Rick Moody: I assume on some level ["John Wayne Gacy, Jr." is] a researched song, and yet it's the moment when you--I can't remember how the line goes exactly, but where you sort of put yourself in his shoes for a brief moment that gives the song its sort of emotional power. So perhaps it's an amalgam of these two approaches to writing.
Sufjan Stevens: Yeah, you could write sort of a gruesome song about John Wayne Gacy but I feel like there's been multiple of these true crime novels written about him, and I read some of those and there's a real infatuation with the grotesque there. I found myself really getting deeply entrenched in those kinds of reading habits, of like, really wanting to figure this out and get to the bottom of this. But then I realized: what is driving this? What is driving my sort of obsession with this monster? And I kind of just realized... Well, I think I know why.
I think that a lot of that album is about that. It's like, really investing a lot of time and energy into materials. Just like, any kind of writing or research. In collecting these materials and then realizing that they're superficial, that all kind of history and any kind of exposition or any kind of rendering of information about any place through a kind of a literature--it's sort of a fabrication. And that I found that I didn't want that. I wanted something real, something that I could feel, like skin. So I wanted to be a part of every song and I wanted to be a part of every subject and I wanted to be a part of every little civic parade and small town... but it just wasn't possible. So I found that that was one of the biggest failures of that kind of album and something that I've been struggling with since then--writing about something and having a lived experience but then having this other thing you have to deal with, the actual history of it.
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