Sufjan Stevens

Michigan

Sufjan Stevens was born in Detroit on 1 July 1975. His first name, from an early Muslim figure, was given to him by the founder of Subud, the interfaith spiritual community his parents belonged to. His mother, Carrie, who struggled with depression, schizophrenia and addiction, left when he was about a year old, and he was raised mainly by his father and stepmother, moving to the small town of Alanson in northern Michigan when he was nine. He played recorder at a Waldorf school, oboe at school, taught himself piano by ear from his sister's lessons, and learned guitar at nineteen, the same week he bought a four-track tape recorder.

At Hope College in Holland, Michigan, he played recorder in the folk-rock band Marzuki and banjo with the Danielson Famile, then went to New York for a writing degree at The New School, working as a graphic designer for a publisher. With his stepfather, Lowell Brams, he founded the label Asthmatic Kitty, which released his first album, A Sun Came, in 2000, and the electronic zodiac cycle Enjoy Your Rabbit in 2001.

Fifty states

Michigan (2003) was announced as the first of a project to make an album for each of the fifty states, and it was followed by the hushed, biblical Seven Swans (2004) and then Illinois (2005), a seventy-four-minute pageant of history, local legend and personal memory written as he recorded it in Queens and Brooklyn. It was the best-reviewed album of its year and became one of the defining records of 2000s indie rock; he toured it with a band dressed as cheerleaders, later in butterfly wings. He later admitted the fifty-states idea had been a promotional gimmick, and no third state followed.

Adz, grief and after

He wrote a symphonic film about the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, said he was tired of his voice and the banjo, and after a viral illness affecting his nervous system made The Age of Adz (2010), an electronic, maximal album inspired by the outsider artist Royal Robertson, which reached seven in America. When his mother died in 2012 he responded with Carrie & Lowell (2015), quiet songs about her, his stepfather and childhood summers in Oregon, which many consider his finest work and which shaped a generation of songwriters, Phoebe Bridgers most notably.

Three songs for Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name (2017), including a piano remake of Futile Devices, brought an Oscar nomination for Mystery of Love. The Ascension (2020) returned to electronics; Javelin (2023) was dedicated to his partner Evans Richardson, who had died that April, the first time Stevens spoke publicly about him or his sexuality. The same year he was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome. Justin Peck's dance-theater staging of Illinois, Illinoise, reached Broadway in 2024 and won a Tony for its choreography. He describes himself as a Christian and lives in upstate New York.

On stage

His tours are theatrical: cheerleader costumes for Illinois, wings and butterfly suits in 2006, and a dense light show for The Age of Adz that ended with two shows in Prospect Park. The Carrie & Lowell tour, more than a hundred shows in 2015 and 2016, was staged with home movies shot by his grandfather; its North Charleston concert was released as a free film and album. Chicago, his most performed song, usually closes the show. He has not toured since 2016.

Standing

Illinois was Paste's album of the decade and is in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die; Carrie & Lowell is among The Guardian's best albums of the century. A fan group exists solely to decide whether his songs are gay or just about God, and the Chicago festival All Things Go is named after a lyric of his. He has also written ballets with Justin Peck and a long-running series of Christmas records.