Interviewers describing meeting Sufjan Stevens is one of my favorite things
On the top floor of a desolate building in a dilapidated Brooklyn neighbourhood, a man in paint-splattered shorts and a Space Shuttle baseball cap is playing little runs up and down a piano and trilling, wordlessly, over the top, like a choirboy. (x)
He’s sitting on a blue plastic folding chair in Astoria Soundworks, a huge, anonymous recording facility in a quiet, residential Queens neighborhood. Stevens squirms when he talks, stretching himself out, then bunching up again, seemingly locked in an eternal struggle for comfort. (x)
We are in Stevens’s studio in Williamsburg, and outside, New York sends a blue light into these few small rooms with their wood floors and Oriental rugs. Stevens is wearing high-tops and a red baseball hat bearing the face of Animal from The Muppets. In person he is warm, approachable, startlingly eloquent. (x)
‘Hi, I’m Soof-yann,“ says Stevens unnecessarily as we meet at the door of his Brooklyn studio in mid-March. He looks, I should point out, in rude health, with the kind of upper-body tone and musculature that is unexpected or even excessive in an indie musician. He is smartly turned out, his dark hair tightly cropped. (x)
“I’ve grown up a lot in the past few years,” says the 39-year-old singer/songwriter, sitting in his modest office overlooking the East River on a sunny-yet-frigid day earlier this month. While somber life events and the stark new album certainly back this up, his look today does not; still boyish in a blue beanie, red sneakers, and a bright camouflage jacket, he could comfortably pass for a man 10 years younger. (x)
Sufjan Stevens is wearing two hats. A woolly blue number sits atop his green trucker cap, whose peak he has bent flush with his forehead, the goofy effect belying his 39 years. At one point when describing his sprawling approach to music, he has to stop himself from saying he wears a lot of hats. “I – accessorise a lot,” he says instead, laughing. (x)
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