Sufjan Stevens: Suffering and Creatiovity

     Sufjan Stevens was born in 1975 on the first of July in Detroit, Michigan. He went to school at Hope College in Michigan and received his Masters in Fine Arts at the New School in New York. Stevens is a multi-instrumentalist. He plays the banjo, guitar, piano, drums, xylophone, English horn, and the oboe among other instruments. Often, he plays most of the instruments on his records, layering the sounds using multitrack recording.1 Stevens is best known for his records Illinois and Lewis and Carroll as well as his collaborations for music on popular media such as Call Me By Your Name and Sex Education.

Album cover for Illinois (2005); Wikipedia 2

    Stevens treats his songwriting creative process like fiction writing. He tries to show and not tell through his lyricism by utilizing active verbs and dynamic nouns to be as specific as possible. He wants to engage his listener in a narrative, typically one that crescendos both lyrically and instrumentally around points of conflict.3 Stevens claims his writing process is very sporadic, however, he is constantly thinking of melodies. He said in an interview with The Creative Independent, “sometimes I have to really go out of my way to subdue the kind of intonation that’s going on inside of my mind”. Because of this, he typically allots a few hours every day or every few days to work on a creative project, otherwise he gets overwhelmed.4

Sufjan Stevens Photo; Vogue 5

In the same interview, Stevens also commented on the interesting, potentially fabricated, link between great creatives and mental suffering. He once really believed in the idea that if it wasn’t painful, it wasn’t meaningful, that there is a certain agony in the creation of “good” art. Now, he believes differently, that you don’t necessarily have to suffer to create impactful art. “We’ve been conditioned to believe that there’s some kind of relationship between the creative life and dysfunctional mental health, that somehow there’s kind a correlation between the two”. 4 

    Nick Cave talks immensely of suffering in his book Faith, Hope, and Courage. He comments on the universality of suffering and how the loss of a loved one especially can bring you to the absolute peak of suffering, an experience that can have transformative properties in and of itself. Cave hopes his work helps alleviate people of their suffering, “You come to understand that this wayward energy you’ve always had, directed in the right way, can actually help people. That music can draw people out of their suffering, even if it’s just a temporary respite". 6

References:

 1. https://www.sufjanstevens.us/bio.html 

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h52FC_EIw9E 

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois_%28Sufjan_Stevens_album%29 

4 https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/sufjan-stevens-on-songwritin

gcollaboration-and-the-myth-of-the-tortured-artist/ 

5. https://www.vogue.com/article/sufian-stevens-javelin 

6. Cave, Nick and O’Hagan, Sean. 2022. Faith, Hope, and Courage. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.