I’ve been a little worried about the gene pool lately. By which I mean, I think we’re straying off course in the whole “survival of the fittest” thing. In the days of our parents and our parents’ parents, the big muscly guys - whether into sports or cars or shop - got the chicks. And the chess players and skinny-ass band geeks didn’t. They settled for the French horn and the chunky girl who smelled like cheese. And because of this method of mate selection, we got great, fabulous, beautiful people like you and me. But then indie rock came around, and as a result, old-man clothes, thick glasses and asthma became the cat’s meow. Yep, skinny band nerds who would have been wedgied into submission 20 years ago are now getting pick of the litter where chicks are concerned. And they’re breeding.

What happened to just playing guitar? Look at Sufjan Stevens, for instance. Dude studied the oboe. And from there he sat in his Michigan college dorm room and taught himself a whole gaggle of nerdy instruments. Like, what normal 18-year-old learns the banjo for fun? What happened to marijuana?

“Well, if you can play the oboe you can play most wind instruments in C,” says Sufjan, the fiction writer turned Time magazine designer turned music man who has set out to document each American state with a separate record - each full of his lush, folky, kitschy, multi-instrumental intimacy. “And I played the recorder as well. So each thing leads to the next thing: piano leads to mallet instruments, piano is very rhythmic so that leads to percussion as well. The guitar leads to banjo, and banjo to ukulele and mandolin.”

Uh, yeah. Obviously. Just saying the word “mandolin” in the ’70s was enough to get you shoved in a gym locker. But instead of emitting stifled screams for help in the dark, Sufjan finds himself putting out Illinoise, the geographically and autobiographically logical follow-up record to 2003’s Michigan, the groundbreaking account of his home state.

But Sufjan never lived in Illinois. Currently, he lives in Brooklyn, a surprising city to host a self-proclaimed Christian banjo player who sings stories about Mary Todd Lincoln and four more about her husband that didn’t make the record. Again, the gene pool. But initially, Sufjan never thought he’d be writing an Illinois record, let alone 49 others.

“It was really a proposal that I made as a joke, an advertising gimmick,” he confesses. “I just made a proposal that I knew was unrealistic. But months later I found my own proposition was being taken seriously and I was being challenged to think about what this means. So I started to think about American identity, American history. We’re a culture of mixed races and religions, a melting pot, and though we’re desperate to be nationalistic and have some kind of unity, it just isn’t there. So I think the project now can really be an investment in discovering what it means to be from Wisconsin or Minnesota or California.”

Apparently, what it means to be from Michigan is to have full choirs and string sections and songs that sound like the soundtrack to a Mr. Rogers Picture-Picture expose on Crayola’s robotic assembly line. And it seems so is being from Illinois, just with a slightly quicker tempo, a larger brass section and a wicked sense of humor.

“It’s totally a joke,” Sufjan explains. “Using this primitive pun on the cover and song titles that read like novellas, going on and on and on, and lots of exclamation points and songs with different parts.”

See, what’s different about Illinoise (technically called Come On Feel the Illinoise) is its light-hearted self awareness, which on Michigan and his next, non-state related record, was a bit stifled by his own emotional attachment to both his home state and God, respectively. But from the moment you pick up Illinoise, with its comic-book superhero graphics and hyperbolic use of syntax and punctuation, it’s clear that despite the 20-plus instruments filling every cranny of the record with movie soundtrack orchestral compositions, Sufjan’s not trying to make an epic.

“It’s sort of making fun of itself in a way. And part of that is because I think sometimes I take myself too seriously, and I’m worried that my listeners and fans take themselves too seriously, so I’m trying to infuse a bit of humor and relief.”

And this is exactly what I’m talking about. When the ironic use of an accordion or the offbeat placement of a semicolon not only wins you fans, but ones that take you too seriously, I really think we gotta call this nerd-chic thing quits. For the sake of our children.