Recent health problems made Sufjan Stevens realise what a frail gift the body is, so he decided to face the music and dance. Those heading to his upcoming Dublin shows can expect a mid-1980s Janet Jackson and Prince vibe, he tells SIOBHÁN KANE
SUFJAN Stevens has always been prolific, but in 2010, the same year that he released his most recent record, The Age of Adz, he faced what he has described as "mysterious and debilitating" health issues that forced him to reconsider everything. The effect of this struggle is almost in the vein of The Very Hungry Caterpillar,the cocoon eventually releasing a butterfly – as recent live performances suggest, the kind that can dance and shimmy in a full celebration of the body, framed by a deeper understanding of how frail that body can be.
“I think so. It was a wake-up call for me, I had always taken health for granted, because I had always been in good shape, but now I see that our bodies are a gift, we need to take care of ourselves, we are finite creatures. My older stuff was preoccupied with narrative, it felt very inward-looking and cerebral, and I never really embodied music that celebrated dance and movement – it felt very alien to me – but this material seems to be cultivated out of a sphere of showmanship.
“I am referencing – aesthetically – mid-1980s stuff like Janet Jackson and Prince, so the show is flashier. I think there is a lot to learn from these people. I don’t think it is just vacuous entertainment. There is substance behind that. I feel a revival and renaissance of my body, and am getting in touch with sensation. It feels very hormonal – like a second adolescence. Maybe it is because I am getting older: I worry about the amount of time I have left, and wonder if I will be able to dance in the future, so I want to take advantage of that ability now.”
There has always been a kind of sensuality to so much of what Stevens does, and though he describes his previous records as more "cerebral", something like 2001's Enjoy Your Rabbitis like a companion piece to The Age of Adz– not necessarily in terms of instrumentation, but sensation.
“Sometimes I think that I am just a sensualist – that my music is about experiencing touch and sensation and being in awe of that kind of sensual experience. I think I also have a kind of obsession with beauty – that garbage can be beautiful, and an urban expressway can be a symbol of beauty, it is just a matter of perception.
“I am always rummaging through old ideas and material, and I don’t necessarily subscribe to a creative succession and a narrative arc to my career. I believe in more of a fullness. My work as a volume that contains many ideas and seasons of my life that are simultaneously churning and moving around. When I wasn’t well I was forced into submission – a debilitating state, and had to really look at my life and work on getting better. It was really unnatural for me, as I am really active and goal-driven, and a lot of my work is about confrontation and conflict and the force of will.”
It seems natural then, that the artwork for The Age of Adzfeatures a piece from Outsider Artist Royal Robinson, whose work was all about "force of will" and ideas of structure versus chaos, confrontation versus passivity, wellness versus madness, fantasy versus reality, providing no easy answers, yet documenting that the struggle exists, at often great personal cost.
“I do believe that if I didn’t have the means of communicating my imagination through my work, I would probably recede into madness. There is a kind of grounding that music creates. It is a form for me to work through my dysfunctions, emotional and mental. I think with Royal, he was functional on some level, but because of his schizophrenia and paranoia, he was cut off from the rest of the world, but was productive and prolific. I sometimes think we are all mentally disabled, in a way, but there are these structures in life that keep us in line, but sometimes we are too formalised and conditioned.
“Just look at children playing alone in their rooms, and the vastness of sounds and characters. They create all these beautiful things with their imagination, and we all have that, it is still in us.”
This childlike acceptance of chaos is present in so much of Stevens's work, especially 2009's Music for Insomnia, which he recorded with his stepfather Lowell Brams (who he also co-founded the Asthmatic Kitty label with) and which explores the beauty in chaos through improvised noise.
“I think that is true. A lot of my music is venturing into the chaos of the body, and the natural world too seems almost built on logic disorder. Even though we are contained within these bodies that are symbols of biological perfection, there is still a madness, a great cacophony of noise within us. Our bodies have a complicated nature. It is so vast a mystery and phenomenon.”
His fascination with nature is also explored in seemingly diverse work such as BQE (which honours that particular New York subway line), his short stories and the beautiful song Lord God Bird(about the Arkansan ivory-billed woodpecker, thought to be extinct), and he immortalises the inherently temporal nature of things, through giving an acute sense of place.
“I was born in Detroit, which is a post- industrial wasteland, and there has been such a levelling of buildings and a flattening of the city that it is kind of returning to nature – the neighbourhoods I grew up in are gone, grown over with grass and trees, and populated with wild birds, and whenever I go back I am always quite shocked by that.
“Here in New York there is no room for that. Nature is controlled and things are cemented and built up, so for me the natural world has become the place of our imagination. It is where we can roam freely and encounter where we really come from. Civilisation is a construction, though I was just in New Zealand and the landscape there is almost supernatural.”
There seems to be a shift from previous patterns in lots of aspects of Stevens’s life, whether through his label’s remit or more adventurous collaborations.
“Asthmatic Kitty is sort of an extended family of friends and musical colleagues. Sometimes that doesn’t make for the best commercial relationships, but it is always an interesting social dynamic, and the people we work with always have a unique voice and vision. For a long time we were mainly about people who wrote great songs, but that has expanded now, and we are also working with people who are doing non-song form and experimental music.
“My collaborations with other people are very important to me as a musician, because I feel very isolated and restricted. I have a limited vocabulary. When I collaborate with people like The National I engage with a whole other method.
“I am just now realising really profound things about my music that I never recognised before. A lot of that has to do with being open to interaction and learning new things. I feel that we are all creative beings, and we all have something to make and produce, and learn from that. There is an imperative there.”
* Sufjan Stevens plays Dublin’s Olympia on May 17 and 18
