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" I've been trying to challenge myself to be more explicit. I've always liked punk rock and Sonic Youth. I make that music privately, but I've never released it. "
Sufjan Stevens
Rock
Music
Myself
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" Pop music is so structured, and I'm excited to try and challenge that in my own work. "
Sufjan Stevens
Try
Challenge
Music
" Audacity is central to everything I do. A lot of times I think my work is about just seeing if I can get away with it. "
Sufjan Stevens
Work
Seeing
Everything
" One of my strongest memories is my father playing bongos in the living room in Detroit listening to Motown radio. He was this skinny white bald guy, but he was really moved by blues and Motown and funk. "
Sufjan Stevens
Listening
Memories
Living
" My anxiety level of my own work and what I'm doing and focusing on my art and all of that stuff? That's fundamental. "
Sufjan Stevens
My Own
Anxiety
Art
" I believe that music is a spiritual language. My everyday self is pretty mundane and boring, but when I'm making music it allows for me to communicate a kind of transcendence that I can't communicate otherwise. "
Sufjan Stevens
Music
Spiritual
Me
" It's hard to say if actual places really affect the way you write. "
Sufjan Stevens
Places
Hard
You
" I don't really have a domestic inclination. Even my apartment has a semblance of a storage facility. It's just stacks, there are no bookshelves, just books and piles of stamp collections and weird little sewing and knitting projects. "
Sufjan Stevens
Books
Weird
Storage
" You know, I don't think my music is important, I don't think it's changing the world, I don't think it's art. I just think it's music. It is what it is. "
Sufjan Stevens
Think
Know
Art
" I still feel like I have a lot to learn in the realm of sound experimentation, and I think I would like things to get noisier and weirder and more distressed and more aggressive, but I don't know if that's something that would be suitable for public consumption. "
Sufjan Stevens
Feel
Learn
More
" I think musicians should stay off television generally. "
Sufjan Stevens
Television
Off
Think
" I wouldn't mind being popular in other ways, but not with music. "
Sufjan Stevens
Being
Ways
Popular
" It's traumatic to meditate on the availability of information through the Internet, or the way we perceive the world as a result. People don't experience things totally or viscerally anymore. It's all through representation, be it a record on YouTube or a post on a blog. "
Sufjan Stevens
Information
People
World
" The best fiction is geared towards conflict. We learn most about our characters through tension, when they are put up against insurmountable obstacles. This is true in real life. "
Sufjan Stevens
Life
True
Conflict
" It's hard to reconcile my personal beliefs with an entire institution like the Church or the Republicans. Or with people within those political persuasions who have such different ideologies but confess the same things I confess spiritually. "
Sufjan Stevens
Personal
Church
People
" I come from a folk tradition where you just dance however you feel comfortable. "
Sufjan Stevens
You
Comfortable
Dance
" I am not naturally inclined to history or geography - maybe that's why I like to sing about it, because it helps me remember. "
Sufjan Stevens
History
Remember
Geography
" A musician's attempt to summarize his or her work leads to all this prescriptive chatter, or what I call the 'Modifier's Madness.' A lot of adjectives working overtime. "
Sufjan Stevens
Her
Madness
Call
" My only concern about art collaborations is that I never thought of myself as an Artist. My tax forms say Musician/Songwriter. "
Sufjan Stevens
Art
Thought
Say
" I've read in a couple stories that I was raised Episcopalian, but that's not true. I think that's just people assuming things. In some ways, I wish I was raised Episcopalian. I was kind of raised hodgepodge. "
Sufjan Stevens
Kind
Think
True
" I'd like to do a record that doesn't even reference actual places. Because I think it's kind of an open-ended concept. It doesn't have to be taken so literally. "
Sufjan Stevens
Like
Places
Kind
" I remember Detroit feeling really unsafe, feeling scared a lot. Our house was broken into, our car was stolen, we had to get a watchdog, we would get beat up in the street, I had my bike stolen. There was just a lot of real anarchy on the streets and sidewalks. "
Sufjan Stevens
Bike
Feeling
Remember
" I don't think it's so hard to be commercial and interesting. Look at Prince, or Neil Young. "
Sufjan Stevens
Think
Hard
Interesting
" My music is just about story telling. I don't have much to say, and I'm not trying to change anyone's mind. I'm just singing through conviction about what I love and what I care about, starting with the very small. "
Sufjan Stevens
Change
Love
Mind
" Public school felt like prison - cinderblock walls, fluorescent lights, metal lockers. It was so sterile and unstimulating. "
Sufjan Stevens
School
Prison
Like
" I was sort of born into a Subud cult that has ties to Islam and Indonesia and Middle Eastern spiritualism. My parents were kind of trial-and-error when it came to religion. "
Sufjan Stevens
Parents
Islam
Kind
" I always hated 'O Holy Night.' It's so operatic and overwrought. "
Sufjan Stevens
Hated
Night
Always
" I feel like the Internet needs to be disarmed in some way. There needs to be a philosophical undermining of the Internet. We take it too seriously and too literally. For a reference we go to Wikipedia, which is full of inaccuracies and misinformation. It's kind of beautiful - it's all the product of imagination; it's not reality at all. "
Sufjan Stevens
Imagination
Reality
Feel
" I think I get a lot of ideas from when I was a kid, listening to Casey Kasem's 'American Top 40.' "
Sufjan Stevens
Think
Listening
American
" I'm pretty involved in everything I do, which isn't always efficient and doesn't necessarily make for the more successful product. But I do feel that, in that sense, everything I do has a comprehensiveness to it. "
Sufjan Stevens
Feel
More
Product
" Morals, principles and laws are when faith is reduced to standards and those standards basically just bind us, and we become prejudicial, racist, self-serving when we're guided by these laws... When a developed country uses Christianity in its policies, in government, in maintaining corporate wealth, that's a bastardized rendering of a faith. "
Sufjan Stevens
Faith
Wealth
Government