Sufjan Stevens

I got an email at the start of the week saying he wanted a few hours of our time and that he had a hundred dollars for us. My friend [Shara Worden aka My Brightest Diamond] seemed excited about it, and I thought she was crazy. A hundred dollars? But I was twenty-two, so I did it. I'll never forget watching "Little Miss Sunshine" and hearing the strings from "Chicago" come up front and center in a scene — and thinking about that check. I mentioned it to Sufjan; he said, "Best hundred dollars I ever spent."

(Rob Moose, violinist on "Illinois")

Did Sufjan Stevens really know what he was doing, in those months between 2004 and 2005, when he roped in dozens of people for a few bucks into the seemingly haphazard project of his new album? When he recorded percussion and Wurlitzer tracks with no reference demo? When he had the trumpet solos on the album's most important tracks played by a punk bassist who hadn't picked up the instrument since high school? "He had it all in his head," drummer McAlister later recalled.

And yet, in the end, "Illinois" sounds exactly like he wanted it to: "Like a middle-school band." Above all, like the product of genuine research, first and foremost an inward one. In the most artistically lush way possible, autobiographical elements (which would only explode into the open many years later, on "Carrie & Lowell") mix with folklore and an elaborate "geo-literary" erudition, in the best tradition of the Great American Novel: if one's stepmother is, like all self-respecting stepmothers (regardless of intent), hateful and repugnant, then surely lions, kangaroos and alligators spotted across the great state of Illinois will come for her ("Decatur, Or, Round Of Applause For Your Stepmother!").

The greatness of "Illinois", beyond its content, lies in being tangible proof of moving past "doubt" as the primary psychological and existential — and therefore creative — driving force, and transforming it into "research".

I think now I listen [to music] more as a technician and a researcher. I listen to music constantly for whatever I can get out of it, and I think I've always done that. I find it hard to listen to music just for pleasure. I'm not an instinctive type, I'm more of a utilitarian listener. Like, what's the use of this song? What's the usefulness of this melody for this theme, or message? What are they doing that sounds different, and what can I learn from it?

(Sufjan Stevens, 2006)

Only a year earlier came "Seven Swans", one of the starkest records of Stevens' career, but above all an album that deals with faith, "naturally" from a tormented, questioning perspective — yet one in which Sufjan's writing and arrangements still feel somewhat withheld (which remains part of that record's charm), the product of a struggle. Ever since the more ambitious "Michigan", he had sensed he had something grand inside him, but it's only with "Illinois" that the Detroit singer-songwriter finds his transfiguration.

It's no coincidence that Sufjan's grand project of "an album for every state" essentially ground to a halt after just two — Michigan and Illinois, the two states of his childhood — especially after "Carrie & Lowell", for reasons anyone can understand. But the spiritual map of "Illinois", helped along by the collaborative spirit filtering through the overdubs and the countless voices on the record (a ruckus of makeshift players and manic, exuberant sessions), speaks of acceptance and regeneration, starting with Stevens's most famous song of all, "Chicago", a triumphant catharsis of a Confession set to music.

"Illinois" came out on July 4th, in an America that had just re-elected George W. Bush, and it stands as a manifesto for liberal rebirth: an album that wears doubt as the armor and shield of its own faith (the harrowing discovery of death and pain in "Casimir Pulaski's Day"), but whose liner notes also embody, above all, what Flannery O'Connor (a key reference point for Stevens) described of her own work: "My subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil." So the "Prairie State" is celebrated for its early anti-slavery movements ("Jacksonville") and its chosen champion, of course, is Abraham Lincoln (who began his political career as a representative of Illinois, despite not being a native).

These are political reflections that are, in themselves, insignificant within the bigger picture of this record's artistic weight, but they help pinpoint the spiritual and moral ground of a work that is proud and bold, because it reclaims a personal identity (as an artist, as a believer, and so on) just as the liberal body politic seemed to be reclaiming its own political identity.

Perhaps that's why the musical content of "Illinois" is so tightrope-walking, a parade of majorettes and clowns crying and laughing at the same time. "Illinois" is a panicked, all-encompassing record, in its themes, its tones and the characters it name-checks: just look at the cover, which originally featured both Superman and Al Capone. Sufjan Stevens himself "is" both the legendary Lincoln, the "emancipator" par excellence ("Decatur"), and a serial killer, in the act of grasping a (super)human design.

In the same way, "Illinois" is, musically, a spiritual act of glorifying that design, through its very form, its very example. Within it dance compositions fully in line with the post-nineties American folk of the early 2000s (for instance, "John Wayne Gacy Jr." draws directly on Innocence Mission, another touchstone of American "Christian" folk, but the emowriting of Bright Eyes isn't far off either: "Casimir Pulaski's Day" could be a "believer's" answer to the tragic anthology of Kozelek's later "Benji"; "The Seer's Tower" speaks from a desolation worthy of Jason Molina) alongside avant-garde impulses, like the jazzy 5/4 of the title track's opening section, or the vaguely Sigur Rós-like choral build of "The Predatory Wasp Of The Palisades Is Out To Get Us", and centrifugal detours, like the R&B of "They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back Fron The Dead!! Ahhhh!" or the power-pop interludes of "The Man Of Metropolis Steals Our Heart".

It's a framework that only seems fragmented, held together, naturally, by Stevens's strongly melodic, linear songwriting (the record is packed with memorable themes, if not entirely made of them), and by the vividness of the arrangements (the flurry of hammer-ons on "Chicago" is a perfect example, however microscopic against the whole). But what also stands out is the very way the record was made — semi-professional, perhaps, in technique and means, yet one of the first proofs that it was now possible to make an album that, just a few years earlier, would have required the incomparable resources of a hugely established artist (George Harrison for "All Things Must Pass", for example). A new, "liquid" collective form had become the tool for making music, one in which the real currency exchanged was above all artistic contribution — genuine coin still in circulation (at least before it started turning up in the credits of a successful indie film).

Within all this, as already mentioned, lies the sheer extraordinariness of this work, in the overall vision of its construction, carried out during a period Sufjan himself recalls as one of great creative transcendence, of total immersion in himself and his art. The intricate expressive picture that makes up "Illinois", seemingly impossible to replicate, would go on to set the coordinates within which contemporary folk would be able — and required — to express itself: it would spell out which classical music reference points to draw from (Reich and Glass), what the main source of hybridization should be (Black music), and also what spirit should hang over the work itself — that of a ferment that is first and foremost intellectual, the fruit of superhuman concentration, a kind of manic dream of greatness that, out of the dim light of one's own bedroom and one's own subconscious, becomes tangible reality thanks above all to the contribution of others.

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10/09/2017