On Sufjan Stevens’s Illinoise

I’ve been meaning to write up something on Illinoise, Sufjan Stevens’s second entry into his admittedly incompleteable album-for-every-state project, ever since I bought it from iTunes last December. Since then, though, I’ve been busy with school, and decided that I probably should pick up and examine the earlier Michigan to get a fuller sense of the series of which Illinoise is a member. The reason I’ve wanted to write up Illinoise is that there is something legitimately amazing about what it accomplishes, something that can get lost in the midst of drooling fanboyness about Stevens’s spirituality and ability to play several dozen instruments, and so I think a close study of the album, and Stevens’s music in general, is in order.

What Sufjan Stevens Does Not Do Well

To define what is so phenomenal about Stevens and Illinoise, we first need to point about things that he doesn’t do well. It may be heresy, perhaps, to say that the man has shortcomings, but once one looks, his limitations are actually quite numerous. First, as I imagine anyone who isn’t an overly emo-come-listen-to-my-quiet-noble-pain type (or cares at all for the musical part of popular music) has noticed, Stevens is not a terribly good singer. His pitch is okay (unlike some pop stars), but his voice’s timbre is a gentle whisper that lets out unvocalized air like an air vent. Not only does this restrict him to a range of an octave in the meat of the tenor range most of the time, but, more importantly, it limits his emotional range. His voice can only express melancholic reflection—it is not capable of humor, exuberance, lust, anger, or any of a number of fairly crucial emotions. More importantly than any particular emotive lack, his voice lacks the power to change its mood, and that makes the narrators of his songs emotionally static and, often, a little less than human. He is only saved by the fact that his reflection is a bit guarded and ambiguous, and thus capable of plausibly assuming at least a range of meditative poses that can incorporate veiled joys and desires. As we will see later, this ambiguity powers most of the best tracks on Illinoise.

Additionally—and this will be a more jarring claim—Stevens is not a terrific lyricist. This is not to say that he is not an ambitious lyricist—anyone who titles songs “All Good Naysayers, Speak Up! Or Forever Hold Your Peace!” or “The Predator Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us” could never be accused of that. Nor do I claim that he is not an interesting or gifted lyricist—certainly the parallels between the absentee father addressing his son and that of God addressing His children that the two verses of “Vito’s Ordination Song” manage to evoke are far more difficult to pull off than either the “Ooh I love you baby”s of most pop or the random assortment of images that power questionably profound late 60s psychedelia. But his lyrics are not the polished poetic masterpieces that most Stevens fans think they are. Too much of Michigan, certainly, is covered in generic pity-me blahness. For example, take the lyric for the opening track, “Flint”:

It’s the same outside
Driving to the river side.
I pretend to cry
Even if I cry alone.
I forgot the start.
Use my hands to use my heart.
Even if I died alone.

Clichés all, and not a single original idea amidst them. To demonstrate how uninspired these lines are (as pure poetry, that is), imagine them screamed by Linkin Park. Fit right in, don’t they? This may seem so intuitively ludicrous, but often Stevens trades in the same stock images, rhymes, and themes as most run-of-the-mill writers of mockable whinefests. Sometimes he can go above and beyond them (often with stunning results) and sometimes he can’t, but he doesn’t always acknowledge the difference. Even in Illinoise’s wannabe-hit-single, “Chicago,” we get this bit of pompous lyrical inanity that, unsaved by any specific surrounding context, also fails the Linkin Park Test:

If I was crying In the van, with my friend It was for freedom From myself and from the land

More tears and big abstractions, used to easily grab unearned sympathy. And this is only one variety of Stevens’s derivative lyrical taste: we have not yet talked about Stevens the generic anti-advertising/mass culture decrier, Stevens the boring born-again, Stevens the spokesman for the hopeless rural poor, etc. And, outside of his wonderful song titles and the occasional blithe postmodern element, his lyrics make no attempt to push the limited emotional range of his voice: his lyrics are typically portentous, self-important, and dour.

What Sufjan Stevens Does Do Well

But how could Stevens be merely a hit-and-miss writer? When so many intelligent people claim such powerful responses to his songs, how could it be that his lyrics are not really profound? Many people, particularly those of the teenager-who-just-got-into-REAL-music variety (that is, like me in tenth grade), have the pre-conception that it is the lyric that defines the song—“Little Red Corvette” is great due to its twisted imagery, “Imagine” for its utopian vision, “Fuck Tha Police” for its political statement. Indeed, many students I taught over a summer course engaged in a project connecting popular songs to the themes of our term, and not a single one attempted to make a connection beyond the text of the lyric. The music, this type of listener thinks, can help dramatize the subject, but its work must be in service of the lyric—the music by itself is just pretty sounds, meaningless because it lacks an easy referent beyond its own noise.

And in some sense, this naïve approach is true. While instrumental music has its own logic, once a lyric or title is added to give it a context, the meaning of any song has to be routed through the lyric. Words signify things in the world, while pure music does not, and thus has interpretive precedence. But certain songwriters, those who recognize that they are better musicians than poets, can use flaccid or boring poetry as a foundation on which to build the real drama with the music. Indeed, most of Romantic opera is built on this theory, particularly with someone who was his own librettist, like Wagner. Wagner actually was a fine poet, but he knew he was more capable of subtlety in music than in language. So he would use his lyrics to verbally set up an idea, but then relate the verbal idea to a musical leitmotif and then complicate the idea by manipulating the leitmotif instead of the language. For example, in Das Rheingold, we hear Alberich singing a powerful Ring, after which we hear the Ring’s leitmotif, a mysterious and halting arpeggiation that descends and then awkwardly ascends again. That leitmotif then develops and modulates for a few moments until the scene changes to Valhalla—and then we hear Valhalla’s glorious theme, which, despite being backed by a firmer chord progression in assertive brass (eminently appropriate for a royal promenade) instead of the Ring’s murky woodwinds, uses nearly the same sequence of notes as the Ring’s. Wagner has set up the parallel with language, but the real art is in the music—the unexpected transition demonstrates that, even if it has a different setting and coloring, great power is at its root the same everywhere, whether good or evil, proud or cowardly, heavenly or earthly. We know now that the key conflict in this opera, and the three following, will be between these paralleled powers, the Ring and Valhalla. Stevens does not quite have Wagner’s compositional prowess (though, of course, Wagner spent about as much time on the Ring cycle as Stevens has yet been alive)—but he similarly uses lyrics that are not terribly remarkable as a springboard to name and develop ideas in musical terms. As we will discover in a moment, Illinoise is loaded with surprising musical moments that leap beyond their trite lyrics.

However, Stevens is not merely skilled at linking melodies to lyrics. Even more potent, to my ears, are his arrangements. Many gush over Stevens’s abilities to play several dozen instruments, but, while this is no mean feat, it’s not particularly unusual in popular music—Stevie Wonder and Prince also play countless instruments on their albums, as does Paul McCartney (though he does not play many that well). All of those men are innovators in their own way, but there’s a little something more expansive about Stevens. Each of the former men have a distinctive sound associated with them—Wonder plays pan-African-American R&B and soul, Prince plays hard rock flavored with 80s dance rhythms, and McCartney plays whimsical pop standards influenced by early American rock. Each, in short, managed to musically incorporate two or more popular genres with wide appeal to a particular culture. Mass cultures, after all, have tended to operate by identifying major characteristics that both can pull their members together (e.g., blues intervals and rhythm for a black American audience of the mid-20th century, catchy but complex jazz-inflected tunes for the sophisticated set of Depression-era America, etc.), but also separate them from other cultures who lack them. This is the double-edged nature of culture, that it simultaneously works to build community and exclude others from it. Thus it is an important feat of cultural work when a musician fuses the key musical elements of two cultures, as it validates and preserves the importance of each community but also demonstrates that the cultures can peacefully co-exist musically, and by implication in everyday life. Indeed, this is why musicians, like the three above, who can do it tend to have such musical success: their prospective audience is twice as large, and they symbolize an optimism—that cultural pride can exist without exclusion—that most people find attractive.

Stevens does not have the same kind of distinctive sound because he is not merely combining two or three related sounds, as the others did, which is an easier task to complete while still maintaining a commercial sensibility. Illinoise seems to want no less than to combine every single musical genre that has existed in the Prairie State (and thus the country) over the past two hundred years. I can’t think of another popular musician who has made this attempt, certainly not since the explosion of popular genres that came in the years after the gramophone. The closest that I can think of is The Band, whose first two albums somehow made the key lyrical and musical elements of folk, rock, country-western, blues, R&B, gospel, and pop work together seamlessly. In their best songs, like “The Weight,” it is impossible to separate the “gospel” or “folk” or “blues” elements from the rest. Indeed, in their concert film the Last Waltz, there never seems a thing out of place during their collaborations with musicians ranging from Muddy Waters to Neil Diamond to Emmylou Harris to Van Morrison to the Staples Singers.

And still, Illinoise—as distinguished from Michigan, which is content to wallow in slow ballads that employ various drones and acoustic guitars, banjos and pianos—actually goes one further: where The Band limited itself to the major popular genres of 1960s America (and their roots), Stevens adds band music, jingles, movie music, world music, traditional classical, Reichean minimalism, and techno, among others. His expanse is mind-boggling. Granted, he does not intertwine them as seamlessly as The Band did—the techno beat to “Chicago” is easily to locate and filter out, as is the rock guitar to “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts.” But other songs make the styles work in combination so well it is hard to remember that they have separate origins—the bass to “They are Night Zombies!!...” sounds lifted from a funk track, but its pulse lines up too well with the electronic drones, which themselves sound a lot like horror movie music…as would the violins, if only they didn’t resemble the folk strains of “Jacksonville.”

With the exception of “Chicago,” in fact, Stevens seems to be deliberately de-emphasizing the more popular genres on Illinoise, which may explain why he lacks the broad appeal of a McCartney or Prince. But it does make a claim that his music knows history—musical and otherwise—beyond the superficialities of pop, and it gives him more authority to speak for the history and populace of a whole state as he tries to do on Illinoise. In the rest of this paper, I will look at Illinoise song-by-song, highlighting what are, to my eyes, the five most important tracks, to examine how Stevens’s eclectic sense of composition and arrangement attempts to interpret and arrange the American experience.

Illinoise: A Close Examination

“Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois”

Stevens has always dealt with faith in his music. Normally this is a turn-off for me. Stevens’s treatment of the subject in Michigan makes the album a much weaker experience for a non-believer: that he can catalogue endless desolations and still end the album with such platitudes as the repeated “There’s only one God who can raise the dead” in “Oh God, Where Are You Now?” and the insistent “There is a design” in “Vito’s Ordination Song” is far colder comfort than he intends. Illinoise, however, deals with the subject more honestly, and even though I do not agree with his conclusions, they provoke thought nonetheless and are profound enough to deserve dialogue. As Wayne Booth wrote in The Rhetoric of Fiction about Samuel Becket (a writer he loved despite rejecting point-by-point philosophically), “One of [Becket’s writings’] beauties is that it leads me, at every moment of my continuing encounter, to demand the best I can give. Even when I move to the proud moment of resistance, I know that I am wrestling with a powerful angel indeed” (457).

“Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois” is a powerful angel with which to start this album. It is the music that leads: the soft opening chords rest in the center of the piano before taking a dramatic leap into the upper register, which is only sustained for a few moments before retreating in pitch and volume. It is an opening that could almost start a teary-eyed pop ballad, except that it’s just a bit too unstable and uncertain. Certainly the fluttering flute that follows helps point it towards weirder territory without leaving the ballad ethos. Already, we see the universality that a musical ethos like Stevens’s can create; it’s an opening that asks us to take a step, just a step, beyond the usual comfort of pop clichés and start asking some real questions. That the real questions will have religious overtones is not something that puts off those of us who are hungering for serious engagement with complexity in our popular music. And they are only overtones, rather than explicitly Christian content: the lyrics discuss a flying saucer, a “mysterious shape” that takes the form of “three stars…delivering signs and dusting from their eyes.” This song does not affirm the existence of a Trinitarian God, or the Second Coming, as the “mystery” is intended seriously. Indeed, I will accept the equivalence of God and a UFO, as both are half-obscured, mythical entities that I have no basis on which to judge—though proof of the existence of either (which is not wholly improbable in either case) are perhaps the only two things that would seriously force a person like me to re-evaluate my (and our) place in the universe. The song’s unsettled setting and lyrical content evoke the rare quiet moments in which I have looked into the sky and briefly let down my guard against questions on subjects like these that, in wiser moments, I know I have no hope of answering. Having already accepted the unsteady pulse of the music as my own in the face of these visions, the sudden swells of other voices on short phrases like “Or what it was,” take me to the brief flashes where I feel like I’ve suddenly understood something, everything, about what’s going on beyond this world…only inevitably to be unable to state it, and lose the idea as the swell retreats. But even if this idea is lost, it does clear “dust from my eyes”; the song asks us to look at the big ideas that we do not, for the sake of our mental peace, visit often. This is also what the album as a whole asks of us as it takes us on a journey through history and geography. That three-note ascending swell will reappear (of course it would be three notes, for our good Christian songwriter), in various forms, throughout the album, to push us toward such cosmic speculation.

“The Black Hawk War…” instrumental follows, though it is not among the album’s most interesting songs. Its title contains about as many words as the lyrics of the previous song, but they’re more glib and accusatory, since Stevens doesn’t have to actually say them; they make the rather unoriginal (thought certainly true) point that there was a certain amount of condescension and brutality in the various American wars on Native Americans. But the strength of the previous song—Stevens’s ability to personalize and universalize Big Ideas—is gone here; the music uses a series of half-Indian, half-minimalist rhythms (though, of course, the latter derives from the former in part, and the connection is moderately interesting) to build up to…nothing in particular. The music “represents” Native Americans only in a broad sense, and thus can’t say much that is original.

“Come On! Feel the Illinoise!”

Stevens solves that problem of connecting the Big Ideas to the personal search for greater understanding much better in the first of the album’s two-part songs. The first part, “The World’s Columbia Exposition,” is, lyrically, full of historical generalities and reference-dropping about the spirit of American Exceptionalism in 1893 Chicago, with its new inventions, high fashion, and artistic movements, with the requisite internal conflict about where all of this is headed—it is similar to the type of broad social-historical analysis in “Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head” from Michigan (though the latter depicted complexity as a component of urban collapse rather than of development), as well as sharing that song’s use of complex rhythms and instrumental breaks to show the variety and bustle of urban life. It’s in the song’s second part, though, that these well-orchestrated clichés pay off. While the song’s two parts are not lyrically connected, the instrumental break from the first part provides the bridge into the second, implicitly connecting their ideas, while transitioning from 5/4 to 4/4 to bring us into a more private realm. Here, the ghost of Carl Sandburg, the poetic soul of Chicago (at least as Stevens sees him, though one hopes that Stevens would have been able to find a deeper thinker if he’d wished), approaches Stevens, who seems caught up in the same conflicts that the narrator of the first part engaged one hundred years previous: the overwhelming rush of Progress and the difficulties of finding oneself within it. The two accept that it is impossible to keep up—“Even with the rest belated, everything is antiquated”—and that each man is “writing all alone.” The important thing is Sandburg’s question, “Are you writing from the heart?” It’s not a brilliant or original question, but set against the historical and musical background, it makes bigger connections, because if we listen to the end of “writing all alone” and “writing from the heart,” we hear that three-note ascending pattern again. Despite the totally different temporal and musical setting, this theme of spiritual search comes back, this time in a more artistic, rather than philosophic, perspective (and indeed, what is the difference between the two?).

“John Wayne Gacy, Jr.”

This song requires special attention, as it’s perhaps the album’s best song and because it’s very different in both subject and setting from what has come before. Previous songs have made broad attempts to engage the bigger questions of the state’s history, and have required complex arrangements and opaque lyrics. However, this song is simply the story of one man; it’s easier to literally interpret, and its instrumentation is stripped down to a few voices and a guitar (a setting natural to any major genre of American popular music, maintaining the universal appeal). But in the context of the album, it must be read against the deeper yearning for understanding expressed in the first and third tracks. After all, the story of Gacy’s twenty-seven killings does defy explanation; it’s hard to see how his rapes and murders of young boys could possibly fit into any “design” of the kind Vito was assured of at the end of Michigan. To its credit, unlike most serial-killer profiles, this song does not make an attempt to psychologize—the only clues we have is that his father was alcoholic, and that he hit his head on a swingset. So if the song is not trying to work out Freudian motivations, what does it do instead?

As a poem, “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.,” is interesting, but hardly well-formed. Consider this verse:

Look underneath the house there Find the few living things Rotting fast in their sleep of the dead Twenty-seven people, even more They were boys with their cars, summer jobs Oh my God

If this were a poem, that last line would just be an easy, melodramatic way to get out of a verse, as the idea of his victims’ innocence in the previous line is out of steam (nor is the idea of destroyed innocence a terribly new one). But in a musical setting, Stevens makes it work. First, note how the “Oh my God” opposes the “dead” three lines up (itself an awkward cliché out of musical context), which descends a little bit below Stevens’s effective singing range, suggesting that Gacy’s killings are incomprehensible and musically unfathomable, as the absence of psychological investigation suggests. So far, Stevens has found a way to grapple with the unfathomable on this album through his engagement with his heart and faith, and thus when the lyric “Oh my God” ascends into Stevens’s falsetto, wavers, and falls back, it’s not just expressing shock and disgust as a poetic reading would imply. It’s searching for that greater meaning, for the presence of God, among the senselessness of Gacy’s killings. But, unlike the more hopeful first and third tracks, it finds none. When the third line in the next verse, which also ends in “dead,” surprisingly jumps up into an uneasy falsetto, we see Stevens redoubling his efforts to make such greater sense of the indecipherable serial killing. But Stevens finally admits in the last verse:

And in my best behavior I am really just like him Look beneath the floorboards For the secrets I have hid

This verse abruptly cuts off halfway in, and on its last note, “hid” returns to that lower, almost unsingable, register. The weird depths that cause Gacy’s killings are not part of any higher plan Stevens can find; moreover, they’re part of a misty human nature that he is complicit in and lacks the strength to fully plumb or the endurance to continue after. This is why this song is so haunting—it takes a man who has had success grappling with the big mysteries and breaks him down so far that he not only cannot explain the suffering of others, but he cannot even make sense of himself. This is a Stevens who is seriously questioning God, and not being answered

This is the darkest that the album gets—as dour as “The Seer’s Tower” is, its questions are not as existentially crippling as “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.”’s—and it is unfortunate that it happens so early. “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” is followed by “Jacksonville,” an upbeat tale of a blind country boy who seems to be managing his life just fine—as far as he’s concerned, “the Spirit is right and the Spirit doesn’t change.” It’s a fine, catchy character study that does a lot of work on the album’s genre-blending (working together banjo blues with a marching band arrangement and mildly unsettling background strings), but it’s a poor follow-up to the song that precedes it. Perhaps Stevens was aware of this, and brought out those background strings to depict the erratic Mary Todd Lincoln of her later years and therefore suggest that our blind friend’s optimism is ill-placed. But “Decatur” is in a similar boat as “Jacksonville” seemingly a celebration merely of how many English words rhyme with “Decatur,” though its general theme of examining personal crises in the midst of natural beauty is better-done on “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us.” It is not merely that Stevens has not answered the darkness he’s hit, it’s that he seems to be ignoring it entirely. With that, the album’s momentum begins to flag and its concept to weaken. The early placement of this spiritually-crippling ballad is probably the single biggest mistake on the album, far greater than any indulgence in brief instrumental tracks or flippant over-titling. Only the immense variety of Stevens’s gifts, which make even the lesser songs worth listening to on their own merits (at least for the album’s first half), keep it from being fatal.

“Chicago”

As I’ve noted already, “Chicago”—which is rivaled only by “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” as the album’s best-known song—does not have a brilliant lyric. It’s filled with the same lost-on-the-highway clichés that fill many American pop songs; the best of these is Simon and Garfunkel’s “America,” which has a clearly-defined story and arcs through hope into confusion by way of oblique images and mundane details. Largely devoid of character and scene (due, again, to that limit in the humanity of Stevens’s voice), “Chicago” does not have “America”’s lyrical strengths. Even its catchy refrain of “All things go/grow/know” was passé by the timeGeorge Harrison released All Things Must Pass in 1971. But its musical setting is a major accomplishment. If it lacks the deftness of composition found in “Concerning the UFO Sighting” and “John Wayne Gacy,” it is conceptually a major contribution to the album. Though the vocal melody and arrangement is similar to that of earlier tracks, the techno pulse to “Chicago” is new, and is the most contemporary element on Illinoise. It combines with, and subsumes, the strings and drones that have been in much of the album’s first half, and in doing so recontextualizes the spiritual yearnings of the album’s eclectic indie sounds for a popular urban audience. After all, where better to sense the confusion and uncertainty of the contemporary world than in a darkened dance club? If the 5/4 brass of “Come on Feel the Illinoise!” represented the pinnacle of urban sophistication and complexity at the 1893 World’s Fair, this relentless unchanging dance beat expresses the unending and unchanging motion of 21st-century life. The fact that it is not as precisely composed as earlier tracks is actually a strength—this song is about a broad sense of loss that continues unbroken from Chicago to New York, among parking lots and vans and apartments, reminiscent of the cultural heat death that Thomas Pynchon first described in “Entropy.”

Speaking of Harrison, “Chicago” serves as a pseudo-Buddhist sermon for the album much in the way “Within You Without You” did for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In the midst of stories about individuals struggling to find themselves in a chaotic world, one seeker pops out of the haze and accepts powerlessness; it’s a melancholy resignation, but its cosmic awareness keeps it from being a tragic one. The only difference is that “Within You Without You” is better placed, responding to the conflict of the optimism of “With a Little Help From My Friends” and “Getting Better” with the ensuing existential confusion and weirdness of “Fixing a Hole” and “Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” and preparing the escalation of that conflict in the album’s strongest late tracks like “When I’m 64” and “A Day in the Life” (of course, the presence of the especially weak “Good Morning” dislodges this a bit, but not even the Beatles were perfect). Illinoise does things backwards; it starts with the weird and uncomfortable tracks before moving into the more pleasant and weaker ones, which both only half-heartedly relieve the previous doubts and furthermore render “Chicago,” while a strong number and a better track than either of the two preceding ones, a bit purposeless. The song holds on by tying back to the recurring three-note motif: where the motif had ascended in search of the divine in earlier tracks, here it descends with each repeat of “All things go/know/grow.” The descent is stable, like the ascent in “Come on Feel the Illinoise!,” as opposed to the rush of “Concerning the UFO Sighting…”; this is the work of a realist, with an all-too-strong sense of how the forces surrounding him repulse his ability to transcendence beyond the generic fate of all other matter.

The succeeding “Casimir Pulaski Day” also gets caught in this problem of flow. Its restrained instrumentation is quite similar in style and quality to “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.,” and also deals with humanity’s relationship to God in the face of death. Indeed, as pure poetry it is nicely understated, with the parallel between the unneeded “complications” of the narrator’s romantic relationship to his doomed friend and those of God’s relationship to the world standing out as one of the album’s best lyrical moments. But it cannot stand up to the force of the best early tracks. The fact that the album does not soon draw to a close, but continues on for well over a half an hour, drowns the song even more; the album has been so emotionally exhausting so far that there seems little reason to continue. “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts” is a waste of six minutes except as an excuse to include a harder rock element. If Stevens had used it for humor, as the song’s parallel of Superman and God could have had a postmodern levity yet unexplored in the album, it might have worked, but despite throwing himself into a different musical setting, his voice remains incapable of anything other than a tender and plaintive whisper, and thus the song becomes a silly exposition of ideas that have already been explored instead of an interesting new take on them. “Prairie Fire That Wanders About” works a bit as a late album parallel to “The Blackhawk War,” as their steadily-paced drones both mark a routine but fierce destruction of the landscape, but the album’s focus has stumbled enough by now that it’s difficult to tell what Stevens wants to do with such a parallel beyond making the jokey rhyme of “Peoria” and “Destroyia.” The album is on very unsteady footing by now; luckily, the following song, the album’s last great piece, moves things back on track.

“The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us”

This is the album’s only real response to its bleakest tracks—it is a song that remains defiantly joyful in the face of subject matter that is anything but. It begins softly, with a tonally ambiguous guitar and recorder (the instrument of choice for the young and innocent in America). Its opening lyrics and melody are tender, showing a narrator who is young, hopeful, and on the verge of discovering wonders he had hitherto been completely unaware of:

Thinking outrageously I write in cursive I hide in my bed with the lights on the floor Wearing three layers of coats and leg warmers I see my own breath on the face of the door Oh I am not quite sleeping Oh I am fast in bed There on the wall in the bedroom creeping I see a wasp with her wings outstretched

This is a place where Stevens’s voice shines: its delicate jumps in the second verse show both joy that has one foot in naïve exuberance and the other in sad wisdom. Both are deserved: in the coming verses, we learn that he is writing to his best friend, whom he fell deeply in love with after the two were bitten by the wasp while swimming in the Palisades and who proceeded to shun him and run away. In most songs, this story is a tragedy, but in this one it is the love, rather than the eventual loss, that is celebrated. The song’s middle in an incredibly forceful choral and orchestral crescendo, minimalist in structure but not in volume, as it praises “Oh great sights upon this state! / Wonders bright, and rivers, lake.” The love may be doomed, but the narrator doesn’t care, as he is overwhelmed with the power of love unlocked by nature through the little wasp. And the wonder goes higher than just nature, with “Hallelujahs” interspersed through the huge musical canvas (listen how close the “Hallelujahs” sound to the other lyric “We were in love…). Again, as with the album’s opening track, this is not a blind trust in God—it is justified awe at the world and whatever forces shaped it. As we might expect, as the chorus repeats the word “Palisades” over and over, we hear that three-note motif again, rushing upward as steadily and powerfully as it does anywhere. Even in the final verse, when the friend has departed, the echoes of this melody and orchestral punch hold strong, as the narrator recalls his friend and admits his inability to explain the forces around him—the sting was “terrible,” but it doesn’t matter, because he “loves him each day.” The song decrescendos, of course, into a long feedback drone, because the relationship cannot go on, but it is bittersweet, not sad. In the face of the bleakest songs on this album, this song’s ability to salvage sweetness out of tragedy is the most hopeful sign in the quest to make meaning out of life. Perhaps even this sensibility cannot sort of John Wayne Gacy or even the strikes of cancer, but it can find joy somewhere.

From here on, the songs are largely unexceptional. “They Are Night Zombies!!...” has a solid groove and blends genre impressively, but its history-conscious lyrics are too vague to be taken seriously and not playful enough to be really funny (excepting the wonderful use of exclamation points in the title). “The Seer’s Tower” is as trying as “The Man of Metropolis…,” as a four-minute bit of insipid pseudo-mystical piano-fueled cosmic bleakness is unendurable after nearly an hour’s worth of existentially-taxing songs. “The Tallest Man, The Broadest Shoulders,” is over-long, and while its first half, “The Great Frontier,” analyzes the contradictions of American expansionism similarly to “Come On Feel the Illinoise”’s treatment of American technological progress, its second part does not do as good a job at bringing the consequences of it home in a personal sense as on the earlier two-part song, though its repeated, slow ascents do a fair job of raising some final ideas about the dual “Great Goat Curse” of the Chicago Cubs and Satan, as well as looking to the “Great Ghost” to resolve it (he does not). The final track, “Out of Egypt, Into the Great Laugh of Mankind…,” is not particularly exciting either, but its drones and soft piano line, beginning quietly and then building to a respectably intense climax and close, are an appropriately uncertain, forward-looking, and delicate way to walk away from the album’s big questions back into the real world.

Conclusion

But my dismissal of these songs is largely intended in relief to the brilliance of the others; the five I’ve cited are all stunning works, and, song-for-song, the first half of this album can stand up against that of nearly any other concept album for sheer intellectual scope. It uses all of its creator’s varied gifts to come to terms with the history of a specific place as well as the eternity of the universe, and even makes a convincing musical case for joy in the midst of pain (though tempered by melancholy, wisdom, and even fear at our natural physical and moral weaknesses). Such an attempt is all one can ask of an artist.

I’ve noted at various points that I think there’s something about the album’s order that does not work, and indeed, I think this could be a near-perfect album if a few numbers were cut and others were re-ordered. Consider the order below—it cuts two of the album’s weakest tracks and some of its incidental clutter, bringing it closer to an hour in duration, which is a more manageable span. Furthermore, the flow is much better—the jokiness of numbers like “The Black Hawk War” and “They Are Night Zombies!!,” as well as the innocent optimism of “Jacksonville” and “Decatur,” can be better enjoyed without having to bear the weight of the early “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.,” which is properly ramped up to and out of by the surrounding tracks. It even preserves Stevens’s tempered optimism by climaxing on “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades,” rather than either “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” or “Chicago,”—indeed, this order gives the album a clear climax, period, rather than the general sputtering out that it currently has:

“Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois”
“Come On, Feel the Illinoise!”
“Jacksonville”
“A Short Reprise…”
“The Black Hawk War…”
“They Are Night Zombies!!...”
“In This Temple…”
“Casimir Pulaski Day”
“Decatur”
“Praire Fire That Wanders About”
“Chicago”
“John Wayne Gacy, Jr.”
“The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades”
“The Tallest Man, the Broadest Shoulders”
“Riffs and Variations…”
“Out of Egypt, Into the Great Laugh of Mankind…”

But, this aside, the album remains astounding in terms of its musical ambition (and the success rate of its innovations), its compositional prowess, and its . It raises all of the important questions about humanity’s place in the world within a nearly-universal interconnection of American music, and its results, while not making any brilliant philosophic breakthroughs, challenge serious musical thinkers as well as their share of laypeople who take the meditative life seriously, regardless of whether they agree with Stevens’s metaphysics. It may be a less cohesive album than Michigan, but its ideas are far more provocative, and as far as I see, that makes it a far greater contribution to popular music. It provides an apparatus that is magnificently complex without being exclusive on which we can think about our place in the universe.