Sufjan Stevens: There's nothing cutting edge about what I'm trying to...

A musician's attempt to summarize his or her work leads to all this prescriptive chatter, or what I call the Modifier's Madness. A lot of adjectives working overtime.

Sufjan Stevens

adjectives madness musician

All the time we spent in bed, counting miles before we said, fall in love and fall apart, things will end before they start.

Sufjan Stevens

falling-apart falling-in-love bed

I love kissing. If I could kiss all day, I would. I can’t stop thinking about kissing. I like kissing more than sex because there’s no end to it. You can kiss forever. You can kiss yourself into oblivion. You can kiss all over the body. You can kiss yourself to sleep. And when you wake up, you can’t stop thinking about kissing. Dammit, I can’t get anything done because I’m so busy thinking about kissing. Kissing is madness! But it’s absolute paradise, if you can find a good kisser.

Sufjan Stevens

kissing sleep sex

Love is unconditional and incomprehensible. And I believe it's possible to love absent of mutual respect.

Sufjan Stevens

mutual-respect love-is believe

Everyone suffers; life is pain; and death is the final punctuation at the end of that sentence, so deal with it. I really think you can manage pain and suffering by living in fullness and being true to yourself and all those seemingly vapid platitudes.

Sufjan Stevens

pain suffering thinking

Perhaps we have failed as human beings. Perhaps we have embarrassed ourselves to the natural world. We have been rigorous and willful in all the wrong ways. But it doesn't have to be this way. Maybe you don't want to deal with (marching), the permanent marker and poster board. But try something else. Carry someone's groceries. Chat with the custodian in your office building. Donate blood. Live in Rwanda for a year. Write letters to the Department of Buildings. Learn to knit. It is only going to get better from here on out.

Sufjan Stevens

writing blood years

I'm a very self-conscious person, I think we all are, but I'm especially not very comfortable in my body. I always feel really weird and awkward on the street or on the stage. It has nothing to do with circumstances, it's just an ongoing psychological state, like white noise.

Sufjan Stevens

self white thinking

I'm terrified of just being myself because I think it's boring. I know who I really am and I think it's boring.

Sufjan Stevens

just-being boring thinking

There is nothing more incredible and moving and appealing than good music, and it cannot always be reduced to a story, to exposition. It's so much more abstract and brilliant.

Sufjan Stevens

brilliant stories moving

I'm being explicit about really horrifying experiences in my life, but my hope has always been to be responsible as an artist and to avoid indulging in my misery, or to come off as an exhibitionist. I don't want to make the listener complicit in my vulnerable prose poem of depression, I just want to honor the experience. I'm not the victim here, and I'm not seeking other peoples' sympathy. I don't blame my parents, they did the best they could.

Sufjan Stevens

parent artist honor

The Internet is just one big gossip chamber - that's why it's so fascinating and entertaining. It's a fabulous platform for superficial communication.

Sufjan Stevens

fabulous gossip communication

I quickly learned that you don't have to be incarcerated by suffering, and that, in spite of the dysfunctional nature of your family, you are an individual in full possession of your life.

Sufjan Stevens

spite individual suffering

I’ve never known a man who loved me.

Sufjan Stevens

known men

I like residing in abstraction.

Sufjan Stevens

abstraction

When I live, I'll give it all I've got.

Sufjan Stevens

giving

I've always been a visual person, I'm formerly a graphic designer. I've always seen myself as an observer. I like to maintain objectivity and don't get too intimately involved in my subjects.

Sufjan Stevens

graphic designer objectivity

I'm not beholden to the public, and neither are the public beholden to me or my songs. I'm very much of a populist on those terms, I believe that the song is no longer mine anyway. I like to process the dispossession that happens when you play something live. I don't have a clue as to how these songs are going to plan out, whether they're going to be on a record. I don't know yet.

Sufjan Stevens

play song believe

I still describe myself as a Christian, and my love of God and my relationship with God is fundamental, but its manifestations in my life and the practices of it are constantly changing. I find incredible freedom in my faith.

Sufjan Stevens

practice christian fundamentals

Some of my music requires an obsessive-compulsive approach and a real embodiment of excessiveness. So I really have to live in that world of overstimulation. Sometimes I think it's like a drug; more is more, and you can never get enough. The older I get, the more I crave that excessive aesthetic. It's never going to satisfy me.

Sufjan Stevens

drug real thinking

I no longer really have faith in the album anymore. I no longer have faith in the song.

Sufjan Stevens

albums have-faith song

There's nothing cutting edge about what I'm trying to do. I'm not creating a new sound. I'm not like Bjork, who's an alien from another world. I'm of the earth. You could extract any measure of music out of anything I've ever done and you could find its affiliations in music history.