Words matter. These are the best Sufjan Stevens Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The best fiction is geared towards conflict. We learn most about our characters through tension, when they are put up against insurmountable obstacles. This is true in real life.
I still feel like I have a lot to learn in the realm of sound experimentation, and I think I would like things to get noisier and weirder and more distressed and more aggressive, but I don’t know if that’s something that would be suitable for public consumption.
I wouldn’t mind being popular in other ways, but not with music.
Pop music is so structured, and I’m excited to try and challenge that in my own work.
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.
Every time Jimmy Scott sings, it’s the same but slightly different. I don’t know how he does that or where he gets that from. I think it’s instinct. Nothing he does is by chance; he’s in complete control of what he’s doing. He’s just beautiful and unique.
I think I get a lot of ideas from when I was a kid, listening to Casey Kasem’s ‘American Top 40.’
I’ve been trying to challenge myself to be more explicit. I’ve always liked punk rock and Sonic Youth. I make that music privately, but I’ve never released it.
I remember Detroit feeling really unsafe, feeling scared a lot. Our house was broken into, our car was stolen, we had to get a watchdog, we would get beat up in the street, I had my bike stolen. There was just a lot of real anarchy on the streets and sidewalks.
You know, I don’t think my music is important, I don’t think it’s changing the world, I don’t think it’s art. I just think it’s music. It is what it is.
I don’t think it’s so hard to be commercial and interesting. Look at Prince, or Neil Young.
The spiritual ambiguity growing up made me really latch onto a faith – Protestantism – that was somewhat conventional. Everyone else was rebelling against traditions and institutions, whereas I was rebelling against the upheaval and uncertainty in my family.
I always hated ‘O Holy Night.’ It’s so operatic and overwrought.
The World’s Fair was the precursor to theme parks like Disneyworld, and the really sort of cheap, superficial promotional architecture that you see everywhere in the U.S. I think there’s a danger when you start creating a civilisation that isn’t meant to last.
Audacity is central to everything I do. A lot of times I think my work is about just seeing if I can get away with it.
I was sort of born into a Subud cult that has ties to Islam and Indonesia and Middle Eastern spiritualism. My parents were kind of trial-and-error when it came to religion.
I believe that music is a spiritual language. My everyday self is pretty mundane and boring, but when I’m making music it allows for me to communicate a kind of transcendence that I can’t communicate otherwise.
It’s hard to say if actual places really affect the way you write.
I’m pretty involved in everything I do, which isn’t always efficient and doesn’t necessarily make for the more successful product. But I do feel that, in that sense, everything I do has a comprehensiveness to it.
I love anything by Tchaikovsky. He was the real pop star of his day.
One of my strongest memories is my father playing bongos in the living room in Detroit listening to Motown radio. He was this skinny white bald guy, but he was really moved by blues and Motown and funk.
I don’t really have a domestic inclination. Even my apartment has a semblance of a storage facility. It’s just stacks, there are no bookshelves, just books and piles of stamp collections and weird little sewing and knitting projects.
I am not naturally inclined to history or geography – maybe that’s why I like to sing about it, because it helps me remember.
I’ve read in a couple stories that I was raised Episcopalian, but that’s not true. I think that’s just people assuming things. In some ways, I wish I was raised Episcopalian. I was kind of raised hodgepodge.
Musicians are often asked to answer for an entire culture, or for an entire movement. It’s a process of commodification. It becomes packaged and summarized in a word like ’emo’ or ‘grunge’… or ‘folk music.’ I think that’s just language itself, trying to understand the mysteries of the world.
I find in music there’s a space and a language I can use to express things in ways I can’t describe conversationally.
My music is just about story telling. I don’t have much to say, and I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind. I’m just singing through conviction about what I love and what I care about, starting with the very small.
I come from a folk tradition where you just dance however you feel comfortable.
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.
It’s traumatic to meditate on the availability of information through the Internet, or the way we perceive the world as a result. People don’t experience things totally or viscerally anymore. It’s all through representation, be it a record on YouTube or a post on a blog.