Sufjan Stevens – Illinois

Art of the State: Banjo-strapped songwriter gracefully straddles the sullen/silly divide
Sufjan Stevens is a precocious fella. After announcing in 2003 that he’d devote albums to all 50 states (thus keeping the Great Indie Concept Album Boom churning well beyond the inevitable White Stripes/Shins/Coldplay reunions a few decades hence), he produced the luminous, lush Michigan. But, with a casual smirk, he just as quickly deviated, with 2004’s wistful Seven Swans.
This year finds him back on track, steering south on 75, west on 80, through a spot of Ohio, and into Illinois, a unique, remarkably ambitious 22-song cycle. With string quartets, banjos, choirs, brass and Stevens himself credited to over 20 instruments, it sounds as if his fractured folk spirituality was arranged by avant-Americanist (and SmiLE co-conspirator) Van Dyke Parks. There’s a sweeping, dramatic grandeur to the production—see the cinematic bustle of the title track—as if Stevens’ Illinois were viewed in hurtling panorama from scuffed train windows.
Despite a predilection for the chilling (“And in my best behavior / I am really just like him,” Stevens sings on serial-killer ballad “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.”), the mode of Illinois—as it reads simply on the spine—is playful. Song titles are effusive (and alternately CAPITALIZED), occasionally taking as long to read as they do to listen to, such as the 19-second “A Conjunction of Drones Simulating the Way in Which Sufjan Stevens Has an Existential Crisis in the GREAT GODFREY MAZE.” (And that’s not even the longest title. Nor the shortest track.)