47 Sufjan Stevens
“Once when we moved away / She came to Romulus for a day / Her Chevrolet broke down / We prayed it’d never be fixed or found / We touched her hair, we touched her hair”

Sufjan Stevens’ first two albums, A Sun Came and Enjoy Your Rabbit, only hinted at the songwriter’s masterful skills at instrumentation and arrangement. With his third, Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lakes State - the first in his ambitious 50-states project - his abilities were fully realized. A myriad of instruments - including piano, banjo and horns - provides a background for whispery-voiced lyrics of personal history intertwined with geographical storytelling. The album is at once personal and universal. Illinois’ flowing, lush arrangements and lyrics guide the listener on a tour through the state’s unique history, from a haunting portrayal of a killer to references to Superman and Abraham Lincoln. In between those two albums he delivered Seven Swans, a stripped-down, somber statement containing deeply personal tales of faith in the vein of Southern gothic writers like Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor. An incredibly prolific songwriter, he’s released five albums in six years, and with an album of Illinois outtakes on the horizon, he’s proving to be a lasting voice in the American musical landscape. CORY D. BYROM

GET - John Wayne Gacy, Jr (2005), Chicago (2005)