Illinois : Sufjan Stevens : Review : Rolling Stone

Lots of songwriters have tried to define their vision of America, but Sufjan Stevens believes in taking a methodical approach. A couple of years ago, he set out on a fifty-record project to make a concept album about each state, starting with Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lakes State. It's a ludicrously ambitious project, one that you wish Randy Newman or Al Green would have tried in decades past. But that's probably the only kind of project that would suit Stevens, one of the indie world's most eccentric and personal songwriters. He's a thirty-year-old Detroit native currently based in Brooklyn, whose most recent album was the acclaimed Christian-folkie meditation Seven Swans. He puts out his records on his own label, Asthmatic Kitty, and uses each one to explore a different obsession. On Illinois, he brings the religious feel of Seven Swans to his Fifty States Project, for a sprawling twenty-two-track tour of the Prairie State. It's part Schoolhouse Rock history lesson, part hippie Bible study. It has songs about UFO sightings, prairie fires, the Civil War, the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, the poet Carl Sandburg and the Cubs. It also has a song called "Come On! Feel the Illinoise!"

Stevens plays acoustic guitar, piano and banjo, but his speciality is over-the-top arrangements, so the musical variety here requires a few listens before it starts to sink in. He brings in his indie-rock comrades the Illinoise Makers to play extra instruments, including a string quartet. But he plays the oboe, flute, vibraphone, glockenspiel, accordion, sleigh bells, triangle and a Casiotone MT-70. The music draws from high school marching bands, show tunes and ambient electronics; we can suspect Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians is an oft-played record in the Stevens household, since he loves to echo it in his long instrumental passages. But he holds it all together with his breathy, gentle voice, reminiscent of Neil Young circa After the Gold Rush.

The characters include some of Illinois' famous historical figures, from Superman ("The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts") to Honest Abe ("Stephen A. Douglas was a great debater/But Abraham Lincoln was the Great Emancipator"). But Stevens' most intense songs are his personal ones. "Chicago" follows two friends as they hit the road in a van, sleeping in parking lots, heading nowhere in particular but drifting apart. "Casimir Pulaski Day" is a monstrously sad acoustic ballad about a friend dying of cancer and leaving a lot of painful spiritual questions behind. The singer prays for his friend, but his friend dies anyway; the singer is too young and scared to ask God why, so the trumpet solo has to ask.

Illinois has some of the pitfalls you expect from literary singer-songwriter albums. Flute solos, for one thing. For another, there's the inevitable song about the serial killer who dresses up as a clown, which symbolizes nothing about American life except the existence of creative-writing workshops. But for a musician like Stevens, going too far and trying too hard is the point, the way to get beyond where a more austere songwriter could get with a more naturalistic pose. So the most pleasurable music here is the most ambitious -- especially "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!" It builds up repetitive Reich-style instrumental pulses, piano, horns, keyboards and layers of vocal overdubs into a gorgeous mess. "I can't explain the state that I'm in/The state of my heart," Stevens sings, and ultimately that's the state Illinois is really about.

ROB SHEFFIELD

(Posted: Jul 28, 2005)

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Review 1 of 4

5of 5 Stars

The first time I listened to Sufjan, I was sitting outside of Sevrinson Hall on the North Dakota State University Campus. A friend of mine gave me her Zune to listen to Decatur, saying that i would enjoy it.

"You like hippie music and stuff, you'll like
this, IT'S RAD!"

The first banjo notes hit me, and a wind started. The trees in the turnaround circle began to sway back and forth in the warm wind, to the exact same time of the music. It was an orgasmically beautiful experience, man.

I bought the album the next weekend in Minneapolis. The whole damn thing gets me today the same way it got me that day outside of Sevrinson. This album, this artist... People, he's something special. He's not something big, no. But he's special. I promise you that if you trade your filthy fiftten dollars for this beautiful music, you will become a better person. Music that is so personally written, music that is SO TRUE, cant help but to make you more personal, more true. If that makes any sense.

Sufjan Stevens is the man.

Jul 30, 2007 18:01:53

Review 2 of 4

5of 5 Stars

A bohemian, pseudo-Christian folk singer sets out to create a 50 disc set that encompasses all of the states in the U.S. Um, okay. His second installment, Illinois, includes woodwinds, instrumental passages and songs referencing Carl Sundberg, Superman and Abraham Lincoln. Riight. As pretentious and ridiculous as Stevens' concept seems, he has not only pulled it off but has created an amazing, instant-classic album. From the opening song, with its repetitive piano and hushed, wide-eyed lyrics about a UFO sighting, it's clear that Stevens is a different breed of singer-songwriter. Rather than the tiring introspective self-examination that one expects from folky, coffeehouse types, Stevens has a wide lens on his camera. He places himself, and us, in a historical context, examining such things as the growth of Chicago, the childhood of serial killer John Wayne Gacy and the relationship between Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln. This fact makes the more personal songs, such as Casimir Pulaski Day and Chicago, stand out even more. Casimir Pulaski Day, in particular, is both astoundingly sad and strangely uplifting as it chronicles the terminal illness of a friend and the spiritual questions that suffering and early death can cause for a believer. The best part of the song is that it offers no easy answers. Chicago, a tale of friends drifting apart as they travel, is another highlight. The instrumental arrangemants are amazing as well, particularly on the gorgeous The Predatory Wasp of The Palisades. The album may be part history lesson on the state of Illinois, but it is also an examination of the human condition. There is something in it for everyone and it certainly announces Sufjan Stevens as a staggeringly gifted, visionary songwriter to watch. So, two down and 48 to go... good luck with West Virginia!

Jul 8, 2006 14:53:29

Review 3 of 4

4of 5 Stars

When I first heard the idea that there was someone who was going to make fifty concept albums about the fifty states, I was incredulous to say the least. I thought that type of preteniousness had faded with the seventies. Then I heard Illinois.

Stevens is a highly literate songwriter who excels at taking his songs to extremes a more conservative singer would balk at. There in lies the brillance. Stevens uses his hushed, near falsetto voice to great effect, conjuring images of Tim Buckley and Nick Drake. His stark and confessional lyrics are handled with great delicacy, rahter than as a means of saying, Look at me, I'm in pain. He encompases all this in orante orchestral arrangments reminsinct of Steve Reich and other avant-garde composers. Yet here they work as a means of bringing the listener in the song rahter than driving them away. The quiet tales of loss in Casimir Pulaski Day and Chicago are wrapped in such beautiful melodies that it will take a few listens to relaize just how heartbreaking the words are. In the end, Illinois is an album about a search for meaning. Often Stevens shows that he knows what it takes many a songwriter years to learn: that it's not necassarily what you say but how you say it.

Jan 10, 2006 16:34:38

Review 4 of 4

5of 5 Stars

Brilliant. The feeling he puts in every song is amazing. Check him out, for sure.

Jan 9, 2006 08:34:03

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