Illinois - Sufjan Stevens
This album was in the same dump of mp3s that my friend loaded onto my computer along with the two October Project albums and several others. I’m not sure what my impression of it was at the time, but it must have been significant enough to warrent buying the album for real, or else I was influenced by various cultural references to Sufjan Stevens as one of the quintessential “Indy” artists.
Which has led me to ponder a certain question: what makes music “Indy?” It’s not just being made independently of a major record label, even if that was what inspired the name of the genre. After all, “Pop” came from a shortening of the word “Popular,” but also indicates a very specific kind of sound that isn’t present in all popular music. So far I have not been able to string together a set of adjectives that describe “Indy” music even as I see it myself, let alone society in general. As such I prefer not to use the word at all. But when talking about some of the albums in my collection, it feels weird not to at least acknowledge that the word seems to mean something to an awful lot of people.
A lot of the songs on this album are like those of The Arcade Fire and The Polyphonic Spree in that they have a lot of weirdly-assembled voices and instruments working together in a surprisingly coherent way, but different in that Sufjan Stevens’ particular voice dominates even when he’s not actively singing. Other voices and instruments are much more in the background even when they are the aural focus.
The moods of the songs range from dismal depressing to bright and cheerful, with lots of interchange between them. It’s a concept album in that all the songs are about things and people and places associated with the state of Illinois - duh - but apart from that, there isn’t any overarching theme connecting anything. Some evoke imagery of mythic grandeur, others are deeply personal nostalgia, others seem to rush through historical name-dropping with a fervor matched only by Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire.
Before making this album, Stevens made one about his home state of Michigan. I’m told that his intent was to create an album devoted to each of the fifty United States. That would be a tremendous undertaking for one man, even if he did nothing else for his whole musical career (how many people even have fifty albums to their name?), so I doubt that it’s ever going to happen. And in the ten years since Illinois’s release, there have been no more state-centered albums. My guess is that Illinois is a hard act to follow up on. Just listen to it. It doesn’t need to be part of anything greater than it already is.
Next: Toxicity
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