Sufjan's tour of the 50 states began in his home state of Michigan. It's easy to write about your home state - you know its history, you know its secrets - and Michigan is a convenient state to call home since not only is it the home of a big (decrepit) city in Detroit, but its second city is the home of pinko Moorewellianism. Anyone who has seen "Roger and Me" has some affinity for Flint, so when the album launched off with "Flint (For the Unemployed and Underpaid)," even if Michigan isn't your home, you felt you knew something about it.
Sufjan's second stop is Illinois. Outside of Chicago, what do you know about Illinois? If you're like me, it's hard to name anything else, and Sufjan admittedly had just as little familiarity with Illinois before this album, which makes it a true test to the realizability of this whole 50 states idea. To pass this hurdle, Sufjan submerged himself in books, so the album carries the slight stench of old Social Studies textbooks with lines like "Stephen A. Douglas was the great debator, Abraham Lincoln was the great emancipator" - perhaps enough to make him Sarah Vowell's new favorite band but not choice source material to most. However, Sufjan's music on Michigan was successful despite the gimmick, not because of it, and Sufjan's card catalog rummaging provides Illinois a few bursts of inspiration, even when its connection to the state seems fleeting at best.
While the songs you'll notice first will be full of bombast as Sufjan brings out his Broadway soul, its two best are stark and bare, like the best moments of Seven Swans. One of those bursts of Illini inspirations is "John Wayne Gacy, Jr.," a song about the serial murderer from Chicago. Delicately mixing acoustic guitar and piano, Stevens spends the first two stanzas discussing the man and his murders, alternating between shock - Stevens' voice quivering at the sheer body count and horrible details - and humanizing Gacy - ruminating on Gacy's childhood and the care he took with some of his victims. However, even that humanization of Gacy doesn't prepare us for the final stanza, as Stevens finds some connection between his sins and Gacy's, singing "in my best behavior, I am really just like him/look beneath the floorboard for the secrets I have hidden." With that line, the guitar drops out, and the piano chords meld together into a peaceful tone as Stevens audibly lets out a breath, signifying his absolution.
The other great sparse song is "Casmir Pulaski Day," named after a Polish pride parade in Chicago. Stevens brings out the banjo to sing an amazing song of love and loss similar to the book/movie "A Walk to Remember." While the song opens with a terrible rhyme of "dome" with the puppy love's affliction, "cancer of the bone," everything afterward is pure beauty, like "Tuesday night at the bible study we lift our hands and pray over your body but nothing ever happens."
While those quiet, introspective songs are the ones I end up playing on repeat over and over (and over), the brassy ones are good too. Track 3 - "Come on Feel the Illinoise" (props for going through with the obvious joke) - is unbelievably catchy and ample reason to start the album over again when you reach the end (despite its unwieldy 74 minute length). The song comes in two parts. "The World's Columbian Exposition" is a bright and sunny discussion of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago that helped put the city into prominence during the gold rush. A rollicking piano rhythm and a fast-talking female backup singer help Sufjan highlight the buildup and expansion of the city over a century ago. After a bridge, the song segways into "Carl Sandburg Visits Me In a Dream," Sandburg being the poet whose works about Chicago helped inspire Sufjan while he was preparing the album. In this soft, gliding, full-spectrum part of the song, Carl asks Sufjan to make sure he's writing from the heart. He says he is, but sorry Carl, he doesn't on this and many of the more upbeat numbers; however, that doesn't make them less fun.
"The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts" - a song about Superman due to the town of Metropolis, Illinois naming itself "the official home of Superman" - alternates between gentle picking and a spirited crunchy rocker. On the second rock explosion, the group creates a truely joyful mass of sound with a choir of da-da-da-das, blurts of trumpet melody, and genuine electric guitar (seldom heard from Sufjan).
Stevens shows a more soulful side to his pop music on "They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back From the Dead!! Ahhhhh!," working in more of a Curtis Mayfield influence than I have heard from him before. Bass funk begins the song, and soon disco-style strings sweep in. As usual, Sufjan does a great job of mixing his vocals with female members from the group. Here, the woman's voice delivers the chorus in a fast, punctuated style, and Sufjan's voice coos underneath in a soft, slow delivery. (Can't be sure of what the connection to Illinois is here - the song is tangentally about the Romero movie "The Night of the Living Dead" which is set in my home state of Pennsylvania!)
Highly recommended. That is, unless you're from Illinois, in which case you'll probably be disappointed he found so little actually about Illinois to sing about. He devotes a song to Decatur, but only because it rhymes with "hate her," shoehorning it into an apology to his stepmom with lots of verbs that rhyme with "hate." He even name checks Philadelphia and sings about a road trip to NYC, for chrissakes! Not the best picture postcard for Illinois, just compare the cover art with Michigan's.
At this point, I'd say chances are Sufjan doesn't make it to my home state (and probably not yours either), which is probably for the best. It's useful to have phrases like "Abraham Lincoln" and "Chinese zodiac" to hand to your librarian, but he would do just as well without that crutch.
