Sound bite

“Illinois”

Asthmatic Kitty/Sounds

Familyre Records

Write what you know, the adage goes. Most bands stay within
familiar territory, playing the same chord progressions and
covering the same subject matter throughout their careers, but then
again, most bands are not Sufjan Stevens. The folk
impresario’s new album “Illinois” is as ambitious
as one would expect from a performer who plays dozens of
instruments, records and produces all of his own music, and plans
to record one album for each of America’s 50 states. Stevens
wrote the songs of “Illinois” based on his copious
research and information gathering, using picture-book histories of
small towns, the literature of local writers and extensive
interviews with Illinois natives for inspiration. As impressive and
thorough as this sounds, the strength of “Illinois”
lies not in the cornucopia of historical nuggets, but in the
emotional pull of Stevens’ storytelling.

For all of his references (and there are far too many to count),
Stevens’ strongest songs are the more personal narratives.
“Casimir Pulaski Day,” a bare guitar ballad flecked
with banjo, depicts the tentative tenderness of burgeoning
love.

“I remember at Michael’s house / in the living room
when you kissed my neck / and I almost touched your blouse,”
Stevens sings early on, and the relationship progresses slowly from
verse to verse until the song ends with the death of his love
interest by bone cancer. What has this to do with Illinois?
Nothing, except for a passing reference to the titular holiday.
What the song does, and what Stevens does best, is establish the
humanity in the history.

“John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” is another prime example of
this. The story of a mass murderer, Stevens finishes the
deliberately mysterious lyrics with the line, “And on my best
behavior / I am really just like him,” a pointed
acknowledgement of the darkness within ourselves. More chilling is
the description of Gacy’s victims: “They were boys /
with their cars / summer jobs / oh my God,” he sings,
cracking into a high falsetto for the painful last line.

The less somber lyrics are backed with appropriate musical
accompaniment, with a touch of funk reserved for “They Are
Night Zombies!!” and a rare distorted guitar chugging along
on “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts.”

The arrangements throughout are intricate but smooth, as complex
and natural as a spider’s web. At first,
“Illinois” seems too much like a musical cousin to
2003’s “Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lakes
State,” the first entry in Stevens’ 50-states series,
but soon the energy and humor of the songs reveal themselves. While
not a drastic shift from the alternating stripped-down/orchestral
dynamic of “Michigan,” “Illinois” is much
more extroverted ““ a performance, rather than a
meditation.

“Ambitious” is usually a euphemism for “really
long,” and “Illinois” is certainly epic in
duration as well as scope. The album is not for the impatient;
numerous instrumental passages divide the songs, which fill the CD
to capacity. Perhaps some of them could have been cut and the album
abridged to a more manageable 40 minutes, but doing so would be to
tamper with greatness. In an era of tabloid magazines and gossip
columns, “Illinois” is the second chapter in Sufjan
Stevens’ great American novel, and, as of now, the finest
album of 2005.

-David Greenwald