Sufjan Stevens Quotes - Page 3

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.

My only concern about art collaborations is that I never thought of myself as an Artist. My tax forms say Musician/Songwriter.

I think musicians should stay off television generally. I get asked all the time. Those shows are just promoting insipid comedies. Who watches those shows? And whoever does I don't think my music would speak to those people. I don't even want those people to hear what I'm doing.

We stayed a long, long time, to see you, to meet you, to see you at last.

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.

There's such a magnitude of record taking. It's so exhaustive. Bandwidth and hard drive space are able to accommodate limitless capacities to take a record of anything and everything.

I've been working a lot on figuring out how to sing differently and better. I want to become a better singer. I want to sing out more. I want to me more extroverted, vocally.

I want to throw my voice more, I want to manipulate melody more... I want to be less deliberate and mechanical... I want less melody.

I think a lot of my interest in history now isn't so much in places and names and texts and public figures, but more in examining all the nuances and idiosyncrasies of particular stories of everyday people. And if that doesn't happen, then I usually transplant myself and my own stories to a particular historical event. Which is why you'll see me, the first person pronoun, interacting in a song about Carl Sandburg, or you'll find my [sic] interacting with Saul Bellow. It's sort of a re-rendering of history and making it my own.

The World's Fair was the precursor to theme parks like Disneyworld, and the really sort of cheap, superficial promotional architecture that you see everywhere in the US. I think there's a danger when you start creating a civilisation that isn't meant to last.

There's a sense of urgency in understanding that your body is not really your own. We can control it to a certain extent through habits and good behavior, but there's so much we don't have control of.

It's nice for me to have a ballet as a kind of platform for creativity, because unlike modern dance or contemporary dance or downtown dance, ballet is formalized, and there's something orthodox about it that I like. I like that there's less emphasis on subversion and innovation. I actually think that my musical vernacular or my musical voice is also less inclined toward innovation and subversion. I think I'm a traditionalist.

I'm no longer beholden to the sacredness of the recorded song as some kind of ultimate standard by which every performance of the song is measured. I like to diversify, that there are multiple versions of every song. And the songs incorporate a lot of improvisation, and an element of chance, and I think that's exciting. There's no one true formulation of a song, they have various manifestations depending on the space we're in. I like that.

I felt that there's an obligation when writing a piece about an urban expressway made in the 50s to acknowledge the context, and Robert Moses is sort of an iconic figure in New York, and he influenced the shape of the city more than anyone else before or after him. He was one of the most powerful and influential civic architects in the world, because of how much he transformed the city. He built multiple bridges and highways and parks and recreational spaces, beaches - in the course of a few decades, he completely changed the city

The round-up is an aggressive tradition. I'm trying to objectively be a steward of the tradition and what it means in its choreography.

I think musicians should stay off television generally.