Michigan-born, Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and composer Sufjan Stevens is one of the most acclaimed, ambitious, and influential figures in indie music. Since debuting, in 2000, with the home-recorded collection A Sun Came, Stevens became known for albums of high concept and escalating grandeur. 2001's Know Your Rabbit was an instrumental electronic extrapolation of the Chinese Zodiac.

2003's Michigan and 2005's Illinois were the first two entries in what the artist initially intended to be a series of 50 albums for each state of the union, and, in between, 2004's Seven Swans was an album of folksongs exploring Stevens' relationship to Christianity. His latest LP, 2010's The Age of Adz is his least-conceptual work, but in its mad cacophony of jittery electronic rhythms and towering choral parts, it seems to serve as a self-portrait; a picture of the artist in flux.

Interview: 9 December 2010

You once told me that you didn't think people could get a sense of you as a human-being through your music. Has that changed, now, with The Age of Adz?
"I think so. A lot of my older records are using history and geography and creating settings, and maybe you could extrapolate something from that about me. But this new record is literally about the self. About myself. I do think that all art if artificial, and all music is fiction by its very nature; by the quality of transposing or transcribing for voice, by creating these aural environments that set out to be artificially transcendent and sublime.

But, this record deliberately does away with the pretense of concepts. There isn't really anything to hide behind. They're much more impulsive, and much more interior."

How much was that a choice, and how much was that what just happened?
"I definitely was deliberate about avoiding the conceptual platform. But, it wasn't a choice, really; it wasn't a decision that I made, it just was an end to take. To be more impulsive, to write more personally, from a more psychological perspective. It didn't make it difficult, it just made it a little less artful. For me, it felt a little more like the songs were based on sonic experimentation; they were more impulsive, and haphazard. I purposely didn't allow myself to correct things and shape them into more of a story; I just felt like I wanted to let them be, and leave them as they were. There's something immature about the record. It's very self-centred. There's a weird interior monologue, free associations; this more private, journal-entry, psycho-babble kind of stuff."

Your other albums have often felt, almost, more like novels: these ambitious works exploring overarching themes, extensively researched, playing with history and exploring things on a societal level. This is more like pop music: lyrical free association, songs of opaque meaning, a high level of confession. Playing with the eternal lure of the 'I' throughout.
"I think I wanted to avoid the pretensions of scholarship that my previous records were built on. I tired of the whole pretension of that. I wanted to purposely be more emotive, be more self-centred. Maybe I'm going through a second childhood, or a second adolescence. I feel like there's a kind of weird teenage hormonal aesthetic to a lot of this material, that's almost like I'm having a mid-life crisis. Wanting to do away with the pleasantness of the scholastic. I feel like I've earned it! I invested so much time in becoming such a student of craft —researching, writing, workshopping, refining, developing; experimenting with the very craft of being a writer— that I think I had lost my myself, my instinct. A lot of this record is about re-embracing that, regaining that."

Is it, in many ways, rediscovering the simple pleasures of just creating sound?
"Yeah. I think the music is based on rhythm more than anything before. A lot of the songs are built on beats and rhythm and movement; so, at essence, that is more about instinct. The songs themselves are about sensation, feeling, touch, the body; there's a kind of obsession with romance, that kind of thing. I feel like it's a regression into more kind of primal experience. There's a lot to learn in that. I've always divided those kind of things: there's the mental self, the scholarly self; and then there's instinct, the inner beast waiting to pray on the passions of the world. Now, I see those two sides as being really equally important, and dependent; symbiotic, working together. I feel like I had overdeveloped one side of me."

It seemed like, for a stretch, that you were working incredibly hard on doing everything but making the next album of songs. Is that how it felt to you?
"Well, if so, I'm glad that the world recognised I was at least being busy. I worked on The BQE, and I did the Christmas box-set, and I did a lot of collaborations, and I produced a lot of stuff. I was just being deliberate about not releasing the next album of songs. It was important for me to turn away from my own work, and my own voice, and my own manic self, and to just work on other things. I decided I wasn't going to write or record my own songs for a while. I just wanted to stop. I had so much material that I had already completed, I'd put out so many records, been so prolific for so many years. I think it's really important to honor the seasons. And I don't think that I am always a good steward of the season of dormancy. I think it's important to lie low, to allow things to go fallow. I don't want to go too far using these analogies of seasons and cycles, but I think the world exists in that cyclical pattern for a reason. And, in the creative life, you should honor that as well."

Were there other aborted attempts at making the album, before this?
"Oh yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I was still writing, recording, working. But there was never an attempt to finish anything. Without a deadline to work to, there was never the feeling that I was really honing in on something. The material that I was working on didn't resemble what the record ended up being at all."

Next: "All my music is informed: all the folk music is informed by Bob Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel, all the pop music is informed by Madonna or Prince or Michael Jackson..."