Sufjan Stevens
His Illinois Welcomes You
By Steve Forstneger

Don’t ever make an album dedicated and named for your home state. Just don’t. ‘Cause you know what’ll happen? The folks from the other states will get jealous and you’ll find yourself saying something stupid, like “O.K., I’ll make an album for each of you.”

That’s what Sufjan Stevens is up against.

Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lake State (Asthmatic Kitty) came out of nowhere in late 2003 and quickly established Stevens as a triple-threat composer, arranger, and lyricist. The album’s solemn tone reflected the unheralded of Michigan through “Flint (For the Unemployed & Underpaid),” “The Upper Peninsula,” and “Alanson, Crooked River.” After the Seven Swans mini-album, news leaked that Stevens’ next project was Illinois, and this summer it lands.

“I didn’t want to force anyone from Illinois to cover this at all, against their will,” he says with a laugh. But anyone from Illinois - or anywhere else - would be a total boob to ignore something like this opus, which makes the work Brian Wilson put into Smile! and Pet Sounds look like a kid building infield dirt piles with his feet during a tee-ball game.

Its scope is mind-boggling, especially considering he’s on the clock for 48 more (a lot of states are bound to feel ripped-off, Michigan included). Illinois is more musical than album, the result of four months of intense writing and research. “I began to see Illinois is kind of the center of gravity for middle America in terms of commerce, agriculture, and industry, and I began to see it as a very confident and successful kind of place. So I wanted the music to reflect that; I wanted it to be triumphant, I wanted it to be sort of like a patriotic marching band. I think that’s more my tone and sensibility more recently: more confident and triumphant. I kind of wanted to get away from the quiet, singer-songwriter aesthetic. It is kind of like [a play]. To me it sounds like [Gilber & Sullivan's] ‘Pirates of Penzance.’ It is kind of like a Broadway musical.”

Listening to Illinois in its entirety levels the mind and makes “Holy shit!” the default reaction. Holy shit I can’t believe he wrote the whole thing and played almost all the instruments himself. Holy shit, that’s a nod to The Cure’s “Close To Me.” Holy shit he has to recreate this on tour. “Yeah, that’s going to be a real challenge. I am supposed to be figuring that out this week, actually. I have a band of about eight people I think, and we have a variety of instruments. Everyone is incredibly talented, but none of us remember how to play these songs, so I have about three weeks to get my act together.”

Actually, what’s sickening about Illinois is that for most artists, this would be it. Uh… spent. But in one-third of a year he captured the personal battles, socio-economic quagmires, and fierce contradictions of a state of which he’s relatively unfamiliar and added a soundtrack to boot. “Michigan was based on memory and experience and actual physical impressions with places. I think Michigan is heavy with that mentality - with memory and recollection. I don’t really have a lot of personal impressions within Illinois, so I had to do a lot of research. I just read a lot of books, called a lot of friends, I read Saul Bellow [and] Carl Sandburg, I read social history books, books on immigration, frontier life.. Everything’s interesting. I tend to fail to have the ability to generalize about things abstractly. And for Illinois, it was really an accumulation of details and every detail was fascinating to me. I could just list them about it would just sound rambling.”

That this quest continues - some would say “repeats” - 48 more times doesn’t bother him. “Writing music and composition comes very naturally for me. For anyone else it’s like, you know, an accountant is great with numbers and a chef is great with food - it’s their natural inclination to do these things. So I just feel like it’s eating or going to the bathroom. I’m not too concerned about a lack of inspiration, material, or time; It’s all a proposition. Who knows if I’ll ever finish it? I try to take it one note at a time, one song at a time.”

Despite that last canned baseball cliche - Stevens gives 110 percent, too - he has the traits of a savant. Only trained on oboe, he taught himself at least 30 other instruments. He’s project oriented, so when he begins something he finishes it. But he also finds conflict when it comes to collaboration.

“I’m so envious of bands who are very skilled at their instrument, who have a dynamic and musical communication that’s very natural on stage. I don’t really have that. This is kind of a personal vision and I hire musicians to perform my songs. In college I was in several bands; it’s a disaster. I think part of it is I do desire that kind of community. It’s a lonely thing, being a solo artist, and that’s why I take so many people on the road with me.”

He continues, “I’m not very good with interpersonal relations. I’m better off when I hire the musicians and they’re on salary - they’re my friends and I love them all - but they know that there’s an economic relationship between us that’s first and foremost. I think that makes things so much easier and healthier, even though it sounds really terrible and impersonal. They know that what they’re investing is their time and their skill. They’re not really investing their art of their heart into what I’m doing. If I were to be in a band with eight or nine people it would be like a really bad MTV reality show.”

A lonely guy, it’s not surprising to learn Stevens originally planned to be a writer - the whole reason he moved to New York from Michigan after college. A skim reader by nature - ironic, given that he would assume readers would give him more consideration - he nonetheless intends to get back to it when there’s room in his head. “Writing is my first love. The thing is, there is a flourishing publishing industry that’s doing really well right now, but I think generally people are less interested in words and more interested in media, and other kinds of electronic media or television or movies and computers. It’s up agains a lot. I think at the root of what I do in this kind of songwriting is narrative storytelling. I think every song on this record has a certain plot line, a series of scenes, a setting, characters - it kind of all follows the mechanics of fiction,” he says adding, “Music is such a distraction now that I haven’t been able to write for the last two years very consistently. So, a lot of my writing has been transcribed and abbreviated to songwriting and lyric writing.”

So books, 48 state-themed albums, more projects like Seven Swans… the world? Well, no, but electronic music is in his sights. “I feel there is a lack of innovation and I think it was limited by the nature of the software. People weren’t really innovative about it. I think there’s a lot of room for improvement, and I’m just not quite ready for that kind of challenge.”

Good, leave well-enough alone. Shit, man. It’s already enough. Enough.