Which would make him - holy shit - the Garisson Keillor of the indie-rock set?Īnd there's also a suspicion that without the 50 states project, Stevens just doesn't have that much to say certainly the monotonous nature of Seven Swans and the cluttered Avalanche suggest as much. Sufjan might kind of be doing the opposite - kind of aiming at people with that background but offering them a vision further into it, like kinda valorizing the far reaches of confirmed midwesternness and Christianity, but mostly for an audience that's already run away from that. Indie when I first got to it (89 or so?) usually seemed appropriate to people with suburban and town backgrounds imagining their way out of that - like it addressed them, but to call them somewhere else. And I'm sure there's something interesting going on with a lot of his audience probably having vaguely similar backgrounds, and to what extent the music either serves that or pulls away from it or what. I feel like the second, like the allmusic review, is what makes his work so different from Oberst: You just don't care.įollow-up note: I guess the actual thing that Sufjan's being in writing his songs is actually completely himself - which is to say that the music he writes and the way he writes it precisely fit the background of a person who grew up around church in that part of the Midwest. I'm not going to reread all the lyrics to Illinoise, but I remember them as being basically middle-class America.Īlso, "he'd just be like Myla Goldberg minus depth":ĭo you mean Bea Season Myla? (Cute, overreaching, sometimes moving, sometimes tedious.) Or Wicket's Remedy Myla? (Historically boring, irrelevant, tedious).
(The distinction of course being: a listener from the 3rd world who listens to Sufjan, or me listening to Bob Marley.) Or it is the fault of the performer (here: Sufjan Stevens) who doesn't belong there as well, but leads us to believe he has authenticity. It is either a fault in the listener, who is engaging in a world (here: American 3rd world) in which he doesn't belong. Because so much of the culture we (I) participate in is observatory, if the above quote is condemnation - so much becomes condemned. Which is a great quote, even if I disagree with its relevence to Sufjan. "Sufjan Stevens is the tourguide for the American 3rd world, giving his listeners a pain-free intro to the US underclass." (I get the feeling Sufjan really wouldn't be so great of a writer of fiction, really, but with that we get back into my whole tag about "MFA rock." Meloy from Decemberists has an MFA, so I think we can all expect that in the next decade or so he'll have a novel to sell - and just enough audience and notoriety to sell it pretty effectively.) So you can set that to the best arrangements in the universe, and the most competent and well-crafted songwriting, but for plenty of people it's going to feel like there's something missing.
Like I said, I always thought that was a terrific thing about indie, especially when it allows acts to imagine things people aren't likely to just naturally be.īut if we were to imagine Sufjan as a writer - both in terms of lyrics and style - he would still be a bit of a boring one he'd just be like Myla Goldberg minus depth. (Note that they also share a fixation on history and a tendency to dress up, though the Decemberists are staging storybooks while Sufjan's staging "America.") It comes down to the same differences we put between writers of fiction and musicians: we kind of expect musicians to perform their ideas, to be themselves, whereas its understood that writers don't have to be the thing, just arrange it on a page. That's part of what I meant about this being the end-point of a certain indie tendency - and you can see the same thing operating with other acts serving this audience, like say the Decemberists. That's one of the things the states concept has allowed him to do: it gives him cover to roll out each song as a snapshot or a short story, always observing, historicizing, telling someone else's story. You know, one really obvious thing you'd think more critics would have talked about is that Sufjan is one of a fairly small group of guitar-holding dudes who don't ever write about themselves.