There's been a lot of talk about Sufjan Steven's upcoming Illinois (which is available now if you order through his label, Asthmatic Kitty), so having all the Sufjan discussion under one convenient thread seemed prudent. I started this in Indie because several people objected to his inclusion in the 'neo-folk' discussion.

I'm on record as not really getting the new record yet, but I've yet to give it a new listen based on recommendations from a few of the kind folks here. But I do have one general commentary...there was a Saturday Night Live sketch a few years back with (I think) Christopher Walken as a record producer and Will Ferrell as the cowbell player for Blue Oyster Cult. The producer kept coming in, take after take, with one demand..."MORE COWBELL!!!" I envision Sufjan, mastermind of the impressively large cast of players on Illinois, repeatedly making one request: "MORE BANJO!!!!"

Given the size of his cast of players, and the complexity and sheer audicity of his efforts, I'm beginning to see Sufjan as being something like Lambchop's Kurt Wagner...the bandleader of an ever-changing, ever-expanding crew of musicians, all of whom are required to put his musical visions on record. Even if I don't end up liking the record more than I do, I can respect the sheer scope of his project.

I have a question about his '50 states' project. You know, Canterbury Tales ended up getting only 22 of the 120 stories that were originally planned for it. Because, the writer, being human, had a maximum lifespan of 70 or 80 years.

Does Sufjan actually think he's going to put a record out for all 50 states? He could do it if he recorded at light speed and devoted his entire recording career to recording tributes to states. But that would be bad, because if he did that we'd never get another 'Seven Swans' type project.

The whole 50 states thing seems a bit silly to me. If I were doing something like that, I'd do it by doing tributes to various countries, and trying to learn the popular styles of music at each country and integrating them into my general style. The 50 states thing seems to me to just be a glorified geography lesson.

I've read a lot of Sufjan's interviews, and it's weird, sometimes he contradicts himself. Some of the interviews (the e-mail ones I think) are really intellectual, kinda bizarre and occasionally hilarious. Once he said that he'll probably never live to complete every state, but he'd pass it on to someone else. Another time he said that not every state would merit a full album, that Vermont would be a split single and other states an EP.

I really like the 50 states idea. I realize it started out as a ploy to get people to listen to the music, but Sufjan's a really intelligent guy and it sounds like he's gonna do research and visit each state that he does.
I'll add more later, but I've got a test in 2 minutes.

thaning God for Metacritic again....I never heard of Stevens until a few weeks back, and have now downloaded about 10 of his songs past and present. Will be buying the Illinoise for sure. Very much like. Buy I must. (sorry, Yoda took over the keyboard)

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/spinning/episodes/03052004

this is a show called spinning on air with super music stud david garland from nyc public radio. it's a pretty amazing interview right before the release of seven swans. it is about 2 hrs long, but if you kinda skip forward through the songs (be sure to watch out for a great solo banjo performance of chicago, if memory serves me) it'll be shorter. i believe it touches on most of the questions and issues surrounding sufjan, including the 50 states, his odd background, his first name, and his christianity. i think. i listened to it like a year ago, so i don't really remember.

hope that maybe helps clear up some stuff, or satisfies some interests.

(ps jan 2004 spinning on air has another sweet interview with jim o'rourke, if anyone else digs o' like i do)

quote:

Does Sufjan actually think he's going to put a record out for all 50 states? He could do it if he recorded at light speed and devoted his entire recording career to recording tributes to states. But that would be bad, because if he did that we'd never get another 'Seven Swans' type project.

I don't Sufjan will hesitate to change up his sound just because he's doing state albums. He always says in interviews that he doesn't think pop artists are pushing themselves far enough and that development and change are really important to him. I remember he once said that he was definitely not done with electronic music, which I'm excited about even though I didn't like Enjoy Your Rabbit.

I've heard a couple radio interviews with Sufjan. I'll try to find the links for them......OK, here's one with KEXP.....here's another one with KEXP. They're both pretty short and include Sufjan and a couple guests performing songs. The interview not eric posted is much longer and better.

quote:

But I do have one general commentary...there was a Saturday Night Live sketch a few years back with (I think) Christopher Walken as a record producer and Will Ferrell as the cowbell player for Blue Oyster Cult. The producer kept coming in, take after take, with one demand..."MORE COWBELL!!!" I envision Sufjan, mastermind of the impressively large cast of players on Illinois, repeatedly making one request: "MORE BANJO!!!!"

That skit is classic. I just saw it last night again. "I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell!"

I also read that he's working on Oregon, New Jersy, Vermont, and Rhode Island.

EDIT: While I was Googling Sufjan the other day I found a place where I downloaded 3 unreleased volumes of Christmas songs that Sufjan did. It's over 20 songs in all. I haven't even had a chance to listen to them yet, but I have high hopes. Here's the link.

They Might Be Giants had once planned a tribute to the 50 states, but that eventually fell in the "too ambitious for practical completion" category.

perhaps he should just do an EP for each state...

...at most.

A song for each would surely suffice, wouldn't it?

I only pray that, when he gets to Minnesota, he pens an ode to the state that elected a libertarian former professional wrestler as Governor. He could call it "Jesse the Body, How You Saved Us from Obscurity" or some such.

quote:

Originally posted by RavingLunatic:
EDIT: While I was Googling Sufjan the other day I found a place where I downloaded 3 unreleased volumes of Christmas songs that Sufjan did. It's over 20 songs in all. I haven't even had a chance to listen to them yet, but I have high hopes. Here's the link.

wow dude. that's amazing, thanks so much for posting that.

Another thing: I happened to get lucky and find a live recording of Sufjan doing songs from Michigan and Seven Swans. The cool thing about it is that he talks between songs and gives a story behind the name and lyrics of three songs. I typed them up and posted them on songmeanings.net. Here's what he says before he plays "The Dress Looks Nice On You." I realize this is long, but I thought it was a great story:

'So when we moved up north we lived here in Pickerall Lake. We took I-75, me and my 2 brothers and my 3 sisters, and we also took a Pommeranian dog, my brother had a california king snake, and we had a dog called a bouvier, bouveitus flanders, which, is a, as you probably know a french sheep-herding dog. They're very beautiful, it was my mother's favorite dog. So we all went in the station wagon we moved up here, into my grandmother's home. It was a summer home, so it was kind of cold in the winter, 'cause the winters up north are very terrible. Anyway, that's where I went to middle school and high school, up there, out of the city, in the country. And there wasn't a lot going on. It felt like going back in time, from moving out of Detroit up there. So there wasn't a lot to do until I hit puberty. And then I met my friend Robin, and she was 18 years old and we went to the same high school. She was a senior and I was a freshman, my first year there. She was really nice, and she had these really big glasses which were popular then, tortoise-shell types. And she had curly hair, which was popular then as well. And anyway, she had a car, which was really kind of cool. Uh, so I was climbing the social ladder, 'cause I had a girlfriend with a car. And I didn't even have a summer job or my driver's license. So we would go driving around sometimes and we'd go to the lakes and the rivers, sometimes we'd go fishing, sometimes we'd go waterskiing. But what she liked to do the best was to go shopping. And there wasn't much shopping up here. 'Cause there's just, uh, K-mart from the last song. There's a lot of K-mart and strip malls and things like that. So we would go down to this, which was the nearest kind of big city, called Travis City, and she had collected these porcelain plates, they were collector's plates, and they had famous people on them, she had one with Mickey Mouse and she had one with Muhammed Ali. She had one with Princess Diana, and things like that. So she would go down to the mall, 'cause there was a store that just had those, she would get those. And she also bought clothing. She bought a lot of dresses, so she tried on this one, and she came out of the dressing room and she says, "Well what do you think of this?" I was only 14, and I wasn't very mature or gracious yet. I didn't know how to open doors for women or buy flowers and things like that. So I said, "Well, it looks kind of complicated." Because this was a time when fashion was really going downhill, and people were mixing kind of paisley and floral and tweed and denim and things like that so it was just all over the place, 'cause I think at that time Madonna was kind of like the fashion role model for most women. So anyway, uh, she said, "No you're supposed to say, 'The dress looks nice on you.'" So, that's what she told me. She taught me a lot of things about that, about how to talk to a woman and what to say and what not to say. So years later I figured this out, and that's when I wrote this song about that.' (Applause)

Thanks to whomever recommended "Casimir Pulaski Day." It's a good song. I started there, and played the record forward.

I'm still not sure I'm impressed, overall. It's got some neat songs on it ("Decatur" and "Metropolis" are really good) but it seems overbaked and way to cutesy at times. maybe that's the point. It's got too much stuff that seems to me to be filler, and not enough cohesive songs.

I'm sure I'll be in the minority, but I doubt I'll find this one in my year end Top 20. Maybe top 50. Cheers for the scope and audicity, but I doubt this one will stay in my "must listens" for much longer.

well i can see how some would feel that way, pE, but i think starting that late misses a couple hugely important (and sort of seven swans-esque) numbers: 1) the UFO track and 4) John Wayne Gacy Jr.
And that way of listening doesn't take into account the totally perfect part B of 3) Come feel the Illinoise (or does part B just sound perfect because it comes in just as part A is beginning to wear on my patience ever so slighty?...no, it's just perfect); and 5) Jacksonville, a song that has a noticeably different feel for sufjan; and my favorite "overbaked" song on the album, 9) Chicago.

That's a serious chunk of the record to generally ignore, and at least 1 & 4 deserve some attention, for their less 50-State-sounding nature.

i would put this record inbetween Michigan (highest) and Seven Swans (lowest, not counting his almost shameful first two records), but that makes it nearly perfect to me. if it had a closing number on par with Vito's Ordination Song (the instrumental Out of Egypt is nice, but weak in comparison to Vito's), i could potentially call the states equal, but i'm not sure he will ever write a song that matches that. actually, i'm not sure anyone can really match that. man do i love sufjan.

I wasn't implying that I was going to ignore the beginning of the record, although some of the most cloying songs seemed to be there.

I think what i need to do is figure out what songs bug me, and program them out and give it another go.

So I've listened to Illinois four or five times since it arrived in the mail this past Wednesday. The back-up vocals homogonize things a bit, I think, but overall I find Illinois pretty engaging, if a bit too long — capping it off with "They Are Night Zombies!!..." would have done a lot to keep everything fresh in my head. I'll listen a few more times before I figure out if I like it or not. But if he can put a 50-State record together without retreading the ground he walked on Michigan and Illinois, I'll start to take him really seriously.

i think Illinois will be my album of the year. That album is packed with more beautiful moments than most artists could hope to capture within an entire career (see: orchestral swells in "Black Hawk War", the whole of "Come On Feel the Illinoise", the jump to falsetto in "john Wayne Gacy, Jr.", the strings in "Chicago", the simplicity of "Casimir Pulaski Day", especially the whole of "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades"). Yes, this is going to be a tough one to beat. I'm not sure if i can say i like it better than Michigan, though. i believe the two are too different to be compared.

i read a few things about his forthcoming projects in a few interviews, and some of it might be true: that Vermont is supposed to be a Christmas album, he's currently working on an Oregon LP, and (most likely jokingly), he plans to give states different format recordings based on size (for example, Rhode Island would be a split 7" or something).

The one area where I think Illinois is much better than Michigan is in those 5/4 orchestral-type songs. On Michigan I thought they were the weakest songs on the album, but on Illinois a couple of them are standouts ("Chicago" most strikingly).

I'm gonna say that I don't think Illinois is quite as good as Michigan, but only because "Predatory Wasps" is the last really good song. "Sears Tower," in particular, drags. He really should've stopped at 16 tracks or so. If you've ever heard the 5 outtakes from Michigan (they used to be available as a free download), on the other hand, you know that it could've been 20 tracks without detracting from the album.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Michigan and Illinois are too different to be compared though, ihgsoi. On the whole they're pretty similar, but there are some notable differences. One welcome addition is the inclusion of a few mellow, upbeat songs in "Decatur" and "Jacksonville." (Coincidentally, I live in a town called Decatur.) The electric guitar in "Man of Metropolis" is pretty awesome too. I'm also excited to hear Sufjan's falsetto, which adds another hue to his already formidable musical palette.

There are some artists that I really like, but I get the feeling that they're not going to keep producing great albums. Sufjan does not give me that impression. I get the feeling that he's only going to get better and that I'll be looking forward to the next Sufjan album for the next 30 years or so.

Today Pop Matters ran the first review of Illinois that I've seen. It's a good review. I've only started reading Pop Matters in the last couple weeks, but I'm really impressed. They've got well written reviews and the few features I've read have been excellent. Has anyone seen any other reviews of Illinois?

Delusions of Adequacy had a very positive review of it a few weeks ago, I believe they had it as album of the week.

quote:

Originally posted by not eric:
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/spinning/episodes/03052004

this is a show called spinning on air with super music stud david garland from nyc public radio. it's a pretty amazing interview right before the release of seven swans. it is about 2 hrs long, but if you kinda skip forward through the songs (be sure to watch out for a great solo banjo performance of chicago, if memory serves me) it'll be shorter. i believe it touches on most of the questions and issues surrounding sufjan, including the 50 states, his odd background, his first name, and his christianity. i think. i listened to it like a year ago, so i don't really remember.

hope that maybe helps clear up some stuff, or satisfies some interests.

(ps jan 2004 spinning on air has another sweet interview with jim o'rourke, if anyone else digs o' like i do)

in addition to this, sufjan just made another appearance with the "illinoisemakers" on "spinning on air" last night, july 1st. i assume the show isn't up yet simply because it was taped just a matter of hours ago, but it should hopefully be up soon (although there is a 6 part slideshow, which ain't bad either) at this url:

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/spinning/episodes/07012005

totally sweet.

(edit) also, fakejazz reviewed illinois a few weeks ago with an 11/12, and 80 user votes have yielded a 10.5/12.

http://www.fakejazz.com/fake/archives/2005/05/sufjan_stevens.php

This message has been edited. Last edited by: not eric,