The Ascension Descends on Sufjan Stevens

“I think maybe what I’m coming to terms with on this record is that you can only answer for yourself. That’s where it’s all it begins and ends,” says Stevens. “Yes, we’re all in this together as they say during a pandemic. But we’re also utterly alone. So what does that mean?”

“What gives me hope? Oh God. Diazepam! Lithium!”

-Sufjan Stevens on the current state of the world

The song “Goodbye to all That” on The Ascension is inspired by and named for this very moving essay by Joan Didion. Worth the read.

Sufjan Stevens: The Ascension

The cerebral, ambitious songwriter—whose tracklists once looked like stage directions to a quirky play—now seems intent on speaking directly, sweeping you away with him.

‘I have a sense of urgency’: Sufjan Stevens wakes from the American dream

“In experiencing so much and growing older, I’ve realised there was definitely a naivety to my former self. There was a hopefulness, joyfulness and playfulness to a lot of those early records that’s been slowly receding over the years. It’s hard for me to speak for it because it’s happened so gradually, like watching a tree grow. But you start to lose faith in the structures of society as you get older, and I think that’s coming to the surface now.”

Sufjan Stevens’s Problem With America

New interview with Sufjan about The Ascension out in The Atlantic!

“I’m speaking to you,” Stevens said. “You are the subject of this record. You, the listener.” It’s an intimidating album, and I asked whether he was worried about coming off as didactic or preachy. “I think I’ve earned the right to be didactic and preachy,” he said. “I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and how many songs have I written about my own personal grievances [with] judgment against myself, self-deprecation, and sorrow? I was like, No, I don’t want to write another song about my dead mother. I want to write a song that is casting judgment against the world.”

Sufjan says the foundations of The Ascension are “a call for personal transformation and a refusal to play along with the systems around us.” And its first single stands as “a protest song against the sickness of American culture in particular.”

“America,” the first single from Sufjan’s new album, available now

It’s the first Monday in March, which means it’s Casimir Pulaski Day in Illinois. Here’s a cover.

From 2011: Sufjan and friends sing “Futile Devices” live on WNYC.

Enjoy Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, and Bryce Dessner covering “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in Paris in 2012

Happy new year! Look alive out there in 2022.

Merry Christmas! Here are 100 Sufjan Stevens Christmas songs to keep you company today.

Today was the Winter Solstice in the Northern hemisphere, the shortest period of daylight in the year.

Sufjan Stevens / Angelo De Augustine: A Beginner’s Mind

As much as there is a sense of stillness and a meditative hush, there’s also a grand sweep—Sufjan and Angelo form a choir of two, their eerily similar voices turning harmony into a kind of natural reverb. It’s often difficult to tell which vocalist is which, complicating the vantage point of an album so invested in perspective and individual identity.

Pitchfork gave A Beginner’s Mind a 6.7

Sufjan Stevens and Angelo De Augustine on binging horror movies and their new film-inspired album

In some ways, this project is looking back and almost reevaluating this material. We’re borrowing themes and ideas from it, but doing a kind of revisionist, free associative, tangential experiment with the ideas. I guess because so many of these films are so iconic, we wanted to kind of deconstruct them and then reconstruct them.

Today’s the day! A Beginner’s Mind is out! Here’s the full album stream.