YMMV / Sufjan Stevens

• Applicability: He prefers to leave the interpretation of his songs to the listener.
  "Intention finishes its work once a piece is created. I believe in a very democratic reader-response to art, that everyone has a unique experience and, though they may not always be valuable, or believable, or accurate, they’re all viable."
• Award Snub: Many were unhappy when his song "Mystery of Love" (from Call Me by Your Name) lost the Oscar for Best Original Song to Coco's "Remember Me".
• Breakthrough Hit:
  • "Chicago", which has remained his Signature Song.
  • Though he'd long been a critical favorite with a devoted fanbase, "Mystery of Love"—one of his contributions to the Call Me by Your Name soundtrack—was his first true mainstream success. The song earned him an army of new fans, his highest charting single to date, and an Academy Award nomination with an accompanying Oscars night performance.
• Broken Base:
  • "Which Sufjan album is his best", with nearly every single one of his main releases from Michigan onward inspiring a near equal number of fervent arguments from fans. With critics the competition is mainly between Illinois! and Carrie & Lowell, which are currently tied on Metacritic (with the C&L Live Album actually beating them both by a single point). Javelin was also a massive critical success, and may go on to develop a similar reputation.
  • There's increasingly a divide between fans who love Sufjan primarily for his melancholy Folk and Baroque Pop songs, and those who either don't mind or actively prefer his experimental forays into Electronica, Synth-Pop, Ambient, and other genres (jokingly referred to as "bleep bloop" music). Synth-heavy releases like The Age of Adz and The Ascension are consistently his most controversial among both fans and critics.
  • "Is this song gay or about God?" is often asked by fans as a good-natured joke, acknowledging that both themes are common in Sufjan's music, but there is occasionally some tension between parts of the fanbase who prefer to interpret his songs in a religious light and those more inclined to a homoerotic, and more secular, reading. There can also be a generational/fandom seniority element to this conflict, as Sufjan's older music tended to be more explicitly religious, while his newer material (especially post-Call Me By Your Name) leans more overtly into homoeroticism.
    • The second group is sometimes further subdivided between those who read his body of work as Ambiguously Bi, with romantic songs addressed to both men and women, and those who believe just about everything he writes is about a man unless there's explicit evidence to the contrary.
    • Historically Sufjan has refrained from discussing his sexuality or relationships publicly, rendering Word of God irrelevant on this subject. This changed in 2023, when he publicly dedicated his album Javelin to the memory of his former partner, Evans Richardson.
  • Any mention at all of the Stalker album (see Old Shame on the Trivia tab) in fandom spaces is guaranteed to ignite arguments about its (in)authenticity.
• Catharsis Factor: His songs are a good way to work through loss, grief, melancholy, et al. Special mention goes to Carrie & Lowell: performing the music reportedly helped Stevens get over the self-destructive ways he fell into after his mother's death.
• Even Better Sequel: While Michigan was well-received when it came out, Illinois, with its more grandiose and maximalist sound and its more complex lyrical content, absolutely outdid the earlier album critically, and is in fact the highest-rated album of 2005 on Metacritic.
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: His songs are rife with religious or spiritual undertones, and some are definitely about faith (e.g. everything on Seven Swans); however, there are listeners who will try to put a religious spin on lyrics that are quite clearly about relationships or mental health.
• Fridge Horror:
  • Listeners who aren't familiar with Illinois history and/or don't pay close enough attention to the lyrics may have this kind of reaction when they realize that "John Wayne Gacy, Jr." is a song about a serial killer.
  • On first listen, it's easy to miss that "Drawn to the Blood" is about Domestic Abuse.
• Genius Bonus: Knowledge of American geography, history and literature, and of Greek mythology and Christianity, really enhances the listening experience. Some examples:
  • In "Come on Feel the Illinoise!", "Columbia" refers to the United States (as in, land of Columbus) and to the Chicago World Expo, which was called the Columbia World Fair. "Ancient hieroglyphic" and "South Pacific" refer to Cairo Street and the Japan Pavillion at the Fair, and the song also references many inventions unveiled at the event, from the Ferris Wheel to Cream of Wheat.
  • The "demogorgon" referenced in "Wallowa Lake Monster" is the two-headed prince of darkness — an apt metaphor for someone suffering from bipolar disorder.
  • Off Carrie & Lowell:
    • "Death with Dignity" is titled after the Oregon Death with Dignity Act on physician-assisted suicide.
    • "Blue Bucket of Gold" is titled after a legendary lost gold mine, as a metaphor for a mythical promise of an unattainble treasure (in this case, a mother's love).
    • In "Should Have Known Better":
    • "Rose of Aaron's beard" refers simultaneously to the Oregon town of Roseburg, founded by one Aaron Rose, and to Aaron's Beard, a flower containing chemicals used to manufacture antidepressants.
    • "The breakers in the bar" refers to the waves at the Columbia River Bar.
    • The "Tillamook burn" referenced in "Fourth of July" was a series of forest fires in the first half of the 20th century.
  • There are a number of references to the work of Flannery O’Connor sprinkled throughout the Seven Swans album. "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is titled after and based on an O'Connor short story, "In the Devil's Territory" takes its title from a line in Mystery and Manners, "Size Too Small" contains the phrase "everything rises, going at it all," which could be read as a reference to O'Connor's story "Everything That Rises Must Converge," and the title track has a lot in common thematically with her two novels, The Violent Bear it Away and Wise Blood.
• Growing the Beard: His first two albums — A Sun Came (indie rock) and Enjoy Your Rabbit (electronica) - didn't make much of a splash with either critics or audiences, but his third album, Michigan, finally put him on the map, thanks to its narrative-driven songs, more overt folk influences, and a geographical concept worn proudly on its (album) sleeve.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The autobiographical Carrie & Lowell adds context to some of Stevens's earlier songs; e.g. "Romulus", about a child ashamed of his Missing Mom, can now be assumed to have a Reality Subtext.
  • In "Fourth of July", Sufjan references the "Tillamook burn", a real-life series of Oregon wildfires in the early and mid-20th century. In 2020, the Tillamook forest was once again ravaged by forest fires.
• Ho Yay: Has its own page.
• LGBT Fanbase: He has a rather sizeable one, thanks to the homoerotic content of many of his songs and his own ambiguous sexuality. (Him contributing music for Call Me by Your Name in 2017 didn't hurt, either.) As an article on Jezebel put it:
  "There is a specific queer loneliness in the music of Sufjan Stevens that has made him a central cultural figure to a generation of queer people — cis gay men, especially — with an affinity for melancholy."
  • Suf released the "Love Yourself" single — complete with rainbow album art! — explicitly to coincide with Pride Month 2019 (and donated a portion of the proceeds to organizations that assist LGBTQ youth).
  • In October 2023, Sufjan publicly dedicated his album Javelin to the memory of his former partner, Evans Richardson. This was widely viewed by fans as an official coming-out.
• Memetic Mutation: Just about every aspect of Sufjan's music and persona have been subject to affectionate meme-ing from the fanbase. Popular targets include his uncommon first name, his lengthy Michigan and Illinois-era song titles, his frequent use of the banjo, and his unique blending of Christian spirituality with frank explorations of grief and sexual identity.
  • "a sad song on the world's saddest banjo by sadjan stevens"◊
  • "Is this song gay or just about God?" (The typical answer: yes.)
  • "Is it a video?" has become a popular refrain following the release of the Call Me by Your Name track "Visions of Gideon."
    • Ditto "Oh, to see without my eyes" from "Mystery of Love", which became a bonafide meme even outside the Sufjan fandom due to the song's association with the film.
  • "Sufjan Stevens Invites You to Come Feel Me Nose" (only one of many reworkings of the Illinois cover).
  • There are a lot of photos of Suf wearing several hats at once, which have in turn inspired a lot of memes about him not knowing how to wear a hat or about any person who wears multiple hats being Sufjan.
  • A whole subgenre of Sufjan memes concerns his failure to finish the Fifty States project, to the point that there are even T-shirts for sale demanding he release the remaining 48. Many fans have decided to fill in the gaps by making up their own parody tracklists or even recording new state-based songs.
    • This expands to fans maintaining that Sufjan has actually completed the project with the release of Planetarium (as the Fifty States are all part of the Solar System) or, more appropriately, the track "America".
  • The uncharacteristically danceable "Video Game" inspired a wave of mashup videos featuring various real-life people or characters from other media dancing to the song.
  • Pictures of Sufjan performing at the 2018 Oscars◊, sporting a gaudy hot pink striped blazer with a stern-looking St. Vincent in all black behind him, have seen a similar use to the "Black and Pink Santa Monica Houses" meme.
• More Popular Spin Off: Sufjan started his music career playing various instruments for the folk rock band Marzuki (named after his brother, who was not in the band) in The '90s. The group released two albums and garnered a decent local following in Michigan, with their last release in '98. Sufjan put out his first solo album the next year, and within six years had become a major name in indie music. Meanwhile few people nowadays have ever heard of Marzuki, and those who have tend to find the band via the Sufjan connection anyway.
• Narm:
  • Despite the song's overall tenderness, the couple of lines "Well, this world is a bitch, girl / Don't end up in a ditch, girl" from "Tonya Harding" sound pretty narmy, thanks to Rhyming with Itself, the Precision F-Strike and the uncharacteristic bluntness of the lyrics.
  • The line "You checked your texts while I masturbated" from "All of Me Wants All of You" comes off this way to some listeners, while others like the way it succinctly evokes a relationship with intimacy issues.
  • Even Sufjan can't quite make "Embrace the epic fail / of my exploding whale" sound not-silly as the chorus of an otherwise heartfelt and moving song about life's regrets. (All the more so considering "epic fail" was already pretty dated internet slang by the time the song was released.)
  • Some find the phrase "like a Judas in heat", used twice in "America", to be rather... unusual.
  • While intended to describe actual side effects of the eponymous anxiety medication, it's hard not to chuckle at the verse in "Ativan" when Suf sings, "I shit my pants and wet the bed."
• Narm Charm: Sufjan has made an art of combining deliberately narm-y elements (baroque musical compositions, odd instruments, obsessively rigorous album concepts, intentionally ridiculous song and album titles, elaborate stage costumes...) with his disarmingly sincere — and just plain brilliant — songwriting. The juxtaposition is a big part of his appeal for many fans.
• Never Live It Down: The last official installment of the Fifty States Project was released in 2005, and Sufjan admitted four years later that it was only ever a promotional gimmick. Nevertheless, it's rare that a new Sufjan profile or review doesn't start with a paragraph about the abandoned project, and many non-fans know him primarily as the guy who said he was going to write an album for every state. (As of 2020, Sufjan's publicist actually requests in advance that interviewers don't ask about this.)
• Obscure Popularity: Sufjan has been a critical favorite since the mid-2000s, has at least two albums which are widely considered to be among the best of their respective years/decades, boasts admirers among some of the biggest names in popular music, has played at the Oscars, and has a large and extremely devoted fanbase. Nevertheless, he's far from a household name, and even those who do know of him often only recognize him as the 50 States Project guy (see Never Live It Down) or the artist whose song Timothée Chalamet cries to at the end of Call Me by Your Name. However, he seems to prefer it this way; he's remained on his self-managed record label for his entire career, has expressed disinterest in doing collaborations with big-name stars, and reportedly hated the whole experience of performing at the Oscars.
• Signature Song: "Chicago" and "Mystery of Love" are easily his best-known songs among the general public. Among fans... well, take your pick:
  • From Michigan:
    • "For the Widows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in Ypsilanti"
    • "Romulus"
  • From Seven Swans:
    • "To Be Alone With You"
  • From Illinois:
    • "John Wayne Gacy, Jr."
    • "Chicago"
    • "Casimir Pulaski Day"
    • "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is Out to Get Us!"
  • From The Age of Adz:
    • "Futile Devices"
    • "Vesuvius"
    • "Impossible Soul"
  • From Carrie & Lowell:
    • "Fourth of July"
  • From The Ascension:
    • "The Ascension"
  • From his non-album releases:
    • "Mystery of Love"
    • "Visions of Gideon"
    • "My Rajneesh"
• Song Association: "Chicago" was used in Little Miss Sunshine and was included on the soundtrack.
  • "Chicago" also plays during the Title Sequence in the Ryan Murphy Netflix series The Politician, and in an episode of The Bear (2022).
• Special Effects Failure: In the otherwise well-crafted video for "Sugar", the smoke and fire emanating from the oven are pretty clearly CGI.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Some have not been receptive towards the drastic sound change to electronica exhibited on The Age of Adz and, in later years, The Ascension. In general, his synth-heavy endeavors inspire a lot of backlash from those who either don't know he's been releasing electronic music since before most of his folksy albums came out or do know but would prefer he stick to the acoustic stuff.
• Throw It In!: Ambient noises (like the sound of the air conditioning) can be heard in the background of many of his recordings.

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