Life on the frontier, the rise of capitalism and killer clows
Wherein songwriter Sufjan Stevens disguises ambitious social theory as lush indie pop
Jon Pruett: text
Kareem Black: image

While the rest of the pop world is perfecting the art of dead-eyed sincerity, getting mystical or hoping for some sort of faux-dance punk revolution, Detroit’s Sufjan Stevens is voraciously reading up tomes on frontier life and waxing philosophically about the rise of capitalism. If that’s not enough, he’s turned all of that into a record. Oddly enough, it’s totally brilliant. It’s a precise, well-written exploration of the themes that came into play before the onset of the industrial revolution, broken into melodic snapshots that sound like the most baroque, beautiful indie-rock-folk you could possibly imagine, led by his ever-present banjo and newfound falsetto. Naturally, I felt compelled to get in touch with this man and discover just how it came to be that my new favorite record has songs about Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln.

The finely titled Come On Feel The Illinoise is the multi-instrumentalist’s fifth record overall, but only his second in his grand plan to create an album for all of our fifty glorious states. Four months in gestation, Stevens spent the majority of that time nose down in the history books, trying to figure out what it was that helped Illinois to become the Midwestern centerpiece of the nation. Growing up in Detroit, Stevens felt a magnetic attraction to the glorious lights and red brick dazzle of Chicago.

“I didn’t know a lot, historically or regionally about Illinois. I didn’t know much about the different towns. I had a few memorable, distinct experiences in Chicago and Peoria and smaller towns, just driving through when I was younger - just impressions. Chicago became my main point of interest because I was fascinated with this Midwestern city that was so successful and resilient and interesting. I was always comparing it to Detroit, which is in economic decline. A kind of stale, industrial town. Growing up, we were always kind of resenting and grieving Detroit and admiring and envying Chicago. Whenever we went somewhere to do something that was really exciting, we would go to Chicago, which was in another state, in another time zone - it was so exciting to us.”

You can hear the excitement and the fascination on tracks like “Chicago” and within the rather unwieldy-titled “Come on! Feel the Illinoise! Part I: The World’s Columbian Exposition/Part II: Carl Sandburg Visits Me in a Dream” and on the stark, haunted “John Wayne Gacy” - one of the few compelling and beautiful songs written about serial killers (”it’s a very dangerous genre,” Stevens admits). Although the album might breeze by the first few listens like some ornate pop record, the intricacies of the lyrics and the arrangements start to sink in after awhile. Take a scan of the song titles on the back of the record and you’re faced with track names that don’t actually lend themselves to being scrawled in the sleeve of a mixtape for a friend. Try writing out “They are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhhh!” - it’s a bit clunky. But in the detail-oriented world of Sufjan Stevens, everything has a purpose and every aspect of the record has been thought-out and everything has an argument behind its existence. Sure, he admits that songs with titles that are nearly small paragraphs was a bit much, but wait - there’s a method buried below this willful obscurity.

“Yeah, I wonder if the song titles were just irresponsibility on my part. I think it’s in line with the character of some of the songs. Some of them are about promotional language and advertisements and capitalism and commerce and how there’s a real desperate motive in the U.S. to create and augment an idea of self. I think a lot of the commercialization the U.S. is doing that. They’re creating a veneer - like this is the face of the U.S. Then when you look deeper, it’s actually something completely different. I think with rambling, run-on titles, I’m very desperately trying to convey and create a picture of something that’s actually very forced about public relations and authenticity. I’m stumbling and fumbling through the semantics of names. However - I will also admit that it’s also laziness.”

Much of the album’s charm lies in its celebratory arrangements and passionate, cheerleader-esque arrangements. The horns, strings and piano accompaniment are never entirely too stark or serious, they are often playful and understated. The album’s Howard Finster-esque cover art adds an air of folk-charm to the overall feel that make the album feel like the ultimate fourth-grader’s extra-credit assignment, as done by a whip-smart post-graduate. When most people talk about doing research for a record, it generally involves writing about their present lack of/ or overexposure to fame and/or love. A cottage in the south of France, a pillowcase full of cocaine, a stripper wife - this is generally the extent of research. For Stevens, preparing for his fifth album involved a variety of trips to the library.

“A lot of the reading wasn’t very helpful at all. It was just filler. It was like carbohydrates. I was just consuming raw data. None of it was really used for the record, but it gave me a kind of foundation. I read a lot of frontier books. I don’t know why, but I was suddenly interested in immigration. What brought the white man into this area? There are no Indians or existing Indian reservations in Illinois. It was a kind of consecutive adaptation and cross culturalization and eventual wiping out of all the tribes across the Mississippi. I was interested in that, not simply in terms of Native Americans and White Europeans, but in terms of civilization and how transitory and migrant it is. We think of ourselves and countries and out cities as being very permanent, but really it’s very, very short-lived and our history is very shallow. So, I began to wonder - “How long is New York City going to be around?” There are ancient civilizations in other countries all over the world that were thriving, cultural centers and that no longer exist. There’s a cycle of civilization you see when you start reading about history. I was interested in trying to figure out what this all means. For me personally, what does it all mean in terms of things like the industrial revolution, which kind of exploited and augmented the rate of growth of cities. Seeing how that triggered things like advertisements and competitions amongst products. Having more things to buy and consume. The birth of commerce that has no other purpose than to generate economy. That’s kind of what I got into when I was doing my research.

As you might surmise, Daft Punk is not playing at Sufjan Stevens house. Which is okay, Sufjan Stevens is taking his own sort of risks on this album - he’s trying to grapple with broader concepts of history while trying to find the magic and inspiration that drives him to keep creating music. The thing is he’s succeeded. He’s managed to infuse these ambitions with his own heart and soul, making songs about Carl Sandberg seem as pure and alive as anything else out in the pop music spectrum. “I’m not really a social theorist or historian. I don’t really have the capacity to write that kind of dissertation - and no one wants to hear that anyways. For me, it’s always important to render everything through the convictions of my heart and to try and maintain a kind of personal identity in everything that I’m singing about.”