— by James Montgomery
The most impressive thing about Sufjan Stevens' Illinois isn't its vast narrative scope, its effortless orchestration or the astonishing array of characters that make appearances on the record: a serial killer, a former president, a Revolutionary War hero, a little girl dying of bone cancer, an army of zombies, a black Civil War soldier, an American Indian chief and Santa Claus, to name a few.
Nor is it the laundry list of instruments Stevens plays on the album (19), the copious amount of research he put into the songwriting (he spent more than four months scouring the shelves of the Brooklyn Public Library), nor the sheer number of additional players that surface (13, including a choir and a string section). No, the most impressive thing is where he recorded it: in a tiny Queens studio, in a room no bigger than an outhouse, and beyond.
"Yeah, well, we didn't have a piano in my studio, so I used the piano at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn. The priest let me use it at night because that was the time it wasn't being used," Stevens laughs. "I recorded all the piano parts there at 1 or 2 in the morning, and I'd have the headphones on, and I would see people ducking in and out of the pews and I would hear things all the time, hear ghosts and strange rattling. One time I knocked the microphone onto the floor and I heard what sounded like a German family having dinner."
Supernatural or otherwise, there was a whole lot that went into recording Illinois, the 30-year-old Stevens' fifth proper album and second in his "50 States Project," a concept he'd originally thought up while doing press for his 2003 album Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lake State. Stevens — half joking, he now claims — promised journalists that he planned to write an album for every state in the country, but after Web sites and magazines around the world began to pick up on the project, he decided he'd actually try to follow through with it.
"As a kind of promotional gimmick, I said, 'Well, wouldn't it be exciting to do a record for every state?' " Stevens says. "Why should I stop at Michigan? Who cares if I'm not from Nevada or New Hampshire; I want to know about the people who live there, too. A lot of their stories have been told for decades and decades in the American folk tradition. I know it's ridiculous to say I'm going to do a record for each state, but I felt this conviction, so I just decided to go with it."
Hence, Illinois, a sprawling, 22-track album with unwieldy song titles like "A Conjunction of Drones Simulating the Way in Which Sufjan Stevens Has an Existential Crisis in the Great Godfrey Maze" and a whole lot of Stevens' observations on the Land of Lincoln, both big and small. From the bursting-at-the-seams arrangements of "Chicago," which sound like a busy, bustling metropolis, to the spookily spare acoustic guitar stabs of "John Wayne Gacy, Jr.," which sound like the empty spaces beneath the floorboards, Illinois is an album of shocking disparity, of wealthy industrialists and escaped slaves, big buildings and abandoned cabins — all of which speaks volumes about Stevens' talent as a storyteller.
"It's an interesting tension, because I don't want to exploit anybody," Stevens says. "I don't want to just go into a situation or an environment and just use it as just fodder for a pop song. It has a lot to do with my background, coming from a working-class family, knowing the work of the hands and providing for your family. These are prevalent themes in my life, so I guess I feel I have an understanding. I can emphasize with that class structure and that struggle."
Stevens grew up in Detroit, the second youngest of six siblings, and attended Hope College in Holland, Michigan. As a kid, he and his family would take trips all over the state, which made coming up with source material for the Michigan album pretty easy. But for Illinois, he had to dig a little deeper ... after all, he'd never lived there. So he hit the books and discovered that the research and writing process for the album served him well.
Now, as he takes to the road to promote the album — complete with his backing band, the Illinoisemakers — he's already got his mind on a few other states. After all, he's still got 48 of them to go.
"I've been working on songs for Oregon and Rhode Island and New Jersey lately, just based on information I've read about their histories," Stevens laughs. "And I'm solicited all the time by people who are proud of where they're from. Texas seems to be a favorite. Everyone's always asking, 'What are you going to do about Texas?' Like it's a big problem or something. People are like, 'What are you going to do, Sufjan? Someone's got to do something about Texas.' Like I'm suddenly responsible for that whole new empire down there."
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