Safety in Stevens

There’s a house party on, and you find yourself there, chatting away to someone
of the opposite sex. There’s music on in the background, your six for seven
beer is going warm and you can’t see your mates anywhere. Still, like I said,
you’re chatting to someone of the opposite sex, so, it’s not all bad. Then the
question comes. It’s fairly standard, ‘Are you a total fucking goon or are you
human?’ but it’s phrased as “So, what music do you like?”

You take a second, and a wee sip of the now mostly saliva beer, and answer,
“Sufjan Stevens”, swallowing down hard your actual taste in Israeli trance, or
Abba, or Christy Moore. Stevens is such an easy answer, for many reasons. He’s
not impossibly obscure, but is hardly mainstream. He’s better than most of his
contemporaries and his music is full of hope, and love and innocence. He shows
that you are caring and socially minded. He is also nearly impossibly good.
Americana, or whatever the buzz word for this type of music: The folk revival in
indie music, has had a big ‘aul impact recently, with several mainstream acts
dipping their oars into the pool. Bruce “the boss” Springsteen released the
Seeger Sessions a while back there (by the by, Seeger himself is not dead, as
yet). Black Rebel Motorcycle Club did the excellent Howl. And let’s not forget
the brilliant if impossibly stretched out American Recordings from Johnny Cash, as
a true American hero dipped into the mainstream to gather gems (although there
should only have been one, or two at the most, released – much too much filler).
The acts quickest identified with this roots and folk style of music are
Devendra Banhart, Mr Stevens and several borderline country singers like
Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams. Older acts, which make this current spike a
revival, rather than an original thing, include Cosby, Still, Nash and Young,
Dylan and perhaps even Simon and Garfunkel. Woody Guthrie and the old
bluesmen and story tellers are the true granddaddies of the genre.

There are some clear hallmarks to it; acoustic guitars are usually there,
stripped back recording methods which give the records a timelessness; and
perhaps mostly importantly a story. The songs have a purpose, they
capture a moment and a feeling of alienation and brutality, of naivety and hope,
and a tremendous hope for the future, but under it all, an appreciation of a
coming tidal wave, of the transience of life and property.

As with the short story, as a formal prose form, so the singer songwriter seems
most at home in the vast open spaces of America. That isn’t to say that only
the Americans do this well. Nick Cave has a mean line in it, with thick and
often lyrically vile songs stomping brutally across the red dust of the
outback. Also in contention is the twirling carnival of noise that Duke Special throws out, although he is getting dangerously close to pop.

But back to Mr Stevens, Sufjan if you will. His best known song ‘Chicago’, is
used in an ad or something, and so people recognise it when you play it, and
comes from the excellent ‘(Come on and feel the) Illinois’ LP. This, along
with ‘Greetings From Michigan, The Great Lake State’, are the start of his planned
fifty concept albums, each one based upon an American state, although he has
waived between joking and sincerity when questioned about it. His sound is a
layering of lo-fi instruments, the banjo to the fore and innovative percussion.
Multiple voices and a willingness to use brass also feature. Lyrical portraits
of people and places and much spirituality fill in the picture.

But perhaps the element that marks Sufjan out so clearly above others
ploughing the same furrow, is his sheer listenablitiy; the feeling of
moreishness, at the end of an album. You’ve gone a journey and seen and met
people, you’ve felt the weather splashing down around you, and you’ve a little
sunburn on your forehead, but you want to go back outside again anyway. You’ve
travelled a little way in a believers boots, seen the vast, endless lakes and
flowers, met the murders and the murdered and unemployed and factories, but
recognise there is more, and want to set out now.

Like the photography of Shelby Lee Adams, William Christenberry and Joel
Sternfeld, Stevens, Banhart and the rest show us glimpses not of America, but
of a particular idea of America. They are no more than snap shots: one mans
view, but in that they have the seeds of some outstanding music.