Album ReviewSufjan Stevens: Illinois

Rating: 9.3

It's always harder for me to write about what I love than what I don't. Especially when the object of the love in question is something as ethereal as music, love is mercurial; dislikes are concrete and easy to identify, and the sarcastic wit of lit crit lends itself to complaining more than praising. Which is why it took much longer to write a review for Illinois than Coldplay's X&Y.

That said, I can tell you countless things I love about Sufjan Stevens' new album, Illinois. I love the cover art and the subtitle ("Sufjan Stevens invites you to come on, feel the Illinoise!"). I love the ridiculous song titles (#17: "Let's hear that string part again, because I don't think they heard it all the way out in Bushnell"). I love the atmospheric strings, the folksy banjo, and the muted trumpets that are at once a lamentation and a triumphant joy. I love the gossipy speculation on what will be next in the series (Idaho: "Girls, Rock Your Boise!"). I love that Stevens has the chutzpah to even joke about writing an album inspired by each of the 50 states; I love even more that we're all praying he's not just teasing us with feigned ambition by following up Greetings from Michigan with this absolute aural gem.

I can't vouch for the accuracy of the Stevens' invocation of Illinois, since I've never been there (I know, sad). I suppose his real test will come when he writes about one of my two locales. So I'll stick to specifics here. The highlight of the album is "Casimir Pulaski Day," nominally about the state holiday but actually a powerfully sad, questioning, redemptive song reflecting on the death from cancer of his lover. Stevens is deeply religious, and in this song he challenges the benevolence of God ("Oh the glory when He took our place / But He took my shoulders and He shook my face / And He takes and He takes and He takes") but when he closes the song with muted trumpets it's easy to see him profoundly sad but comforted by God's grace--just one example of the vulnerability of faith and the frequent apparent contradictions between heart, spirit, and mind that are present in Stevens' music, and presumptively, in the state character of Illinois.

This album, like the state, is bookended by history. From "The Black Hawk War" (an instrumental invocation of Illinois' violent founding), to "The Tallest Man, the Broadest Shoulders" ("Oh Great Illinois / Given what you lost, are you better off?") the stamp of progress, and the questioning of its value, is a persistent theme. Stevens gives us the Sears Tower as a modern-day Babel, the 1896 Columbian Exposition as failed herald of the New Jerusalem, Superman as Savior. He gives us songs about geography too ("Chicago," "Decatur," "Jacksonville"), but like all good travel writing, Illinois is not so much about a state as a state of mind. On "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades," Stevens lies, "I can't explain the state that I'm in." With this album, he's proven that he can explain more than just arbitrary territories; he's a poet laureate of the uncharted, borderless states of our personal histories and most human experiences.