Reviews: Songwriter Sufjan Stevens pens a stunning love letter to Illinois.

Teenage symphonies to God (and Illinois): A Brooklyn songwriter takes folk rock to new states of mind

By ROB SHEFFIELD

Lots of songwriters have tried to define their vision of America, but Sufjan Stevens believes in taking a methodical approach. A couple of years ago, he set out on a fifty-record project to make a concept album about each state, starting with Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lakes State. It’s a ludicrously ambitious project, one that you wish Randy Newman or Al Green would have tried in decades past. But that’s probably the only kind of project that would suit Stevens, one of the indie world’s most eccentric and personal songwriters. He’s a thirty-year-old Detroit native currently based in Brooklyn, whose most recent album was the acclaimed Christian-folkie meditation Seven Swans. He puts out his records on his own label, Asthmatic Kitty, and uses each one to explore a different obsession. On Illinois, he brings the religious feel of Seven Swans to his Fifty States Project, for a sprawling twenty-two-track tour of the Prairie State. It’s part Schoolhouse Rock history lesson, part hippie Bible study. It has songs about UFO sightings, prairie fires, the Civil War, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the poet Carl Sandburg and the Cubs. It also has a song called “Come On! Feel the Illinoise!”

Stevens plays acoustic guitar, piano and banjo, but his speciality is over-the-top arrangements, so the musical variety here requires a few listens before it starts to sink in. He brings in his indie-rock comrades the Illinoise Makers to play extra instruments, including a string quartet. But he plays the oboe, flute, vibraphone, glockenspiel, accordion, sleigh bells, triangle and a Casiotone MT-70. The music draws from high school marching bands, show tunes and ambient electronics; we can suspect Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians is an oft-played record in the Stevens household, since he loves to echo it in his long instrumental passages. But he holds it all together with his breathy, gentle voice, reminiscent of Neil Young circa After the Gold Rush.

The characters include some of Illinois’ famous historical figures, from Superman (“The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts”) to Honest Abe (“Stephen A. Douglas was a great debater/But Abraham Lincoln was the Great Emancipator”). But Stevens’ most intense songs are his personal ones. “Chicago” follows two friends as they hit the road in a van, sleeping in parking lots, heading nowhere in particular but drifting apart. “Casimir Pulaski Day” is a monstrously sad acoustic ballad about a friend dying of cancer and leaving a lot of painful spiritual questions behind. The singer prays for his friend, but his friend dies anyway; the singer is too young and scared to ask God why, so the trumpet solo has to ask.

Illinois has some of the pitfalls you expect from literary singer-songwriter albums. Flute solos, for one thing. For another, there’s the inevitable song about the serial killer who dresses up as a clown, which symbolizes nothing about American life except the existence of creative-writing workshops. But for a musician like Stevens, going too far and trying too hard is the point, the way to get beyond where a more austere songwriter could get with a more naturalistic pose. So the most pleasurable music here is the most ambitious — especially “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!” It builds up repetitive Reich-style instrumental pulses, piano, horns, keyboards and layers of vocal overdubs into a gorgeous mess. “I can’t explain the state that I’m in/The state of my heart,” Stevens sings, and ultimately that’s the state Illinois is really about.