You’re in Michigan now, where Stevens spent the first 22 years of his life, and everything he’ll tell you about the state is interfused with the years he spent there, becoming himself. Trace your fingers along the peeling paint and green-gray metals of the Rust Belt’s belly, imagining what it must have been like when the factories shut down and the wheels stopped turning. Look to the Canadian border and watch deer bound through enormous forests of aspen and fir. Turn your gaze northeast instead, over to an awkwardly shaped duo of peninsulas cradled tenderly by four of the Great Lakes. The record is tall and proud, a far-spanning, painstakingly hand-sewn tapestry of the Prairie State.īut we’re not talking about Illinois today, really it’s been raved about enough. On its face, Illinois may be a greater feat, if just for the man-hours it demanded from Stevens in its creation-the Midwestern instrumentalist did months of eyeball-straining research on the state’s history, from Saul Bellow to Casimir Pulaski to John Wayne Gacy, Jr. Stevens’s breakout third album suffers from constant comparison to its broader-scale, more polished sibling. And then, perhaps, after all that’s out of the way, you remember 2003’s Michigan. Maybe then you remember the 50 States Project. When you think about Sufjan Stevens, you think about 2005’s expansive, tomelike Illinois.

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