There’s theatricality to your work, both musically and in your live shows. What’s your relationship with the theater, or high drama?

I endured enough high drama as a child to know to avoid it as an adult. In my everyday life, I’m exceedingly pragmatic. But music seems to provide a language in which I am able to express transcendent things in sometimes very explicit, theatrical ways. In my music, I hear a constant fundamental tension between the folk aesthetic and the epic aesthetic. The big versus the small. So any kind of theatricality in my work may, in fact, be unrestrained humor attempting to relieve that tension. I worry that my music is too serious, that people (myself included) take me too seriously. The outfits I wear, the album art designed like stage sets, the constant changing of personas, well, these things are to alert everyone to the performance quality of what I’m doing. But I admit I was always suspicious about those theater students who wore pirate hats and trench coats to class. What were they hiding?

Are there subjects you avoid in songwriting? Subjects you don’t feel ready to tackle?

Not really. I mean, I’ve written about serial killers, supercomputers, airports; aliens from space, and an extinct woodpecker. I’m not always successful; I’ll be the first to admit that. But everything is worth considering. I’d write a song about the toxic waste dumps in New Jersey, the Superfund Sites, if you asked me. Or if you paid me $10.

Do you really have time for two Illinois albums when 48 other states (you’ve done Michigan) are waiting for your Midas touch?

If Illinois takes two albums, Texas may take 10. To be honest, time is just a social construct. I’m in no hurry. I’d like to spend more time in the here and now. I don’t mean to sound new age.

What state is next on your list?

It’s a state of Christmas. I call it That Creepy Christmas Feeling. You’ve had too much eggnog, your credit card bill is due, Aunt Marie just threw up all over the bath mat, and no one can figure out how to get the lights on the tree to stop blinking!

The Avalanche: Outtakes and Extras from the Illinois Album

Stevens, the Encyclopedia Brown of song – curious, well-read, and enterprising – is two albums deep in his 50 States series. This is really a collection of fragments and discards from Illinoise!, working as a shadow project to that critically acclaimed triumph of musical minutiae, retracing the careful, dusty, majestic steps into history’s bright recesses.