A Travel Guide With Heart

There are obstacles one must overcome when listening to Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois: song titles up to twenty-five words in length, mini-instrumentals, and, depending on your religious perspective, Christian overtones. Once these deterrents are embraced, the album emerges as a rich and moving portrait of an American state.Illinois is Stevens’ second state-themed album in his ambitious plan to write about each of the fifty. Whether he possesses the endurance to complete such a project, and whether it will remain interesting ten, twenty states in remains to be seen. What makes Illinois successful is Stevens’ adept musicianship, songwriting prowess, and lyrical economy.

Throughout the album, Stevens strikes a comfortable balance between upbeat movements that playfully animate a time and place (“Jacksonville,” “Decatur”) and mournfully bare ballads written in tribute to lives and memories passed. The ballads are especially engaging as Stevens’ gentle manner and almost detached vocal style, which should rob the songs of emotional value, add a haunting and penetrating sense of vacancy, of loss.

“John Wayne Gacy, Jr.,” an accurate biography of the famed serial killer, brings humanity to the man without diminishing his horrific actions or trivializing the lives he took. With “Casimir Pulaski Day,” about a friend dying of cancer, Stevens expresses the confusion and pain of a family in crisis with a series of scenic lyrical triplets that proves Stevens a uniquely poetic storyteller. He sidesteps maudlin melodrama with ease, maintaining his subjects’ dignity.

The album’s strengths wane as it progresses. Weighed down by religious content and pretty, but unnecessary, instrumentals, it loses focus. Nonetheless, the album is enough to make the idea of seventy-plus minutes about West Virginia sound good.