral for it. Instead, much as in certain moments on Michigan, he's constantly engaged in emotionally rich songwriting that yields results it's genuinely hard to remain indifferent to.

Having so admirably put to rest, with this biblically inclined work, his personal reinterpretation of the American traditional song, Sufjan Stevens turns to the second chapter of his "states tour", moving from Michigan to neighboring Illinois, to which he dedicates - with an obvious pun in the album artwork and the usual mile-long titles - a true sprawling, heterogeneous epic made up of no fewer than twenty-two tracks (though six are merely brief interludes or divertissements under a minute long), produced in the short span of four months and recorded across numerous different locations, including the St. Paul Episcopal church in Brooklyn, where the piano parts were recorded.

The content of Illinois is extremely dense and varied, yet marked by incredible creative vitality: it opens with the placid "Concerning The UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois", in which Stevens frames his seraphic voice - that of a teenager observing the world with wide-eyed wonder - with a light, crystalline piano; next comes "The Black Hawk War...", an instrumental built entirely around a very '60s-sounding epic of strings and horns. Quite different is the breezy stride of "Come On! Feel The Illinoise!" which, introduced by a plucked piano, evolves into an exchange between a decidedly retro choir and a relentless kaleidoscope of horns, culminating - after a brief jazzy interlude - on a hushed, romantic and intimate note.

The intense, Buckley-esque "John Wayne Gacy, Jr." offers yet another change of pace, with its meticulous reconstruction of the story of one of the most vicious serial killers in American history, told with narrative skill, an enveloping structure - built entirely around acoustic guitar and piano - and Sufjan's impeccable, perfectly suited vocal delivery, moving and reflective. "Jacksonville" then lifts the mood back up, with its bouquet of strings led by a banjo, bursting into a rousing final chorus that feels like a kind of white gospel.

But almost every track on the album is noteworthy, each offering its own surprising structure. Stevens's musical and compositional range stretches from the grand on-the-road fresco of "Chicago" (where his voice is punctually countered by a vaguely Christmas-like choir pitched higher) to the orchestral-funk fascinations of "They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back From The Dead!! Ahhhh!", which even manages to conjure, in the mind's ear, a touch of '70s choral dance music.

It ranges from the seeming opposites of the folk accordion sketching out the quirky rhymes of "Decatur, Or, Round Of Applause For Your Stepmother!", to the one and only hint of electric guitar on "The Man Of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts" - itself interrupted by an intimate moment of just acoustic guitar and voice - from the musical-theater pomp of "The Tallest Man, The Broadest Shoulders" to the Steve Reich echoes of "Out Of Egypt, Into The Great Laugh Of Mankind, And I Shake The Dirt From My Sandals As I Run", all the way to the liquid, ethereal melodies of "Prairie Fire That Wanders About", a track that, as happened at points on his debut album, even brings to mind the inspired pop style of the best Stereolab.

And yet, while clearly enjoying himself amid so many eccentric digressions (and showing uncommon skill and sensitivity in every one of them), Stevens once again expresses his talent at its best in the album's most minimal, intimate passages, where his plain but steady voice rises over a bed of just piano and/or acoustic guitar - as in the touching "John Wayne Gacy, Jr.", in the poignant, dark tale of "Casimir Pulaski Day", built on a dialogue between guitar and banjo, and in the gorgeous, suspended "The Seer's Tower" which, centered on a minimal piano melody and an elegiac, evocative choir, stands as one of the emotional peaks of the record.

Illinois is once again a work that defies definitions and comparisons, utterly timeless in its apparent heterogeneity - which is in fact the result of a carefully assembled, fluid concept, skillfully structured across its many different moments, in which technical and compositional precision never tips over into emotional coldness. Stevens manages to steer clear of any redundancy, filling his compositions with pathos while maintaining, at the same time, his now-familiar breezy, unserious tone, which, listen after listen, helps the album's many eclectic episodes settle into both mind and heart.

As if the twenty-two tracks of such a complex, intricate album weren't enough, a year after its official release Stevens put out another twenty-one songs drawn from the extremely intense recording sessions for Illinois, but left out of its final version. The collection, titled The Avalanche, while something of a "lesser fresco" compared to the previous album, shouldn't be too hastily dismissed as mere label filler, nor as a simple collection of leftovers. Granted, the album lacks the coherence and flow of its predecessor, but that doesn't mean it's without interesting ideas: the tracks gathered here offer yet another demonstration of Stevens's creative fertility, as well as of the ease with which he's able to dress his songs in a variety of sonic guises, reworking their styles and instrumental components with remarkable versatility - as shown by the three different versions of "Chicago" included here, in which, starting from the same basic harmonic approach, the song is first presented in a stripped-down, intimate acoustic guise, then recast with a vintage easy-listening sensibility somewhere between '60s echoes and orchestral jazz, and finally rendered in an oblique electric version, deliberately off-kilter.

As for the rest, alongside the now-familiar instrumental interludes—forever suspended between dilation and eccentricity—The Avalanche inevitably revisits the elements of Illinois: from the brisk pace of the thoroughly enjoyable acoustic transformations of the Stereolab sound (“Dear Mr. Supercomputer”), to the abundance of horns in lavish arrangements with a recurring old-fashioned flavor that, as ever, steers clear of nostalgic temptations (“The Henney Buggy Band”, “No Man’s Land”). The collection is nonetheless far from negligible, especially for its simple, bucolic acoustic ballads, in which Sufjan Stevens once again proves particularly at ease, masterfully alternating banjo touches, joyful choruses (“The Avalanche”, “Adlai Stevenson”) and a hushed, deeply refined intimacy (“The Mistress Witch From McClure (Or, The Mind That Knows Itself)”, “The Undivided Self (For Eppie And Popo)”).

In short, even on an album almost certainly destined to remain a minor entry in his discography, Stevens ends up laying out the full breadth of his enormous writing and performing talents, proving once again incapable of producing anything less than top quality. And perhaps precisely because of that, even a collection of “leftovers” can offer further confirmation of the abilities of an artist whose personality is by now so well defined that he no longer needs many points of comparison—indeed, he is capable of becoming a benchmark in his own right, with his unmatched, delicate, lively and eclectic style.

A few months after The Avalanche—rounding out, with the release of more than sixty tracks, a year that otherwise saw no proper album come out—comes the collection, in a hefty box set, of the mini-albums Stevens is in the habit of recording on the spur of the moment for the Christmas holidays, with contributions from various musicians as well as friends and occasional housemates. The 2006 edition of his Songs For Christmas is in fact bundled together with the official reissue of the four previous volumes, accompanied by all sorts of extras, such as stickers, sheet music, lyrics, comics, photographs, as well as a video and a 42-page booklet containing an original essay by American novelist Rick Moody, along with two essays and a short story that find him trying his hand at writing too.

The initially homemade nature of these mini-albums is evident in the first two volumes, “Noel” and “Hark!”, in which one can sense the compositional immediacy inherent to songs written for the occasion, along with the authentic, genuine, unpretentious setting surrounding radiant little tunes and brief instrumental fragments recorded live and performed on fairly bare-bones instruments, from banjo and guitar to toy pianos. Already on “Hark!”, however, the variety of expressive registers for which Stevens is now renowned begins to fully emerge: within the space of just a few songs, he moves with ease from dreamy arrangements awash in the inevitable profusion of little bells, to the soft hush that gently envelops “Come Thou Fount Of Every Blessing”, to the airy intimacy of “What Child Is This Anyway?”, the only track to feature electric touches, which smudge the mix here and there before dissolving into a muffled finale embellished by piano notes. The eight songs gathered on “Ding! Dong!”, written in the short span between the albums “Michigan” and “Seven Swans” and artistically very close to both, then alternate between delicate reflection and hints of tradition on one hand, and the unbridled polyphony of “Come On! Let’s Boogey To The Elf Dance!” and the angelic orchestral sweep of “O Holy Night” on the other.

On the fourth mini-album, “Joy”, recorded in late 2005, melody takes the upper hand: aside from the choruses and the unexpected indie-rock flourishes of “Hey Guys! It’s Christmas Time!”, the remaining songs are all very straightforward, carried by slender, delicate harmonic structures that address the less bombastic themes of Christmas with sobriety. Once again, Sufjan Stevens, setting aside for a moment his taste for extravagant sonic grandeur, manages to express himself superbly through the simplicity of songs built on little more than voice and guitar—joined only by a few other “Christmassy” elements—inspired as much by religious subjects as by gentle, universal and personal reflections that, with soft introspection, beautifully capture the subtle sadness inevitably lurking beneath the holiday season.

The final volume, recorded in June 2006, is the most substantial of the eleven-track set, and probably the most significant in terms of artistic continuity with his most recent work. Once again, Stevens doesn’t forgo the element of surprise, constantly reshaping his mode of expression: aside from three short piano interludes—among them a thirty-six-second fragment of the age-old “Jingle Bells”—“Peace” stands out from the earlier mini-albums for the richness and complexity of its sound. After the placid instrumental “Once in Royal David’s City”, a quirky orchestral quality surfaces on “Get Behind Me, Santa!”, which, amid lopsided little organs, horns, and a dash of homespun retro charm with a vaguely psychedelic effect, recurs across several tracks (“Christmas In July”, “Jupiter Winter”, “Star Of Wonder”), before fading into the oblique final stretch of “The Winter Solstice”. Here too there's no shortage of composed intimacy, hovering over the piano on the serene “Holy, Holy, Holy” and the first part of “Sister Winter”, whose string arrangement nonetheless builds into a restrained crescendo marked by electric flourishes, horns and a modest variety of other effects.

Although it's often said that these songs offer useful clues for defining the sensibility of the post-Illinois Sufjan Stevens, what actually seems to emerge from them are hints of yet another evolution that, without ever losing sight of the artist's fundamental coordinates, feeds his more markedly orchestral tendencies, while also steering his multi-instrumental bent toward a recovery of analog, liquid and more than a little disorienting sounds.

Taken as a whole, the lavish box set Songs For Christmas comes across as something more than a collection for diehard fans or a way to keep the artist's presence alive between proper releases, since an artist of Sufjan Stevens's caliber manages to dispel any suspicion of purely commercial intent behind such an operation by nothing more than his usual skill at reworking, with disarming wisdom and simplicity, a range of different styles and modes of expression, coming across as equally credible in all of them. Moreover, the Christmas theme itself—admittedly rather limiting—is developed in a way that's anything but banal, without easily caving to the saccharine excesses of trite “good feelings” and induced, surface-level happiness; if anything, among the most expressive tracks are precisely the more reflective ones, and those that, with a mix of tenderness and irony, tell the other side of Christmas. Its bittersweet flavor, lighthearted but not overly so, also makes it suitable for listening on other occasions, with the possible exception of the traditionally Christmassy tracks, even though the sheer scale of the collection carries with it the sole risk of overindulgence—a risk Sufjan Stevens is well aware of running with so many closely spaced releases, but one that, in the end, never proves predictable or repetitive.

Rounding out—surprisingly—four years devoid of any genuinely new releases, in late 2009 Sufjan Stevens put out, almost simultaneously, two more works that find him pursuing the orchestral, chamber-music approach already evident on Illinois. Both are one-off albums that testify to nothing more than a tendency already expressed in the past, now channeled into experiments with sound and instrumentation, but not yet mature enough to support fully fledged songs.

The first of these experiments is a straightforward rearrangement of Enjoy Your Rabbit, entrusted to the string quartet Osso, who translate the sonic trinkets of that eccentric work by swapping digital glitches for creaking bowed strings and synthetic rhythms for simple taps on the body of the cello. A work not entirely without interest, but ultimately no more than a divertissement and an exercise in style, Run Rabbit Run demonstrates the versatility of compositions that, truth be told, weren't even particularly successful at the time, to which the new sonic context lends an unexpected grace and breadth—although all too often the tracks remain devoid of genuine sparks, coming across over time as rather pretentiously tedious.

The second experiment instead consists of the soundtrack to a themed documentary, devoted to the troubled history and countless social contradictions running through the urban expressway of the same name, which connects Brooklyn to Queens, and was commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Part of a broader musical project, the musical side of The BQE showcases Stevens's taste for orchestral grandeur, finding varied expression in instrumental outpourings that, with strings and brass to the fore and the piano's ever-graceful notes, take shape as though they were pieces meant for a ballet—enchanted fragments plucked from the soundtrack of a Disney cartoon.

Like every work bearing the touch of the Michigan maverick, The BQE too is shaped considerably by his multifaceted artistic personality; however, the particular purpose of the compositions, and the way they present themselves as hybrids awaiting further development, leads one to regard it as nothing more than the fruit of an improvisation not without points of interest, looking ahead to its future complement through the brilliant songwriting that could surely draw further nourishment from these skillfully orchestrated sketches.

The hope is that an album of actual songs won't be long in coming.

And indeed, in the middle of August 2010, with no advance warning whatsoever, Stevens resurfaces with something new, in the form of a digital EP (so to speak, given its hour-long runtime), which arrives just a few weeks ahead of his true return to full-length album form.

All Delighted People is made up for almost two-thirds by two slightly different versions of the title track and a closing track of over seventeen minutes, in which Stevens gives free rein to his orchestral and musical-theatre leanings, in an incredible kaleidoscope of passages and transformations; as if to counterbalance the grandiosity of these long tracks, alongside them sit five shorter songs of stark, intimate acoustic songwriting, yet never predictable nor lacking in digressions.

The melodies are in fact never banal, nor as linear as they might appear, the introspection of the mood is far from upbeat, and the nocturnal sweetness of piano and acoustic notes settles into the loose gait of a warm picking style and austere piano cadences, without however giving up the occasional analog-tinged digression.

Sealing this odd but idea-packed release is finally the monumental "Djohariah" (a tender dedication to Sufjan's little sister), with a binge of choirs, acid guitar strumming, electronic beats, soul cadences, a profusion of horns and graceful melodies that serve as a twelve-minute intro to the song proper, a sort of more concise, intimate slight return, deliberately diminuendo, following the symphonic rock-opera openings of the long initial section. All this and more, in a so-called EP, confirms the richness of the melodic turns and arrangement solutions Stevens offers with a naturalness and a knack for shapeshifting that only confirm his genius.

The album that follows the EP just a few weeks later, The Age Of Adz, is something unpredictable and disorienting. In two words, it could be called an electronic and schizophrenic record. Electronic is the sonic framework, which is its most obvious novelty: a vintage, in a sense "poor", electronics, almost entirely centred on analog drum machines and synths, dredged up from the days of Enjoy Your Rabbit and now elevated to the substantial protagonist of songs that, on closer inspection, don't actually diverge all that much from the orchestral vein and the penchant for musical theatre inherent to Stevens's eclectic artistic profile.

Schizophrenic is the apparent break with previous records and the frantic tendency toward shapeshifting, aptly depicted by the title and the artwork, both borrowed from the hallucinated visions of mythological monsters, aliens and apocalyptic prophecies found in the works of Royal Robertson, a painter who died in 1997 and who indeed suffered from severe personality disorders.

Analog keyboards, psychedelic touches and electronic lashes, at times harsh and distorted, are in fact the prevailing, if fundamental, accessory elements of frameworks that otherwise reveal a certain continuity with the past, at least in terms of songwriting and arrangement choices. It's true that little acoustic guitars and muffled atmospheres (now liquid and disorienting) remain confined to very brief sketches; however, a large part of the work proves intent on combining unbridled choral power and orchestral magnificence with new and unpredictable ventures. On one hand, probing mainstream electronic pop between the 80s and early 90s and even certain dance music from the same era or slightly earlier and, on the other, using acid incursions, broken rhythms and recurring deconstructions to derail pieces that in many cases could easily have worn more conventional clothes.

Distortions, detonations and acid splashes envelop the seraphic flow of melodies and vocals, merging with the orchestral emphasis, resurfacing in the form of horns and Rileyan arrangements, and a myriad of ingredients, sublimated over the course of the mad twenty-five-and-a-half minutes of the closing "Impossible Soul", an interstellar kaleidoscope that sums up (so to speak) cosmic overdrives of old psychedelia, unprecedented black tones, ambient interludes of screeching guitars and dusty keyboards, pianistic iterations, obsessive and free choral passages, post-futurist twists, surreal fragmentations and 80s citations in the form of unbridled dance-pop steps and a sort of analog vintage-videogame lounge.

Although, from a strictly songwriting standpoint, the impression remains that these aren't the most fitting sonic clothes for Stevens's songs, it would be excessively limiting to reduce it to a mere matter of form, as well as pointless to wonder how those same songs might have sounded if arranged as on Illinois. But such a brilliant – and slightly mad – artist could hardly settle for easy ventures; in this sense, the "spatial", arty, apocalyptic and (retro-)futurist approach of The Age Of Adz is undoubtedly a bold artistic choice and a potentially very significant step toward a new declination of orchestral (folk-?)pop for the third millennium. Unless, sooner or later, it turns out that, true to his nature, good old Sufjan was only joking.

Five years later, the return of Sufjan the eclectic once again marks a radical change of direction, in which the game of shapeshifting gives way to the flesh and blood of experience.

No baroque architectures, no disorienting gimmicks. On Carrie & Lowell, Stevens isn't interested in surprising anyone. A crystalline chase of arpeggios is enough to accompany the fragility of a voice more defenseless than ever. A voice ready to split in two as in a mirror's reflection, suddenly turning solitude into chorus. You can hear it from the very first notes of "Death With Dignity", with a caress of keyboards peeking in only to graze the contours of the melody. The fabric is the same as the "John Wayne Gacy Jr." of old: the vein of Stevens's most intimate songwriting.

And yet there is an unprecedented nakedness, for him, in the rarefied atmospheres of Carrie & Lowell. The secret is already contained in the album's title, in the dedication to Carrie and Lowell, Stevens's mother and stepfather. A mother who abandoned him as a child and whom an incurable illness snatched away before he could truly come to terms with the scars of that separation. Looking her death in the face means looking in the face the void left inside himself, means looking in the face his entire desperate need for meaning.

The songs become sighs to be captured before they vanish, even through phone voice memos, in a hotel room somewhere in America. The essence lies in the nuances, in the acoustic brushstrokes that fade into a vapour of keyboards at the end of "Drawn To The Blood", in the unexpected hovering, within the folds of "Should Have Known Better", of synthetic pulses that seem dreamed up by Tunng. Like a single, long elegy, right up to the solemn gospel stride with which "Blue Bucket Of Gold" marks the album's epilogue. Every breath along the way carries the same density as the Eels of "Electro-Shock Blues" or the Bon Iver of "For Emma, Forever Ago": natural touchstones for a record that isn't afraid to rival Illinois in purity of inspiration.

A blanket of keyboards envelops, on "Fourth Of July", the final dialogue on a hospital bed with a breathtaking sense of heartache. "We'll all gonna die", Stevens murmurs. It isn't resignation, it's the exact opposite: it's the awareness from which the most radical question arises, the one about one's own destiny. That destiny which seems to empty out all hope, condemning him to the same spiral of self-destruction as his parents.

But the heart never stops desiring, with all its disordered, impetuous hunger: "I am a man with a heart that offends with its lonely and greedy demands", proclaims "John My Beloved" over the goading of an insistent piano note. And to those who desire, sooner or later, life answers. The smile of a niece stepping into the world is enough: "My brother had a daughter/ The beauty that she brings, illumination". The choral breath that blossoms from the light beat of "Should Have Known Better" lifts regret into a song of rebirth. No use looking back: "Nothing can be changed/ The past is still the past, the bridge to nowhere". Only the here and now matters, the tireless reaffirmation of beauty. Everything is illuminated.

In 2017 came Planetarium, an album born from the collaboration between Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner and James McAlister. The result is a work of continuous reworkings that had been dragging on for years, namely since the Dutch concert hall Muziekgebouw Eindhoven commissioned Muhly to write a pièce to present to the public: that's how the composer – a close associate of Valgeir Sigurðsson and already working with Björk, Bruce Brubaker, Philip Glass, Grizzly Bear, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Ólafur Arnalds and many others – decided to bring in Sufjan Stevens and Bryce Dessner to create a complex and ambitious work. James McAlister, Sufjan's trusted collaborator, joined later, and the work was then divided up as follows: the Detroit songwriter handling vocals and lyrics, McAlister the rhythm section and electronics, Dessner the guitars and composition, and Muhly, naturally, the orchestral and symphonic part, the framework within which the National's composer-member added his compositional sensibility, making the sonic layering more complex.

Once the final piece of the puzzle, McAlister, was brought on board – his contribution of beat and electronics representing the last piece needed to define the project – and once a draft tracklist had been put together, "Planetarium" was first tested out in a live setting, performed band-style with the addition of a string quartet and seven trombones. Flipping their usual modus operandi, Stevens and McAlister later (in 2016, to be exact) brought this live material, along with the arrangements, into the recording studio, connecting Muhly's and Dessner's parts and thus giving birth to Planetarium.

The quality of the production work shows in how seamlessly everything locks together, as on "Jupiter", where the layers of sound grow more complex and are steeped in a dark atmosphere ("Sermon of death says Jupiter is the loneliest planet"), lit up by Sufjan's vocal inserts like a planet standing out against the darkness (“His radiance in the dark/ Mysterious shape or beauty mark/ As if it were Minerva”). Here, though, a suspicion starts to take hold that slightly weighs Planetarium down, namely a sporadic centrality of Sufjan that at times makes the album feel like a follow-up to The Age Of Adz, even in terms of a sound balanced between symphony and electronics.

At other times, instead, you can hear the influence of composers like Hans-Joachim Roedelius or Popol Vuh, and therefore of kosmische musik (how could it be otherwise): that's the case with the epic "Mars", with its long trail of horns and percussion and those apocalyptic, Sufjan Stevens-esque themes that echo humanity's current state (“In the future/ There will only be war/ The vanity outside/ And after all the devastation/ Will we see the Lord”).

But there's also room for Brian Eno-style ambient, which reigns above all in the interludes ("Black Energy", "Halley's Comet" – which passes by as quickly as the comet itself – "Sun", "Tides", "In The Begininng"). And there's even a moment where Sufjan Stevens's sensibility crosses paths with the Björk of "Vespertine": that's the case with "Moon", built around two Native American myths about a rabbit's journey to the Moon – myths that chase each other as an allegory running through the whole record, underscored by the lofty references to Greco-Roman culture scattered throughout the lyrics (the Taurobolium, Venus called Pandemos, and so on).

And if on one hand there's a truly unwarranted excess of autotune bordering on abuse ("Mars", "Jupiter", "Saturn", "Earth": too much), on the other hand Sufjan's voice steps outside its usual whispered shores, warping to reach paroxysmal heights, as on the (radio-ready!) "Saturn" or in the deep, dynamic falsetto of the closing "Mercury", where once again Dessner's remarkable guitar work stands out, in a piano ballad that unfolds as a graceful gallop, a dressage, bringing this journey through the cosmos to a close.

A journey that lacks the unpredictability of a jam session, despite the source material having been born live, and that never overflows despite having its epic moments: every element is calibrated with precision, slotted into place and balanced with scrupulous care. This avoids the effect of a baroque odyssey, but at times risks an excessive flattening-out of the four artists' contributions.

In 2020 comes Aporia, an album made in collaboration with his stepfather Lowell Brams – yes, that very Lowell of the much-celebrated Carrie & Lowell. The record presents itself right away as an unusual duet, to be precise their second get-together after the glories of "Music For Insomnia" on Library Catalogue in 2009, an LP released, naturally, on the label the two of them founded together, the venerable Asthmatic Kitty, and created, no less, with the collaboration of Bryce Dessner of The National.

Formalities aside, the album was recorded over the course of recent years, in their spare time, to be precise – a detail Sufjan Stevens himself pointed out when presenting the record. The work therefore carries no underlying ambition. No pretension to lead anywhere, other than an attempt to merge the two musicians' imaginations, drawing on their shared passion for early-80s new age (!).

Sure, the stated influences are Boards Of Canada and the like, so posthumous epic, even Enya, all the way to the soundtrack of Vangelis's "Blade Runner" – the true guiding light of the whole affair, alongside the pastoral hypnosis of Joanna Brouk and the celebrated duo Peter Mergener/Michael Weisser in the masterpiece "Beam-Scape": progressive electronic music that fell from the Teutonic sky in 1984 and was incredibly forgotten.

Listening through its various moments, it's precisely in the seemingly aimless digressions of the earliest "Western" new age that the album's real parallels lie hidden, as it winds continuously between a slow cosmic ascent in the vein of Tangerine Dream ("What It Takes") and an IDM pulse alternating with an epic keyboard that is nonetheless spiritually kitsch, with its solo suspended between the pauses ("Disinheritance"). Meanwhile, something halfway between the familiar, selective Aphex and Ciani's "The Velocity Of Love" calms waters that, truth be told, were never particularly choppy to begin with, before the second attempt at sidereal ascent gains "altitude" – reaching, however, rather low peaks, weighed down by cloying subdivisions and flimsy little melodic turns. In short: "Agathon" will appeal to newcomers – to those who, for one reason or another, haven't yet dug into progressive electronic music from the turn of the 80s into the 90s.

Between a mini synth trip, a timid reverb and the odd bit of background noise framing the usual flickers of anesthetic loop ("Afterworld Alliance"), things proceed with great difficulty. At the heart of the record, instead, lies that urge to create "noise" – certainly an overused one by now, but one that here and there shows faint cracks of light, with the inevitable celestial keyboard backlighting the "tempo" ("For Raymond Scott", "Matronymic").

By the end nothing has changed, and the feeling remains that of standing before a botched improvisation. A puzzle of clashing experiments that, thankfully, add nothing to the tally of America's "indie" star.

Summing up, there's nothing left to do but look the other way and wait for Stevens's hoped-for return to songwriting.

A return that didn't take long, heralded in July 2020 by "America", a track Stevens had kept in a drawer since the days of Carrie & Lowell. At first it's a moan taking shape through echoes of synthetic pulses. The panting of breaths, the unmistakable spleen of the keyboards. Then, though, it morphs into something completely different: a cosmic gallop that scatters into a fog of ectoplasm.

The new album, The Ascension, picks up from there. Stevens decides to flip the perspective: from inward to outward, from introspection to reality. "I don't want to write any more songs about my mother's death. I want to write songs that pass judgment on the world."

Thanks in part to his move from Brooklyn to the Catskill Mountains, Stevens trades banjo and guitar for synthesizers and drum machines: solipsistic electronics, somewhat like the days of The Age Of Adz. But with one fundamental difference: if ten years earlier Stevens seemed to be dreaming of some impossible electro symphony, now he's searching for his own personal path to pop.

What is “Video Game”, after all, if not an exercise in writing the perfect pop song? The pronounced beat, the sinuous melody, the glimmer of keyboards redolent of Eighties retro-futurism à la “Stranger Things”… Stevens turns it into a kind of invective against the tyranny of the like (“I don't wanna be the center of the universe”), only to then hand the video over to a TikTok star like Jalaiah Harmon: “a dance video about not wanting to be the star of a dance video”, in his own words.

Then again, pop means simplification. And that's exactly what Stevens is aiming for, to talk about the present around him: the immediacy of the slogan, the force of the proclamation. “Everyday sayings and phrases, but ones that for me carry a much greater echo and wisdom”. He can even declare, without embarrassment, that love is the answer, over the strains of a romantic ballad like “Tell Me You Love Me”. Despite its length and unevenness, The Ascension ends up feeling sharper than The Age Of Adz precisely because of its desire to say things directly.

Stevens says he drew inspiration from the sound of Janet Jackson's “Rhythm Nation”, Janet Jackson. Perhaps, for a comparable historical period, this time around he owes more to the Eighties/Nineties Peter Gabriel. Between the incantatory “Die Happy” (half mysticism, half dancefloor) and the kaleidoscopic schizophrenia of “Ursa Major”, the only opening toward folk confession comes at the close, with a return to the more intimate hues of the title track. This at least partly redeems some overly muddled passages in the record's middle stretch.

Sufjan looks around, and what he sees is, above all, fear: “The fear of life/ That seeks to bring despair within”, he sings over the soft groove of “Run Away With Me”. The fear of someone trapped by loneliness, resentment, distrust. And alongside the fear, the desire to find some form of communion with others again: “A new communion/ With a paradise that brings/ The truth of light within”.

In this, we are no different from those who came before us: since the dawn of time we have wrestled with the great mystery of otherness. Back along the spiral of history, the indietronica of “Gilgamesh” reaches all the way back to the epic of the land between the two rivers: once upon a time there was a hero who discovered friendship by wrestling with his nemesis; once upon a time there was a hero who discovered mortality by gathering his friend's last breath. “Oh, my heart receives you now/ With arms full of harvest”. Born into estrangement, yet always made for brotherhood. The American dream, the real one, is nothing other than this.

An apparently incidental album, A Beginner's Mind marks Sufjan Stevens's return to the elegiac folk-pop of Carrie & Lowell. Joining him on this venture is Angelo De Augustine, co-author of a stimulating and unusual project.

Indeed, the two musicians' new album is a genuine creative challenge, drawing inspiration chiefly from Zen Buddhism and the I Ching, as well as surrealist suggestions lifted from cinema.

Conceived during a month spent at a friend's house in New York, A Beginner's Mind (2021) is a precious little trove containing fourteen ballads with folk/lo-fi coordinates and a meditative, reassuring tone, which only conceptually embrace the themes of the films that inspired their lyrics, while remaining musically faithful to that writing style typical of Sufjan and Angelo – emotionally sticky, immediate and simple, even when it conceals finely wrought, subtly more experimental ideas.

Amid more or less explicit or declared references, the kaleidoscopic, familiar sequences of arpeggios and dreamlike vocal whispers shape a striking modernization of Simon & Garfunkel-style folk-pop (starting with “Reach Out”, inspired by Wim Wenders's “Wings of Desire”), even if Angelo and Sufjan prefer a more mournful approach à la Elliott Smith (“Lady Macbeth In Chains”) over melodic exuberance. Also intriguing is the two authors' particular fascination with serial killers and horror movies: not only George Romero's zombies, a source of inspiration for the restless, intricate “You Give Death A Bad Name”, or one of the most famous cult films, John Carpenter's The Thing, which lends itself to the heartfelt, serene piano ballad “(This Is) The Thing”, but even the controversial “Hellraiser III”, which the two musicians reinterpret through the dreamy, enigmatic sounds of “The Pillar Of Souls”.

A Beginner's Mind is a particularly fertile, inspired album. A track like “Lady Macbeth In Chains” (inspired by the film “All About Eve”) is one of the most powerful ideas not just on the record, but in the two authors' entire careers, a sun-drenched acoustic crescendo backed by a velvety bed of percussion and interwoven vocals. “Back To Oz” goes even further, with major chords and tambourines in full swing, crowned with delicious emphasis by a jangle-pop and psych-folk sensibility.

It then falls to the rarefied title track and the mellow surf-folk of “Olympus” to set the stage for the album's two most surprising pieces. For “Cimmerian Shade”, De Augustine brings out his finest psych-folk touches, while Stevens unveils one of the project's most powerful lyrics, blending Zen references, American mythology and dystopias of sexual identity that together sum up the unease of an America caught in continual cultural unraveling (the film is “The Silence of the Lambs”). Even more unsettling, despite its ethereal sonic backdrop, is “Lacrimae”, a bittersweet delight that for a moment brushes against the magic of cinematic imagery, a visionary psychedelic ballad about sadness and redemption, the final piece of an album that adds further small delights to the two musicians' already respectable body of work.

In 2023, Reflections was released as a standalone work, the sixth collaboration with director and theatrical choreographer Justin Peck, whose synergy with Stevens had already produced The Decalogue. The soundtrack to the eponymous show commissioned and performed by Houston Ballet in 2019, the work is Stevens's first score for two pianos, entrusted to the virtuoso performances of Timo Andres (previously involved precisely for “The Decalogue”) and Conor Hanick. As the composer himself has stated, the pieces bear the influence of a wide range of authors and styles, assembled without any real overarching vision – an approach clearly audible across the sequence of the seven tracks.

Classicism and twentieth-century avant-garde currents intertwine in a kind of pianistic patchwork built, especially in the first part of the work, on torrential phrasing and lively counterpoint, percussive drive and dissonant sections that highlight the two performers' skill. There's a constant pursuit of tension, a chasing after a climax that then goes unfulfilled, a development that feels unclear and unconvincing. What works better are the more relaxed compositions, where the interplay loses its frenzy and friction, allowing a melancholy romanticism to emerge. “Mnemosyne” and the brief “Reflexion” are, in this sense, the best moments of an album that, taken out of its context, doesn't stand as an essential chapter in an otherwise brilliant career, but one marked here and there by minor, if not negligible, moments.

Eight years after Carrie & Lowell, with Javelin Stevens returns to the essential, to his most minimal and exposed side. Despite all the digressions, experiments and assorted collaborations he's taken on, deep down all expectations were pointing to this very moment. And while the urgent sense of necessity that animated Carrie & Lowell is probably unrepeatable, Javelin manages to achieve an expressive maturity in which the various dimensions of Sufjan's multiverse find their best reconciliation.

Proof of this comes right from the incipit of "Goodbye Evergreen", which blossoms from a sigh over piano notes, only to explode after barely a minute into a whirl of synths and synthetic percussion worthy of The Age Of Adz or The Ascension. Once again, the starting point is the precariousness of life: Stevens bids a final farewell to his partner, Evans Richardson IV, whose passing is a wound that runs through the entire record. "Everything heaven-sent/ Must burn out in the end", he whispers, balanced on that same ridge between love and loss where all the drama of Carrie & Lowell once played out.

The songs on Javelin unfold following the same blueprint, growing from the tremor of an arpeggio into a choral progression, before reaching their climax through a kind of ecstatic illumination. The airiness of the sound, from the festive spirit of "A Running Start" to the devotional breath of "Genuflecting Ghost", is entirely the product of Stevens' home-studio work, relying only on the accompaniment of a group of female voices (among them singer-songwriter Hannah Cohen stands out). The sole exception is the guitar of Bryce Dessner of The National on "Shit Talk", the most sprawling episode on an album that otherwise stays deliberately concise.

The courage to appear fragile is the strength of these songs, the mark of their authenticity. "I know very well that I've often been the poster child for pain, loss and loneliness," Stevens admits. Yet that doesn't stop him giving voice to his most defenseless questions too, as in the plea for unconditional love that drives the gentle melody of "Will Anybody Ever Love Me?". "God gave me a pen and a pad of parchment paper. 'Write down what you feel and what you discover,' he told me." And so the diary of a troubled relationship takes shape within the folds of "So You Are Tired" and "Shit Talk", blurring anger and guilt into a single spiral.

It's with "Everything That Rises" that the initiatory journey of Javelin truly gets underway, borrowing its title from a short story by Flannery O'Connor (itself inspired by a quote from theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin). "Can you lift me up to a higher place?/ Forget everything that was before", Stevens implores, his voice's tremor seeming to hang suspended in mid-air. Then the chorus opens up and the ascent takes on a universal horizon: "Everything that rises must converge/ Everything that rises in a word".

The climax arrives like a flash, a vision lasting less than two minutes. A peak experience, as those in the know would call it, an instant before which the meaning of things seems to lay itself bare. "It's a terrible thought to have and hold", announces the title track over a trembling veil of sound: the paradox of a desire that is at once alluring and terrible, because trying to hold something in your hands actually means you've already lost it. "I desperately wanted to possess and retain the true substance of things (the evidence!)"; but, Stevens immediately adds, "the true substance of divinity is ineffable."

A further paradox: just as Javelin takes its first steps out into the world, its author finds himself confined to a wheelchair. "One morning I woke up and I couldn't walk. My hands, my arms and my legs were numb and tingling, and I had no strength, no feeling, no mobility." Guillain-Barré syndrome, the diagnosis reads: an autoimmune disease that attacks the nervous system. Therapy, rehabilitation, a road to recovery still long ahead: and yet, for Stevens, "this whole experience has been a blessing in disguise." Something capable of reawakening hope in humanity and in its capacity for care.

And it's precisely on a note of hope that Javelin closes, with the help of the rustic wisdom of Neil Young: Stevens gleans from the wheat fields of "Harvest" the song of reconciliation with the world found in "There's A World", and makes it his own with the grace and lightness of the "Seven Swans" era. "There's a world you're livin' in/ No one else has your part". The world is out there, with all its weight of possibility.

Contributions by Gabriele Benzing ("Carrie & Lowell", "The Ascension", "Javelin"), Luca Santoro ("Planetarium"), Giuliano Delli Paoli ("Aporia"), Gianfranco Marmoro ("A Beginner's Mind"), Peppe Trotta ("Reflections")

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google