Sufjan Stevens’s Illinois was, according to the huge cross-section of voters who make up the Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop critics’ poll, the 3rd best album of 2005. The Epinions Music Section voters placed Illinois as 2005’s 6th-best album, and the Tris McCall Report poll slotted it at 14th. I voted in all three polls, and despite having owned Illinois since the week it came out, I didn’t list it on any of my ballots. Clearly, this did Mr. Stevens no harm; nonetheless, I was wrong to overlook his brilliant, lovely, overreaching record.

It was post-poll commentary that helped me recognize Illinois’s worth to me: not the praise, but three well-argued criticisms of the album. I will quote them, and respond to them, because they are sensible, and because they inspired me to take Illinois from my shelves for a couple more spins. In this time the tunes not only lodged themselves in my head – since then I have gotten used to having a soaring brass section in my head give way to a cycling banjo line, or a piano chord repeat and refract across my cortex as a remembered flute practices bird-calls over it, and I’ll think “where’s that from?” before realizing “oh, right, Sufjan Stevens” – but also taught me that the album’s claimed flaws mean zilch to me.

1. Robert Christgau, who likes the album in a modest way, filed it among music that would fit in the year 2045’s predicted “typical Ango ethnic music … the booming classical music scene”, specifically saying Stevens is, “like Steve Reich” (?!), “reconstituting 19th-century melodicism and color without corning everything up”.

Anglo, it is. I’ll state right here that any discussion of racial divisions between “black” and “white” music will be full of broad generalizations and stereotypes, falsehoods permeating even the clearest statistical truths; but I’ll also point out that when Bright Eyes and the Faint hired a rap group, Mars Black, as their opening act at a Winston-Salem concert, the number of black men onstage (three) was higher than the number of blacks I’ve sighted in the audience at _any_ non-Public-Enemy concert I’ve ever been to.

(If anything, white music is the ethnic ghetto. The Public Enemy audience was very racially mixed; the mostly-white Pazz & Jop voters picked Kanye West albums as the best of 2005 and 2004, as they’ve honored OutKast, Lauryn Hill, and many others; and even a long-dead black musician like Marvin Gaye is so admired, among all races, that middle-schoolers praise achievements in almost any field as “that’s _so_ Gaye”.)

Illinois, unlike the state, is as white as driven snow is rumored to have once been. Sufjan’s voice is a delicate, pure tenor, jumping accurately from note to note rather than sliding melismatically like a soul singer. He makes liberal use of (white-girl) choirs, of piano (classical, not boogie-woogie), of a string quartet, of oboe and flute, of banjo and accordian, of sleigh-bells and shakers and a triangle and clapping hands. The drums often suggest John Philip Sousa marches. The funky “They are Neighbors! They are Night Zombies! Run for Your Lives! Aaah!” is, in fairness, built heavily on Superfly and Motown, but you would never use the other 93% of the disc to show how the white man done stole the black man’s music and re-packaged it.

Or, to quote a stupid criticism (from the very smart Tris McCall), “How many six-minute vibraphone jams does a fella need?” Those are glockenspiels, technically, like in an orchestra or the Joshua Tree; vibes and jams are for jazz bands. Sufjan’s pieces are tightly composed; I assume sheet music was involved, the counterpoint melodies and time signature switches carefully plotted.

One of the clearest divisions between white and black music (please repeat disclaimer about over-generalizations here) is that the musics associated with black people have, like their churches, been noted for spontaneity, for being caught by the moment. Jazz is the obvious example for instrumentalists, gospel and freestyle rap for vocalists, but even as rigid a form as the blues pays much respect to the ability to solo, or to wail or grunt with sudden pain. White people mostly needed the beat poets to introduce these concepts, and the beat poets were famous for hanging out with blacks in jazz clubs.

Which was great, and did a lot for the civil rights movement and for basic human decency. That said, I rarely like beat poetry. If the poet can’t explain what his poem means, I want it to be because the poem is complicated and layered and resistant to summary, not because the poet has no freaking clue. Jazz, to me, sounds like ten minutes of people wandering in search of a good idea, to each five minutes of them playing any. Gospel singers should sound possessed, ecstatic, so I feel awkward in wanting to ask them “Are you alright? Do you need to sit down, can I get you anything?”

The problem’s mine, I know, but pre-planning is right for me. When I write, I’m constantly backtracking and crossing stuff out, and even then my first finished draft will be at least 40% crap; it takes effort to get down to the 24-28% crap range that I feel ready to publish. I don’t mind playing the fool in person, making up songs or tunes or dances – that’s different – but even there, if I’m making it up on the spot, it will mostly have slapstick value, while if I think about it for fifteen minutes first it has some chance to be slapstick-funny yet also sort of _good_. Sufjan Stevens borrows from traditions that are heavy on forethought: folk storytelling, hymn singing, orchestral composition, the precision studio production of Phil Spector and Brian Wilson and the Beatles. I like that. Call me repressed and you may be right, but I’m the one bobbing my head and grinning as I type this and listen.

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2. Tris McCall, who grants Stevens’s immense talent, challenged Illinois on its very premise. “Folk-rocker Stevens made a name for himself by writing with great sensitivity about two subjects he knows intimately: post-industrial Michigan and evangelism. Unfortunately, back when he was an unknown, he also announced his intention to do an album about every state in America -- and the [critical establishment] appear to be holding him to it. Illinois is his first foray away from familiar territory, and it feels like the fifth-grade homework assignment it evidently was: ‘Stephen A. Douglas was a great debater/ but Abraham Lincoln was the Great Emancipator’. Glgaaaahhah … Such a big deal has been made about this stupid 50 States project that it probably feels to him that there's no way out of the corn-maze. Mr. Stevens, that's Jesus Christ on the phone; he is releasing you from your absurd conceit”.

Or less charitably: “If some Brooklyn hipster sat up one night with a search engine and a crappy old folk-history of my state, and tried to make an album out of that, I’d come out swinging like 50 Cent on ‘In My Hood’”.

Tris makes one point here that I second: if Sufjan feels trapped by his album-about-every-state promise, he should stop right away. Two points, actually: the Douglas/Lincoln rhyme is lame, and “Decatur” (which contains it), though folky and gentle in a pleasantly upbeat shuffling way, was a pedestrian and too-obvious choice for a single. What I’m not convinced by is the assumption that Stevens is trapped. I think it’s as likely that he finds “Write what you know” to be limiting, and benefits from having to bounce off of topics that aren’t his field.

I have a bias here: I own, and enjoy, State Songs, the solo album by John Linnell of They Might Be Giants. Here is what Linnell has to say about South Carolina: “Lift that fork, eat that snail/ garcon, summon up a new cocktail. Crash my bicycle, crash my bicycle, in a big South Carolina wreck”. About Maine: “Maine! At the top of the charts/ has crushed my evil heart”. About Iowa, the state where I spent more than two decades of my life: “Iowa is a witch, she’s a witch. She likes the conical hat”.

Does Linnell know anything about South Carolina, Maine, or Iowa? Probably, but that wasn’t at issue. He’d written a bunch of peppy melodies for primitive organs, synthesizers, and drum machines, and he needed words for them, and he grabbed onto state names and started writing. My poems and song lyrics need gimmicks to get going too; some of them stay gimmicks, but a few don't. Either way, I need something random to get me started. (This is probably why, as an essayist, I’m a reviewer: it’s a platform from which to launch.)

So maybe Sufjan’s reached that point. Illinois’s songs, unlike Linnell’s, reference many people and events from Illinois. “John Wayne Gacy, Jr”, a sad lament with Simon & Garfunkel-style leaps of harmony, acoustic guitar, and rippling piano, is an empathetic (but still creepy) bio of Gacy, the beloved birthday clown who murdered hundreds of children. The triumphalist first half of “Come on, Feel the Illinoise!”, piano and brass and vibes and drums pumping along in 5/8 time, centers on the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the town’s expansion into a center of world commerce. “The Tallest Man, the Broadest Shoulders” – where the piano and handclaps, the mediaeval brass and spiraling modernist clarinet tunes, shuffle onto the scene in 11/4 time – uses Illinois as the (former) model of the Great Frontier, where the rising young big city’s newspapers and boxing matches and whorehouses co-existed with the one-church towns, and the farms that fed the urban nation even while launching new dreams.

“Prairie Fire that Wanders About”, a short dreamy hymnal-with-woodwinds built on skewed chords and intrusively syncopated drums, at least name-checks some Illinois thingies. A lot of Illinois is name-checking, really: just because Sufjan _starts_ by researching a state he doesn’t know, doesn’t mean he’ll end up there. “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is out to Get Us” and “the Man of Metropolis Steals our Hearts”, heartfelt musical extravaganzas, are detailed stories of young love and lust. The propulsive “Chicago” is about traveling while poor, naïve, and wide open to new emotions; it could as easily have been “New York” or “Green Bay”.

The softly strummed and French-horn-accented “Casimir Pulaski Day”, named for an Illinois holiday that honors a Polish general, is simply about watching a loved one die of cancer, recalling their youth together, and being deeply Christian but still kinda peeved. “All the glory that the Lord has made, and the complications when I see His face in the morning in the window/ All 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”.

Tris McCall writes intensely local songs, and doesn’t like places to be mere spots on the map or collections of tourist attractions. Tris – who loves gangsta-rap and is almost as likely to pick albums of the year by Mos Def or the Pharcyde or De La Soul as by white indie types – believes in Keeping It Real. To me, keeping it real is the necessary act of people (including too many blacks) for whom survival is up for grabs: you have to think of reality when it might bust your chops, burst your locks, or simply drown out your thoughts at any minute. The modern First World is as wealthy a civilization as has ever been created, though, and while the U.S. allows disgraceful poverty to linger in ghettos, most of us have the freedom to _not_ keep it real. We can look at a house or a tree or a book and free-associate, come up with unrelated ideas that may mean more to us.

Another man (Douglas Adams) might watch a cricket match and imagine what would happen if a sofa suddenly appeared, floating in the middle of the field with two men (one of whom has a bone in his beard), while a UFO hovered and let a tall thin alien stride down its ladder. (The sofa suddenly disappears: “Well, that’s one less mystery”, the announcer chirps.) Or a woman (Octavia Butler, black but not poor) might look at her cozy L.A. neighborhood, read news reports about the economy and global warning, and sketch out what her town looks like in 2020, planning for the still imaginary.

Sufjan Stevens looks at Illinois and sees the half-forgotten legends and love stories that could’ve happened anywhere. Why _not_ Illinois?

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3. Jessica Hopper, a Chicago-based critic who chose Sufjan’s album among her favorites of the year (“I enjoy [his] marriage of the ecclesiastic and the vaguely erotic”), warmly invites him to tour Chicago with her. She (addressing him) would “show you the cool things around town that you did not sing about on your record: drive under the Green Line tracks where a car chase from the Blues Brothers took place, the fern room at the Garfield Park Conservatory, the top-floor atrium of the Harold Washington Library where the floors are marble and cool and very clean and no one is ever there so you can lay on them and look up into the downtown sky or just read the books you checked out, the Soul Vegetarian vegan soul food restaurant run by the African Hebrew Israelites, the Baha'i temple in Willamette which gets a lot of god in the architecture and has seven gardens.

"If you are not scared of dark isolated places there is always the train-line land bridge that runs through the industrial corridor to downtown where there are tons of baby rabbits and great discarded things—last time I was up there there was part of some old fair ride and the sign to some mid-'60s hair salon with those sequiny letters. We can sneak onto the elevators at the Drake Hotel and look at the lake at night—and if it's fall they have apples in baskets in the hallways that are for decoration, but if you are me, they are for stealing and eating”.

That's a nice invitation; if I were Sufjan, I’d take her up on that. With these experiences, he might write a new and very different album about Illinois: an album set in the now. It would, I’m sure, be excellent.

But the now gets enough attention. Concepts of the now get treated as real even when they’re silly: unless you’re applying for Medicare benefits or a business licence there, “Illinois” is just some goofy mystic unity between quasi-Southern wheat farmers, ghost-of-small-town Wal-Mart clerks, south Chicago slum-dwellers, rich New Trier commuters and high-school debate champions, working-class Peoria stiffs, and Iowans who maintain pretend residences in Moline so they can pay lower taxes. Illinois is a fiction, even as it (wonderfully) sends Dick Durbin and Barack Obama to the real U.S. Senate. It is a myth on which no shortage of people make their livings reporting.

Old-frontier Illinois is also a myth. Even Jane Addams and Benny Goodman and Shoeless Joe Jackson, whose deeds are documented for all to read or hear, are mythical for all anyone notices those documents. Sufjan Stevens is not the best person to bring them back; as “They are Neighbors! They are Night Zombies!” suggests, Sam Raimi might be the only one suited. But it's Sufjan who, for those parts of 72 minutes when he’s not distracted, gives their revival his best shot. I bet they appreciate it; the tunes are lovely and old-fashioned enough they might even enjoy the sounds. I do, for sure.

Recommended: Yes