“It all came together in a matter of months. By then he’d spent two years on these new, ‘mean-spirited’ ideas, but it was only once he left the city that he had time to flesh them out. “I thought, That’s it! This is over! New York can be a brutal place to live – it can be inspiring in the right mindset, but after a certain point you realise you can’t sustain it anymore.” He moved upstate to The Catskills, where he had been building a new studio. One day, he came home from a vacation to find his apartment infested with rats. He’d been kicked out of his Brooklyn studio “because the landlord was expanding or renovating or whatever,” and put all of his equipment in storage apart from some keyboards and a drum machine, a restriction that would go on to influence The Ascension’s sound. In his personal life, things were changing too. But this time I think I just needed to embrace it. I can engage in sorrow and self-pity and sadness, but anger was never my calling. I think I felt an obligation as an artist to be hopeful and generous and kind-spirited. Shortly after embracing its tone, he wrote ‘Video Game’, “which is also bitchy and mean-spirited, but I kind of felt empowered by it.” In the past, Stevens says, those sort of songs “weren't really in my lexicon. The rest of The Ascension flowed from ‘America’. I realised, this is just how I feel! And it’s how I’ve been feeling for a very long time."Įventually, as the warning signs gave way to the things they were warning us about - children held in cages, the so-called ‘Muslim ban’, inaction in the face of accelerating climate change, etcetera - he realised it was time to “embrace the tone and persona of that song.” The phrase ‘don’t do to me what you did to America’ was just coming out because it sounded cool, but I thought it was mean-spirited. It was in fact more prophetic than timely he wrote it in 2014, “and then shelved it because I didn’t really understand what it was. “Don’t do to me what you did to America,” he sings over and over like a mantra, his voice distorted with terrific and unearthly power, carried on an overwhelming wave of instrumentation that’s elegiac, psychedelic, beautiful and apocalyptic. Stevens announced his new record in July with the single ‘America’, a song that embodies the sound of that collapse. Isolation and fear, it’s become so crippling here.”
“But anything is better than where we are now, so I’m hopeful about that. I wish we could put ten-year olds in power.” He sighs again, before forcing optimism. I wish that we could rewrite our constitution. I wish we could break it all down and build it all back. “Well the thing’s just so disappointing to me, I wish there could be a revolution. I bring up the upcoming presidential election and he sighs. We have this tendency to mythologise the American identity of the past, but now those mythologies don’t really align with the reality of the situation so people get angry and resentful and fearful.” “Self-absorption? Entitlement? An inflated sense of worth? Inability to change? That’s really tough. When I ask what he considers indelibly American today, he starts laughing. When he released ‘Tonya Harding’, he described her with pride as ‘indelibly American’. She’s just one character in this story of the American consciousness,” he says. “She’s the manifestation of the great American anti-hero. As recently as his 2017 single ‘Tonya Harding’ he drew from that deep American well.
ASCENSION STEVENS POINT CHAL SERIAL
Over the past two decades, he’s intertwined his music with the country’s sprawling mythology, writing delicately crafted and literary songs, populated by UFO enthusiasts and serial killers. I felt like the messages must be clear and coherent, almost editorial.” “No stories, no characters, nothing representational, no metaphor and no self-mythology. “I had to do away with all my previous tropes,” he says of his new album The Ascension.
Its fabric, made up of folk tales and legends, is tattered past the point of restoration. The America that has always informed Sufjan Stevens’ music is mid-collapse.
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