The singer-songwriter reflects on what hes learned about the holidays after releasing 100 Christmas songs.
Snow Jams
Were making our lists and playing them twice.
Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Sufjan Stevenss catalogue feels wild and untamable.
to the boisterous big-band sound of Get Behind Me Santa!
By the time you figured this out, Sufjan was already miles away.
Do you ever feel like a tough artist to follow?
My stuff runs the gamut.
I understand that can be a little confusing and head scratching for the average listener.
Youve released 100 Christmas songs, which is beyond Pentatonix territory, and closer to Trans-Siberian Orchestra territory.
Do you consider yourself a Christmas song catcher?
I think you know more carols than Ive ever heard.Yeah.
Thats 12 years ago now.
Sort of like first thought, best thought.
Except for the one you recorded in June.
You made Christmas in July one summer, right?There was one where I skipped a year.
I think that was whenIllinoiscame out.
I had to catch up.
I cheated that year.
On the second box set, I went back and kind of reproduced a lot of the original stuff.
These were really just gifts to friends and family at the time.
I would just make these little EPs and send them to friends.
They werent necessarily meant to be released publicly.
After the fact, I would put them together in the box sets.
Once I start thinking about the public, thats when packaging comes into play.
Then I have a project.
It gives me something to do.
I start to contextualize it.
I think from a library-science perspective.
These Christmas EPs are an interesting kind of record of history.
I thinkSilver & Goldis a snapshot of that evolution.
I take it all very seriously.
How do you come into contact with so many 18th and 19th century carols?
I smell church upbringing.
Methodist was my second guess.There is experience there with liturgical Christmas music.
Im just kind of a hymnal collector.
I have Presbyterian hymns and Methodist hymns and early music books.
I have a little library.
I would just dip into that archive whenever I was working on EPs.
I like to mix that kind of stuff with more contemporary secular stuff.
I think as the box sets evolve, they get more and more indulged in the secular stuff.
Is that something you work at?I definitely have a religious practice.
I consider myself a Christian, and I love participating in that culture.
This is just my personal practice.
Christmas music gets to the heart of the dichotomy between the sacred and the profane.
You get beautiful traditional hymns about incarnation of Gods son born in a manger surrounded by animals.
Everything from Do You Hear What I Hear?
Baby Its Cold Outside is dirty.
But is it any dirtier than birth in a manger surrounded by animals?
I was really thinking about the word manger the other day.
Its where we get mange, like a mangy dog.
I keep coming back to X-Mas Spirit Catcher.
A child will come whos destined to do great things but also to be tortured.
The orthodoxy of the Christian story of the incarnation of God is that Jesus was created to be murdered.
I think in celebrating that, we have to understand our own mortality.
I think thats what its mostly about.
In fact, I had to stop.
I put a moratorium on it.
I was like,This is getting out of hand, and I need to focus on something else.
Unfortunately, my own pathologies are often an explanation for my work, and the motivation for my work.
Theres no better feeling than moving on to something else.
I think thats the writers dilemma: How deep does this trail go?
Am I willing to follow?
Are you just a lore master bouncing between bouts of intense tunnel vision?
Thats how it plays out for me.
You have to pry yourself away after a while.Its important to have deadlines, of course.
I have to ask if thats what happened with the50 States project.
Did you just kinda realize it demanded superhuman time and focus you didnt have to spare?Yeah.
I feel like my whole music career has been an exercise in calling my own bluff.
I go on all these excursions and I feel theyre indulgent and slightly megalomaniacal in their approach.
Youre an artist, so you understand.
There is a kind of sadomasochism inherent in what we do.
It requires that we completely give ourselves over to the work.
It requires a lot of money, time, resources, and energy.
It isnt necessarily healthy or sustainable.
When you tour on a bus, youre basically sleeping in a coffin.
Thats part of the job.
I dont really get as much out of performing as I think most of my peers do.
Theres something visceral and tactile and emotional that they get out of the live performance.
For some reason, Im not made that way.
I dont find it exciting by default to be onstage in front of people.
I find it awkward and weird and abnormal.
I have to really put a lot of energy and effort into making it exciting and visceral for me.
Does this explain the crafts aspect, thewingson theIllinoistour and theneon and silver suitsatAge of Adzshows?
Thats really exciting, so you have visuals and lights and sound and choreography.
I wanted to talk aboutThe Astral Inter Planet Space Captain Christmas Infinity Voyage.
I think its a gateway into what you were doing with electronic music afterIllinoisthat threw people for a loop.
What was up that year?The title got reduced.
Its just calledChristmas Infinity Voyage.
You wouldnt know that because streaming doesnt allow you to label EPs on box sets for some reason.
That would have been … God, when was that?
I was working onAge of Adzduring that time.
In terms of its aesthetic, its more similar toAdzthan anything else Ive done.
That was the first time I was using drum machines.
Dave Smith launched theProphet 08that year, which was this seminal analog synthesizer that became really popular.
I wanted to do Christmas in space.
There was vocoder on that, right?
Thats when I started to really reacquaint myself with electronic music.
I just had grown tired of it.
Im cool with that.
How did a cover ofAlphabet St.end up onInfinity Voyage?I have no idea.
Obviously, Im a huge fan, and I always wanted to cover a Prince song.
I grew up listening to him.
He informed my aesthetic and my psyche in a lot of ways.
Hes someone whose work juggles the sacred and the profane.
He was a very spiritual person, but his music could be really dirty and sexy.
He found a unified theory.
Hed sell a gospel song like The Cross and a song like Dirty Mind with the same conviction.
Did anyone else impact you musically like Prince?Nina Simone, of course.
Her stuff is outrageous.
She was a master musician but also a master thinker.
Her intelligence was vast and she was in touch with realities no one else was aware of.
I cant say that shes an influence on my work, because shes out of my league.
Its hard for me …
Im sure a lot of people disagree.
There are so many properties that make a great singer.
Some singers do crazy runs and others have impeccable melodic sensibilities.
Everyone doesnt have to be Beyonce.
I likeRenaissanceas a heat check.
On top of everything else, its a technical marvel.
All that stuff is really interesting too.
Its a pretty exciting album.
You mentioned Coolio in the song Mr. Frosty Man.
Were you a fan?Of course.Rest in peace.
May perpetual light shine upon Coolio.
I have no sympathy for the Frosty kids anymore.
Christmas lore is strange.Its really messed up.
What bugs you about Christmas in pop culture?Unimpeded cultural appropriation.
It starts to lose its original meaning and becomes something else.
Christmas is Frankensteins monster.
Then theres Santa Claus coming down the chimney.
Mr. Frosty Man had that wildLee Hardcastle videowhere zombies ate Santa.
Are you a horror fan?Oh God, yeah.
I think its a construct curated by politics and power.
Everything is in between.
Its a clumsy and complicated and diverse process, being human.
Its a constant cycle, and I think that thats what were having to contend with now.
We still live in a world obsessed with binaries, especially in American politics.
Were all becoming conservative in our approach to behavior and morality.
Everything between good and evil is infinite and malleable and constantly changing.
We need to be changing with it and learning with those changes.
Most of the gifts are for her.
We do a scavenger hunt.
I wrap the ornaments and I hide them all over the place and I give her clues.
She can have them when shes, like, 30.
But when I lived in the city, wed always go out to Chinatown.
What are your favorite Christmas songs?In terms of sacred hymns, I loveLo!
How a Rose Eer Blooming,the German hymn.
I think one of the greatest Christmas songs is Donny Hathaways This Christmas.
His Jealous Guy?His Jealous Guy is outrageous.
Young, Gifted, and Black?
For some reason, theyre playing in 7/8 or something weird.
You dont even notice it.
Thats a classic Nina Simone song but his version is pretty spectacular.
Which Christmas movies do you make a point to watch every year?I loveNational Lampoons Christmas Vacation.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
