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.
The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically.
By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.
O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful! And yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all hooping.
Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.
I don't want people who want to dance; I want people who have to dance.
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.
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