Trivia / Sufjan Stevens

• Approval of God: Inverted; his song "Tonya Harding", an empathetic but honest ode to the ice skater, was met with less-than-warm reception from Harding herself.
• Attention Deficit Creator Disorder: Outside of his career as a solo musician, he has been a member of the alternative/comedy hip-hop group Sisyphus; has written music for the New York City Ballet; has collaborated on a classical music project commissioned by the Dutch concert hall Muziekgebouw Eindhoven; has contributed to the work of (and appeared in concert with) The National; has contributed to movie soundtracks (Round-Up, Call Me by Your Name); and has directed music videos.
• Breakup Breakout: In the late 1990s, Stevens was a member of Marzuki, a college band that enjoyed minor success in Michigan. The band failed to make it big and eventually broke up, but Stevens and bandmate Shannon Stephens (no relation) went on to have successful solo careers.
• Copiously Credited Creator: He has his own label, which he co-founded, and is normally the one writing, recording, engineering and producing his albums (although the exact percentage of his contributions varies from record to record). In addition, he's also served as the art director/graphic designer on some of his album covers, and has directed animated music videos for his label.
• Creator Backlash: Sufjan has been very critical of his performance of "Mystery of Love" at the 2018 Oscars, explaining that he felt completely out of place in the Hollywood awards world.
  "Honestly, one of the most traumatising experiences of my entire life. [The ceremony was] a horrifying Scientology end-of-year prom [representative of] everything I hate about America and popular culture. I didn’t want to have anything to do with that world and that culture. I don’t want to be part of any room full of adults hemming and hawing over plastic trophies."
• Creator Breakdown:
  • The Age of Adz happened as a result of a depression/neural illness that Stevens suffered from, which explains the album's atmosphere of what Stevens described as "hysterical melodrama".
  • Carrie & Lowell was a means for Stevens to cope with his mother's death.
  • Convocations was inspired by Stevens' father Rasjid's passing in September 2020, as well as the anxiety and isolation felt during the COVID-19 quarantine.
  • Javelin was heavily informed by the turbulence surrounding the death of Sufjan's longtime partner, Evans Richardson, in April 2023.
• Creator's Apathy: He has stated in interviews that the commissioned project The B.Q.E. sapped his creative strength and led to a temporary breakdown.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: Until the 2018 vinyl release (which sadly does not include all the extras), Songs for Christmas existed only in digital form or as a deluxe box-set collection (5 discs, 40 pages of liner notes, including guitar tabs and short stories, an animated music video, a poster with a full-page comic strip on the back, and stickers).
  • The soundtrack for The B.Q.E. can either be purchased as a CD / DVD combo pack (including the soundtrack album, the complete film, and a Viewmaster reel) or as a vinyl album (with an accompanying comic book).
• Orphaned Reference: Carrie & Lowell features numerous references to Oregon, as do a number of tracks released in 2017, including the the outtakes from The Greatest Gift: "Exploding Whale" (about a whale carcass detonated in Florence, Oregon), "The Hidden River of My Life" (a reference to Rogue River), "City of Roses", "Wallowa Lake Monster", "Mystery of Love" (which again namedrops Rogue River) and "Tonya Harding" (about the eponymous, Portland-born figure skater). This is because Carrie & Lowell was supposed to be a revival of the Fifty States project tackling Oregon, until Sufjan's co-producer convinced him otherwise.
  • "My Rajneesh," released in 2020 but apparently written alongside the other Carrie & Lowell-era material, also concerns the Oregon-based Rajneeshpuram commune.
  • Several of the unreleased bonus tracks included in certain special editions of Javelin also feature references to Oregon history, and sound similar to his Carrie & Lowell-era recordings too.
• Real Life Writes the Plot:
  • The Age of Adz and Carrie & Lowell were both inspired by real-life episodes in Stevens' life. (See Creator Breakdown, above.)
  • The decision to make The Ascension an electronica album was influenced by the fact that the building where Sufjan rented a studio was under renovation and most of his recording equipment was packed away.
  • Convocations was written as a way of processing both his father's recent death and the COVID-19 lockdown.
• Reclusive Artist: While Sufjan tours, does interviews, and has a modest social media presence, but he tends to be extremely private about his personal life outside of his music, preferring to let the songs speak for themselves. The most public he had ever gone on social media was in the lead-up to Javelin, where in September 2023, he revealed he was on a slow recovery from a sudden diagnosis of Guillain–Barré syndrome from the previous month, and that Javelin was made In Memoriam to his late partner, Evans Richardson, who died in April 2023 (it wasn't even known at the time that they were in such a relationship prior to the announcement, which additionally marked the very first time Sufjan had publicly discussed his oft-debated sexuality).
• Referenced by...:
  • Snow Patrol name-drop him in "Hands Open" (mispronouncing his name in the process):
    Put Sufjan^note pronounced "Suhf-yahn" instead of the correct "Soof-yahn" Stevens on / And we'll play your favorite song
    "Chicago" bursts to life / And your sweet smile remembers you.
  • The Roots used "Redford" (from Michigan) as the lead-in to the instrumental piece concluding their 2011 Concept Album Undun. Redford Stevens, the fictional character at the center of the album's narrative, was also named after both the song and Sufjan.
  • His music has been frequently sampled in hip-hop, e.g. by Social Club Misfits, Kaleb Mitchell, and Asaiah Ziv.
    • Kendrick Lamar sampled "All for Myself" in "Hood Politics".
    • Logic also sampled "All for Myself" in "Life of a Don".
    • Mac Miller sampled "Vesuvius" in "Donald Trump".
    • Chiddy Bang sampled "Chicago" in "All Things Go".
    • Lecrae sampled "Djohariah" in "Can't Stop Me Now".
  • Childish Gambino, going under his DJ alias mcDJ, made an album called Illin-Noise that consisted of several songs from Illinois remixed into beats. He also mentions Stevens in the track "Fire Fly":
    No live shows, 'cause I can't find sponsors
    For the only black kid at a Sufjan concert
  • Mentioned in Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda (the protagonist of the novel is a fan).
  • In You're the Worst, Gretchen stops Sam from investing "in Sufjan Stevens's broth restaurant".
• What Could Have Been:
  • Sufjan reportedly sent his song "Tonya Harding" to the music supervisors of I, Tonya, but they couldn't find a proper way to utilize it in the film.
  • As mentioned above, Carrie & Lowell was at one point conceived as an Oregon-based follow-up to Illinois and Michigan.

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