9. Sufjan Stevens

Acclaimed Brooklyn singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens has a pet project: making a concept album about each of the fifty states. After beginning with Michigan, and taking a detour last year into the mystical Christian-folk moves of Seven Swans, he returns with Illinois. These twenty-two songs are a strange weave of acoustic folk, marching-band jazz, prog rock and meditative electronic pulses in the mode of Steve Reich or Brian Eno. It's impossible to classify a song as complex and adventurous as "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!" Stevens sings about Illinois' most famous historical figures, from Superman to Abraham Lincoln, and covers UFO sightings and expositions. But he also gets personal in simple ballads like "Casimir Pulaski Day," about a teen losing a friend to cancer, and "Chicago."

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