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.
Interpretation
Music serves as a higher form of communication that expresses feelings beyond ordinary conversation.
In this quote, Sufjan Stevens articulates the idea that music transcends the mundane aspects of everyday life, allowing for a deeper form of expression. He views music as a spiritual language that helps him convey emotions and experiences that he feels are impossible to express through normal interactions, highlighting the transformative power of art in connecting with something greater than oneself.
In practice
During a speech about the impact of the arts on personal growth.
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.
Every time Jimmy Scott sings, it's the same but slightly different. I don't know how he does that or where he gets that from. I think it's instinct. Nothing he does is by chance; he's in complete control of what he's doing. He's just beautiful and unique.
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.
Musicians are often asked to answer for an entire culture, or for an entire movement. It's a process of commodification. It becomes packaged and summarized in a word like 'emo' or 'grunge'... or 'folk music.' I think that's just language itself, trying to understand the mysteries of the world.
There's poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don't like doing what people expect me to do.
I am a poet who composes what life proses, and who proses what life composes.
The actual world, not some fantastic structure that has nothing to do with reality, must provide the material for modern poetry.
I want to make films without a single clear message, and films that are as close as possible to what it feels like to be alive. At least to me.
Television excites me because it seems to be the last stamping ground of poetry, the last place where I hear women's hair rhapsodically described, women's faces acclaimed in odelike language.
Hip-hop was indifferent to Broadway. We didn't need Broadway, but I think Broadway needed hip-hop.
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