When can we expect a follow-up proper to his eclectic masterpiece? asks James McNair

WHEN I meet Sufjan Stevens for his only face-to-face interview on this European trip, he's photographing his live-sound engineer by their parked tour bus. Last night, said technician dislocated his knee in Manchester, whereupon Stevens carried him off-stage and into the arms of waiting paramedics. As we shall see, this is a musician who does things differently.

"Different" was certainly a word that came to mind on learning of his Fifty States Project, wherein he pledged to record an album themed around every US state. With only Greetings From Michigan and his eclectic masterpiece Illinois behind him, it would take Stevens (31) until he was 79 to complete his undertaking at the brisk pace of one album per year. Though he should perhaps be getting his skates on, he has instead just filed Songs For Christmas, a five-CD set of traditional/original material recorded between 2001 and 2006.

How he found time to make the painted butterfly/bird wings that he and his 10-piece band currently wear for gigs is anybody's guess.

Stevens is simultaneously handsome and geeky, the upturned earmuffs of his Russian hat a comic aside to his swarthy good looks. Though not without a dry sense of humour ("It's a charming militaristic Muslim name, " he has said of his Armenian first name, which means "comes with a sword"), Stevens knows his lyrics and the dark intensity that pervades some of his songs have cast him in a certain light. Songs For Christmas, it seems, is partly an attempt to redress the balance.

"Hopefully it's more fun, " he says. "There are lots of big choruses, lots of trumpets, and it has more humour. Most of the songs started out as gifts for friends and family, but it turned into an epic project. . . In some ways it's the most complicated record I've released."

While the sleigh bells-imbued 'Let's Boogie To The Elf Dance!'

and the brass-bolstered 'Get Behind Me, Santa!' are frolicsome originals, the latter clearly has a satirical aspect, too, its line about Christmas becoming a four-letter word - Xmas - a reminder that he is a practising Christian. Anagrams aside, though, is Santa really The Great Satan?

"Santa is such an icon, " he says, "and I'm frustrated, because if you trace his origins he's based on an important and philanthropic Catholic saint, yet we've ended up with this overweight, cartoonish guy who breaks into people's houses. . . We've taken a very sacred time and commodified it, so that there's a capitalist campaign to buy more, consume more, and then you have a conflict between the spiritual and the mundane. I don't want to sound didactic, but that's what I think."

He's a little happier discussing how his beliefs inform his business decisions, describing his approach as a "socialist bohemian" or "cooperative" one in which everybody he works with needs to be taken care of. "I shouldn't be making decisions based on making money, or gaining exposure for its own sake, " he adds, "and when we tour I get paid the same as everybody else."

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Stevens grew up in "the chilly upper reaches of the Lower Peninsula". His natural reticence to discuss his nearest and dearest makes the jigsaw of his upbringing tricky to assemble. In concert, he is a tad more forthright, telling how the banjoled title track of his 2004 album Seven Swans was inspired by a fire that occurred when his father's ritual burning of a rubbish heap set a ring of cedar trees alight. The fireman who extinguished the blaze sat around singing songs with the Stevens family afterwards and Sufjan saw Old Testament-like "signs" in the smoke-filled sky. The song's conflation of fact and seeming magic-realism is striking indeed.

The young Sufjan attended Detroit Waldorf School, an establishment big on the teachings of the Austrian philosopher Rudolph Steiner.

"It had a huge influence on me.

They pushed music and the arts over academics. There was lots of making things from strictly organic materials - lots of knotting and beeswax, " he laughs.

"It was weird to be part of that educational environment in dirty, run-down old Detroit, though.

Our house and our car were broken into all the time and we'd get beaten up."

Stevens's step-father, Lowell - the pair would eventually set up the independent label Asthmatic Kitty together - introduced him to cassettes of Neil Young's Harvest and Nick Drake's Pink Moon, which the 10-year-old Sufjan listened to on headphones while walking to school.

His own musical development later flourished at Hope College, Michigan, where he became proficient on oboe, guitar, drums, piano and more. His talent in scoring for all manner of instrumentation, and his wide breadth of influences, is evident on Illinois.

However, his early Asthmatic Kitty releases, A Sun Came (2000) and Enjoy Your Rabbit (2001), were not especially listener-friendly. Indeed, the latter was an all-instrumental work based around the animals of the Chinese Zodiac and, for all its charms, basically amounted to the Year of the Turkey for Stevens. This gave him pause for thought and he moved to New York City to study creative writing at the New School For Social Research.

"At that point, music had begun to feel like a hobby, " he says, laughing. "For two years I hardly played at all. It felt like a positive kind of fasting. . . but when I started doing music again I was writing songs on acoustic guitar and banjo. Everything had turned full circle."

The resulting album, Greetings From Michigan, put Stevens on the map, but it was 2005's Illinois which marked a leap forward.

Joyous and moving, it is has an almost limitless capacity to repay repeat visits.

What, though, of the follow-up proper to Illinois? Good as they are, Songs For Christmas and this year's Illinois outtakes album The Avalanche seem like adroit pit stops. "You know, I don't think Illinois is as good as people say it is, " he says. "I feel some external pressure to follow it up well, but I feel more pressure from myself, and my own goals, which are much grander than anything I can ever accomplish. My way of dealing with it is to try and find ways of making music that are fresh for me. Hopefully that will be enough."

'Songs For Christmas' is out now on Rough Trade