Sufjan Stevens Plays His First Public Set in Eight Years at Meg Lui’s Album Release

Sufjan Stevens did not return to the stage with an announcement. He returned as a guest. On September 25, at Tempo in Kingston, New York, he played piano and sang backing vocals on “Elvis Queen,” a song from Meg Lui’s debut album Instant Validation, during her record release show. It was his first public musical performance in more than eight years.

In 2023, Stevens disclosed that he had been diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare autoimmune disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks the nerves, and said he was relearning how to walk and use his hands. Last year he described his condition to Vulture’s Craig Jenkins as “okay.” “I’ve had some pretty difficult things happen to me, so I’m in a state of repair and survival,” he said, adding that he was not yet in a position to tour but was “starting to see the light.”

The setting suits him. Lui is a Hudson Valley songwriter who sang background vocals on Javelin, his 2023 album. The two met through mutual friends in the Catskills, and Instant Validation was recorded at Stevens’s home studio and released the same day as the show via Asthmatic Kitty. “With Sufjan there was so much more out-of-the-box thinking,” Lui has said of the sessions, describing layers added until the record became an unrestrained soundscape.

Since the diagnosis, Stevens has stayed active in other registers: anniversary editions of Seven Swans and Carrie & Lowell, a John Legend children’s album he produced, a Tony Award for the Illinoise musical, guest work with Mina Tindle and Mouse on Mars’s Jan St. Werner. A piano bench in Kingston is a smaller gesture than any of those. It is also the first one with an audience in front of it.