Last year, after nearly two decades as a resident of New York City, Sufjan Stevens moved to the Catskills, and it’s already changed him. “I’m utterly no longer a city dweller, which is pretty exciting,” he said in a recent interview. “I started gardening, I bought an ATV, I bought a chain saw. I’ve relocated in body, mind, and spirit.”

It’s not a surprise that Stevens, he of more than a few pastoral folk songs and two whole albums devoted to Midwestern states, would find some solace in the country; a year and a pandemic-related exodus from the city later, his exit even seems prescient. But his new record, The Ascension, the first he has finished in his new studio upstate, is not exactly a tribute to rural life. It’s emotionally elusive and almost entirely electronic—and he sees it as a foray into making something like pop music. “Aesthetically, it’s a little bit outside of what I normally do,” he said, adding that he even considered bringing on outside producers and programmers to bring it further into the mainstream. “But at some point I just decided to own it.”

For Stevens, the change comes a few years after he reached new heights in his career. In 2015, Carrie & Lowell, an intimate and personal record about his childhood and family, received widespread critical acclaim. In 2018, his contributions to the soundtrack for Call Me by Your Name earned him an Oscar nomination—and an invitation to perform during the telecast. (He said the experience was a “living nightmare,” but admitted that he was starstruck when he met Eva Marie Saint in a valet line.) Since then he’s continued his prolific output, seen mainly through collaborations; in 2019, he did his fifth composition for New York City Ballet choreographer Justin Peck, and earlier this year he released an experimental album he made with his former stepfather and label director Lowell Brams.

Writing and recording The Ascension came as Stevens was just beginning to mull leaving New York, the city where he lived when he wrote much of the music he is known for, from his odes to Flint and Detroit on 2003’s Michigan to “Chicago,” the exuberant centerpiece on 2005’s Illinois. A rat infestation in his apartment was the final straw, but his frustration with city living began a few years before when he was abruptly kicked out of the Brooklyn studio space he had used for about 10 years. Unable to find a new one, he put his instruments into storage and felt his relationship to the place begin to change.

“I started to feel like a visitor, like a foreigner in the city,” he said. “As deeply as I had fallen in love with it, I had suddenly fallen out of love with all the things. I began to notice that there were diminishing returns in being there, like the city itself was no longer of service to me, and I was no longer of service to it.”

While he was planning his next move, Stevens began writing a suite of songs using the only implements he had—his computer, some synthesizers, and a drum machine. It’s a real departure for the multi-instrumentalist, whose songs can range from symphonic jaunts on Illinois to spacious acoustic folk on records like Seven Swans. But the songs on The Ascension aren’t something you would mistake for, say, chill lo-fi beats. His trademark falsetto delivery and sonic layering still stand out, and the songs play with orchestral highs and lows even if the list of instruments is limited.

What is totally different is his lyrical approach. Rather than thinking of his songs like short stories—he took graduate classes in writing in the early 2000s, before he wrote some of those detail-laden or place-based records—he wanted to experiment with going in the opposite direction. “These songs are very colloquial,” he said. “There’s a lot of catchphrases, a lot of cliches. They’re based on statements, imperatives and declaratives, platitudes.”

He began writing the album’s closer, “America,” around six years ago, while he was still wrapping Carrie & Lowell. In the 12-minute epic, he begs plaintively: “Don’t do to me what you did to America.” He decided it wasn’t a great fit for the last record, but it came back to him after Donald Trump won the 2016 election.

For years, Stevens had written empathetic songs that use American history as a metaphor, but that tone didn’t make sense for the moment. “After the election of Donald Duck, I started to feel that the song had a meaning and relevance beyond what I understood at the time,” he said. “I decided to take that song and rework it and rerecord it, and embrace the expository tone. It’s somewhat preachy and a little bitchy and cynical and mean-spirited. I finally gave myself license to speak like that in music. I hadn’t really done that too much before.”

In 2018, more inspiration for the album arrived from an unexpected source. “I think that the Ariana Grande song kind of woke me up, ‘Thank U, Next,’” he said. “It seems like she was tonally able to balance an understanding of a situation and of the value of [seeing] things diplomatically—but was also so over it.”

In conversation, Stevens has long been reticent to talk about his personal life, but his vast body of work serves as a densely layered autobiography. In The Ascension, he rejects that approach. “It was intentional to eliminate anything autobiographical or personal or narrative. I didn’t want anything representational,” he said. “That’s not helpful right now. I don’t need to project a narrative onto a crisis like this. I want to just deal with the problems head-on, no mincing of words.”

He told me that he was afraid the album would come off as too angry. But upon listening, it’s almost hard to find anger that isn’t tinged with sadness or resignation. The title track is accusatory and disdainful, but it ends with a repeated refrain of “What now?” Even the songs that discuss romantic love, like “Video Game” and “Landslide,” are also concerned with betrayal, pain, and defeat. Besides, there’s something almost tragic about living in circumstances that make a person long obsessed with nuance and detail feel moved to cast them aside.

“Sometimes I think these platitudes can speak for deeper truths in moments of crisis when you don’t have the words or the wherewithal or the resources to really fully comprehend in language what’s going on,” he said. “We went to Alateen meetings when we were kids because there was alcoholism in my family, and they had all these signs all over the walls at the community hall where we would go to these meetings. Like, ‘Keep It Moving’ or ‘Let Go and Let God’ or ‘Easy Does It.’ ‘One Day at a Time.’ I find myself falling back on those when I’m at a loss.”

There is a song on The Ascension called “Goodbye to All That,” a reference to Joan Didion’s famous essay about leaving New York; there is Sufjan Stevens autobiography still to be found. But it’s also an album about all of us finding new ways to live. “We’re actually extremely adaptable, humans,” he said. He was referencing the way we’ve adjusted to life during a pandemic, but it’s equally applicable to some of the issues that motivated him to make the album. “Maybe we should consider that—maybe we can also change politics and change the systems of government and society.”

Unlike the record’s narrator, Stevens feels some hope. “Some of the subject matter is pretty heavy and there’s certainly a lot of criticism and agony being expressed,” he said. “But I don’t think that I would have been able to write about these things if I hadn’t felt confidence and hope and faith and trust that things could be better.”

— Jesmyn Ward Writes Through Grief Amid Protests and Pandemic
— Melania Trump’s Clothes Really Don’t Care, and Neither Should You
— How Prince Harry and Meghan Markle Paid Off the Frogmore Cottage Renovations
— Poetry: COVID-19 and Racism Collide in Mississippi
— 11 of Fall’s Best Coffee-Table Books
— Is This the End of In-Person Awards Shows?
— From the Archive: The Precarious Future of Stately Aristocratic Homes

Looking for more? Sign up for our daily newsletter and never miss a story.