Soof-yawn blows up

When I saw Sufjan Stevens live last November, I knew he was special. Then his new album came out in late June, and it was really good. (A blog called "Welcome to the Midwest" has several mp3's you can download of a live performance Sufjan did in studio with KCRW, if you want to hear him.) I bought tickets to see him live again, this time in New York City in August.

I kept checking to see if he was getting any good press. But unlike most major bands or musicians, there was no pre-album release hype or marketing.

But Sufjan's album, "Illinois," is blowing up anyway, and the internet is abuzz about him. He is that good. "This very minute, you're witnessing the emergence of the next indie rock star," blogger Matt Dentler crowed on Tuesday.

CMJ Music reports that Sufjan has "reached No. 1 on the CMJ Radio 200 chart and Core Radio Chart with his new album, Illinois (Asthmatic Kitty). For a self-released record (Stevens runs AK), this is an astonishing feat. Illinois has also reached No.1 at Radio 200 Adds and Triple A Adds, and on the retail side of things, it has been the number one seller on the A.I.M.S. chart for two weeks straight."

I'm not totally sure what that means, but it sounds good. Blogger Dentler reports that in Austin, TX, the current U.S. music capital, one of the top music stores has reported "Illinois" as their top-selling album.

But the more dramatic thing I noticed as I read reviews of Sufjan's music was the way his Christian songwriting and truly Christian music is touching people's souls. When I say his music is Christian, I mean it is done so well and is so beautiful and inspiring that it gives glory to God the way musicians should.

I can't say it any better than LA Weekly reviewer Heather Havrilesky.

Listening to these songs, I feel as if my need to worship has been asleep for decades. With his odd kaleidoscope of nostalgia, sweetness, manic joy and regret, Sufjan Stevens has shaken that need awake with his bare hands.

Havrilesky was responding to an absolutely amazing quote from Sufjan.

When asked about the prevalence of a punishing God in his songs, Stevens told Uncut magazine, “Oh no. There’s no element of revenge in the character of God, but there’s definitely an aggressive joy. He’s not chasing you like a stalker, he’s chasing you like a lover chases you. There’s a lot of aggression in that kind of romance. We pursue things out of reverence, out of our need to worship.”

A reader of Dentler's blog put it this way: "This album is rocking my monotonous, shallow world."

Michael Daddino, in his review of "Illinois" for Seattle Weekly, says he "loves the shit out of" Sufjan's idea to make albums about all 50 states, and describes how Sufjan sings about the "megafuckopolis of Chicago." But a paragraph later, Daddino comments on Sufjan's overtly Christian themes. Here comes the mockery...well, maybe not.

"I doubt someone as deeply devout as Stevens can dwell on man and his works for very long without seeing God's presence in them," Daddino says admiringly.

Then Daddino gives a spiritual insight into a song I had wondered about myself, "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out To Get Us!" Here is the most questionable portion of the song.

There on his shoulder my best friend is bit seven times/He runs washing his face in his hands/Oh how I meant to tease him/Oh how I meant no harm/Touching his back with my hand I kiss him/I see the wasp on the length of my arm/We were in love, we were in love/Palisades palisades palisades/I can wait, I can wait/I can't explain the state that I'm in/The state of my heart, he was my best friend.

It's a song ripe for those who want to read homosexuality or homoeroticism into it. But Daddino, amazingly, goes the opposite direction.

"I can't explain the state that I'm in," Stevens sings on gorgeous "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!"—his voice later cracking high and free at every third line above pulses of waltz-time horns and woodwinds that seem to grow and grow. It is tempting to describe this as a story of male-male agape—just touching on the erotic, with mentions of falling asleep in the backseat of a car—between Stevens and his best friend, but Stevens also lets you see right through it as a love story between himself and Jesus, God born human, a man stung and mocked and wrestled with. We may see ourselves as the members of a state or a country. There may be a kind of equality in a state of sin. But we are brought to an even greater unity when we love Jesus, who brings us into the highest relationship with God. Yet, in echoes of the narrator's ecstasy, the chorus is left gasping inarticulately over the "great sights upon this state! Hallelu!/Wonders bright, and rivers, lake." Stevens loves the country in much the same way he loves people: He senses the infinitude of God in both, and it sets him reeling.

Now, Sufjan doesn't like discussing his Christianity. I love his explanations for this.

“It’s one of the reasons I don’t like doing interviews,” he confides. “I lose my sense of identity and meaning and conviction, saying the same things over again. I don’t feel qualified to discuss apologetics every time someone wants me to. I mean, music is transcendent. We write songs to express things that we can’t express by other means.” Expanding on his distaste for the business of promotion, he says, “I wish every interviewer just got one question. But it would have to be really interesting, something we could talk about for twenty minutes. I could just put up the answers to my ten most-asked questions on a website and then devote every interview to a more interesting conversation.” I ask him what he’d like to talk about today, if he could talk about anything. “Ornithology,” he replies immediately. “Here in New York, all we have are pigeons. They’re scavenger birds. When I see a cardinal or a blue jay, it’s really exciting. So I’d like to talk about that, about birds. Pigeons just aren’t very magical.”

That's from Quebec's Terminal City Magazine. And this is from the Boise Weekly.

"It's a little cumbersome talking about sacred things in a public forum because you find yourself speaking for an entire institution or an entire church or an entire industry and I don't think that's my calling or my inclination or my goal," Stevens said. "At this point, I kind of want to talk less about it and just value the things that are important or personal to me and keep those sacred to me."

Meanwhile, the UK music rag NME had nothing but high praise for "Illinois."

The first thing that strikes you about ‘Illinoise’ is that Sufjan’s a brainy little f-----. This is a record so well researched that the guy actually studied early immigration records before writing it.
As well as writing this record, Sufjan also recorded, engineered and produced it. Given that tossing out a half-baked impression of your last album every couple of years is seen as some sort of accepted work-rate these days, such workaholic freakishness should be applauded. And what a sound he’s constructed...
...Sufjan Stevens, then, is the rarest of talents: prolific, intelligent and – most importantly – brimming with heart-wrenching melodies. ‘Illinoise’ might not end up his best record, but it’s his masterpiece so far; a staggering collection of unspeakably precious music.

"'Illinois' contains some of the most beautiful pop you will hear all year long," boasts Billboard.com's music critic, Ron Hart.

Some of the praise is downright over the top. "The songs themselves are grand examples of perfect pop music," writes Ben Salmon for Boise Weekly.

Then there are the odd and interesting facts and tidbits. Blogger Roland Allen says that during Sufjan's July 18 show in Los Angeles, he was so nervous his knees knocked together, and he stood on his tip toes for much of the concert (seen in this picture, taken by Allen at the LA Show).

Sufjan explains to CMJ Music why he wrote an entire song about John Wayne Gacy Jr., a serial killer from Chicago who killed more than 30 young boys over several years during the late 1970's, and buried many of their bodies under his house. I was up until 2 a.m. the first night I bought "Illinois," reading about Gacy. At the end of the song, Sufjan says, "And in my best behavior/I am really just like him/Look beneath the floorboards/For the secrets I have hid."

I had a lot of moral problems with the subject and with the presentation—wondering if I was being irresponsible or exploitive. There's something about him that appeals to me and I think it was the dual personality. There was this social self that was very well liked and was very politically active and very socially active. He befriended neighbors and was a popular clown for kids' parties. Then there was this other side that was a complete monster, and I guess I began to see how that related generally to my themes of identity and progress and capitalism and commerce and America's interest in buttressing itself with this veneer—this kind of advertisement that it was the world's superpower and the ideal sort of capitalist democratic society. And yet within that, there were all kinds of personality disorders and dysfunction and disaster. I don't think it's a mistake that I decided to put the Gacy song after my eight-minute diatribe against commerce and bad art.

And what about his name? Terminal City has the answer to a question that has long plagued me.

“You say it soof-yawn,” he patiently explains. “It’s Persian.” The plot thickens. How did this Midwesterner get a name from the Middle East? “Well, my parents were in this cult at the time, so it was actually the cult leader, Babak, who named everyone’s babies, not them.”

Meanwhile, Rolling Stone seemingly can't believe that a musician who believes in Jesus Christ could actually be both damn smart and damn good, in fact damn better than most other musicians out there. So the perpetually snobby music mag features Sufjan's album on their website and gives it four stars, but in a 583-word review, the single positive thing reviewer Rob Sheffield can say is that one of the songs is "a gorgeous mess."

the most pleasurable music here is the most ambitious -- especially "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!" It builds up repetitive Reich-style instrumental pulses, piano, horns, keyboards and layers of vocal overdubs into a gorgeous mess. "I can't explain the state that I'm in/The state of my heart," Stevens sings, and ultimately that's the state Illinois is really about.

Rolling Stone may have missed the point, but they seem to be the only ones to have done so.