About Illinois by Sufjan Stevens Album
Illinois (or "Sufjan Stevens Invites You To: Come On Feel The Illinoise") is the second album in the so-called 50 States Project, which later turned out to be a stunt. The album focuses on Illinois and includes some things from Sufjan’s past as well. The artwork for the album originally included Superman but was eventually replaced (or, on some albums, flat-out removed). Contrary to popular belief, this is not because DC Comics filed a cease and desist. Rather, Asthmatic Kitty’s lawyers advised against this copyright infringement and a sticker of balloons was placed over it. They had also made other copies with the balloons printed on the cover or sometimes left that space blank. In the anniversary edition released 11 years later, the Marvel Comics character, Blue Marvel, took the place of Superman on the album cover. Divya Srinivasan did the original artwork and later did the artwork for the re-release as well. The album ‘booklet’ also featured all the lyrics and credits to the album, and the full cover, which included things like the UFOs, Abraham Lincoln, John Wayne Gacy, a Ferris Wheel and Sufjan himself with a banjo and a Bio-Gro hat. Sufjan had written all songs as well as producing, arranging, engineering and recording each track. James McAlister did the drum programming. Like the self-proclaimed “Spiderman” who climbed Chicago’s Sears Tower with no harness, Sufjan Stevens scales dusty prairies, steel factories, and two hundred years of history in the second installment of his 50 State Project, Illinois, a 22-track anthematic tone poem to The Prairie State. An engrossing musical road trip, Illinois takes you through ghost towns, grain mills, hospital rooms, and the City of Broad Shoulders, with guest appearances by a poet, a president, a serial murderer, UFOs, Superman, the goat that cursed the Cubs, and Decatur’s famous Chickenmobile. Sufjan weaves variegated musical styles (jazz, funk, pop, folk, and Rodgers and Hammerstein-like flourishes) and the textures of 25 instruments into a tapestry of persons and places famous, infamous, iconic and anonymous. Invoking the muse of poet Carl Sandburg, “Illinois” ushers in trumpets on parade, string quartets, female choruses and ambient piano scales arranged around Stevens’ emerging falsetto.
