Hot Platters: Illinoise - Sufjan Stevens

Today's Hot Platter is a 2005 concept album, Illinoise, by American singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens. Illinoise was Stevens' fifth studio album which features songs that reference places, events, and persons related to the U.S. state of Illinois. Illinois was part of a planned series of albums that covered the fifty states in the USA.

Initially that series began with the 2003 album, Michigan, and later on Stevens acknowledged that the whole idea of recording a series of album on the fifty states was a joke. In 2009, Stevens told Andrew Purcell of The Guardian in October 2009: "I have no qualms about admitting that the fifty states project was a promotional gimmick." Illinois was released on July 4, 2005, on Rough Trade Records in Europe and in the US by Asthmatic Kitty Records.

For this second album in the "series", Stevens chose to focus on Illinois with this recording because 'it wasn't a great leap', and he liked the state because he considered it the center of gravity for the American Midwest. Before creating the album, Stevens did extensive research by reading literature by authors who hailed from Illinois; Saul Bellow and Carl Sandburg, as well as studying immigration records and history books about the state of Illinois. Throughout the planning for the album, Stevens made the deliberate decision to avoid current events and focused on historical themes; this led to Stevens taking trips through several locations in Illinois and asked friends and members of Internet chat rooms for anecdotes about their experiences in the state.

Subsequently, Stevens went to work and composed all the music, followed by Stevens recording it by himself at The Buddy Project studio and in his own apartment in New York. Stevens: “I was pretty nearsighted in the construction of Illinois. I spent a lot of time alone, a few months in isolation working on my own and in the studio. I let things germinate and cultivate independently, without thinking about an audience or a live show at all”.

To achieve a DIY feel for the album, Stevens utilized lo-fidelity equipment. His process of creating the Illinoise album involved recording the material on 8 track tape and inexpensive microphones such as the Shure SM57. The mixing and other production elements achieved using the Pro Tools production workstation.

ILLINOISE TRACK LIST

1."Concerning the UFO Sighting near Highland, Illinois"2:08

2."The Black Hawk War, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself in the Morning, or, We Apologize for the Inconvenience but You're Going to Have to Leave Now, or, 'I Have Fought the Big Knives and Will Continue to Fight Them Until They Are Off Our Lands!'"2:14

3."Come On! Feel the Illinoise!" (Part I: The World's Columbian Exposition – Part II: Carl Sandburg Visits Me in a Dream)6:45

4."John Wayne Gacy, Jr."3:19

5."Jacksonville"5:24

6."A Short Reprise for Mary Todd, Who Went Insane, but for Very Good Reasons"0:47

7."Decatur, or, Round of Applause for Your Stepmother!"3:03

8."One Last 'Whoo-Hoo!' for the Pullman!!"0:06

9."Go! Chicago! Go! Yeah!"6:04

10."Casimir Pulaski Day"5:53

11."To the Workers of the Rock River Valley Region, I Have an Idea Concerning Your Predicament, and It Involves Tube Socks, a Paper Airplane, and Twenty-Two Able-Bodied Men"1:40

12."The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts"6:17

13."Prairie Fire That Wanders About" (Peoria)2:11

14."A Conjunction of Drones Simulating the Way in Which Sufjan Stevens Has an Existential Crisis in the Great Godfrey Maze"0:19

15."The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!"5:23

16."They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!"5:09

17."Let's Hear That String Part Again, Because I Don't Think They Heard It All the Way Out in Bloomington-Normal"0:40

18."In This Temple as in the Hearts of Man for Whom He Saved the Earth"0:35

19."The Seer's Tower"3:53

20."The Tallest Man, the Broadest Shoulders" (Part I: The Great Frontier – Part II: Come to Me Only with Playthings Now)7:02

21."Riffs and Variations on a Single Note for Jelly Roll, Earl Hines, Louis Armstrong, Baby Dodds, and the King of Swing, to Name a Few"0:46

22."Out of Egypt, into the Great Laugh of Mankind, and I Shake the Dirt from My Sandals as I Run"

Come On! Feel the Illinoise! Part I:

The World's Columbian Exposition Part II: Carl Sandburg

Concerning the UFO sighting near Highland, Illinois

In 2005 the second part of the Fifty States Project was announced. This time the subject would be the state of Illinois. The following information was gleaned from Sufjan Stevens’ own site (sufjan.com) Illinois is described as follows: "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. The lyrics mention many persons, places and events from the Illinois, like a UFO sighting near Highland, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, serial killer John Wayne Gacy, the state celebration of Casimir Pulaski Day, Superman (Metropolis was based on Chicago), manufacturer Caterpillar, author Carl Sandburg, former president Abraham Lincoln, the Sangamon River, the Chicago Cubs, the Sears Tower and multiple city names." (sufjan.com)

Casimir Pulaski Day

"All of the songs on Illinois were written, recorded, engineered, and produced by Stevens, with most of the material being recorded at The Buddy Project studio in Astoria, Queens, and in Stevens' Brooklyn apartment. As with his previous albums, Stevens recorded in various locations, with additional piano recorded in St. Paul's Church in Brooklyn; strings and vocals performed in collaborators' apartments; electronic organ recorded in the New Jerusalem Recreational Room in Clarksboro, New Jersey; and vibraphone played at Carroll Music Studios in New York City. Stevens mostly created the album without collaboration, focusing on the writing, performance, and technical creation of the album by himself: 'I was pretty nearsighted in the construction of Illinois. I spent a lot of time alone, a few months in isolation working on my own and in the studio. I let things germinate and cultivate independently, without thinking about an audience or a live show at all.'" (Wikipedia)

The Various Covers of Illinoise

"Artist Divya Srinivasan made the album cover, combining several Illinois themes, including Lincoln and Al Capone. Just moments before the initial release problems arose surrounding the depiction of Superman. DC Comics, owner of the image, agreed to the sale of the first pressings under the condition that the Superman image was deleted from further pressings. This ultimately led to various cover pressings:

01. with the Superman image
02. with the Superman image covered by a balloon sticker
03. with balloons instead of the Superman image
04. no image at the position containing the Superman image
05. with an image of the Marvel character Blue Marvel

Despite the controversy the cover won the PLUG Independent Music Award in 2006." (A Pop Life)

Sufjan Stevens on stage

Shortly after the album’s release, Stevens went on tour with the album. The band he took along with him was named The Illinoisemakers. From September to November 2006 Stevens mounted another tour in Europe. During the second tour the costumes were changed from University of Illinois cheerleader outfits to outfits with butterfly and bird themes, including wings.

Illinoise (Full Album Mix)

When Interviewed about the Illinoise album by an online magazine, Stevens stated that "On some level, this record dramatizes the cause and effect of industrial capitalists like George Pullman or Andrew Carnegie. Pullman designed a more comfortable sleeping car for the railroads, as you know, but his urban planning balked. It was feudalism all over again. He did a lot of damage for the sake of capital gain. Our disdain for capitalism today has been commodified by people like Michael Moore and documentaries like The Corporation. But it's interesting to see how these issues began to simmer early on. There has always been tension between entrepreneurial enterprise and ethics. Perhaps because wealth and power rely on the subjugation of man, and man is not always willing to go along with that. Pullman's ambition for an ideal, efficient society did not necessarily take into account the convictions of the human heart, or the human soul. Every society suffers from a similar disease."

FINAL THOUGHTS

"Album tracks like John Wayne Gacy, Jr., Jacksonville, Decatur, and Predatory Wasp give descriptions of the people the everyman feels a bond with through humble, vibrant folk plucks, offering some of the most intimate moments on the album. Particularly, the juxtaposition of Gacy’s horrific acts being described with beautifully mellow guitar, alongside the coy allusion to a sexual awakening at the center of the lattermost track.

When the album’s focus diverts from its main stories, the momentum is upheld by a healthy dosage of interludes. Mary Todd rounds out Jacksonville, Night Zombies isolates its String Part, Decatur endearingly ends with One Last ‘Whoo-Hoo! for the Pullman!!, and the ambient soundscapes of A Conjunction of Drones and In This Temple offer a more lush sense of resolve.

As peppy as it is, Illinois doesn’t shy away from the darker shades of the everyman’s psyche, as captured in Casimir Pulaski Day, an ode to a late friend and the crisis of what he finds to be the same inconsequential faith embedded in America’s past, alongside the desolate image of the Christian apocalypse painted by The Seer’s Tower.

With the album’s progression, we find that there’s no single light Stevens sees Illinois in. No, his stories run a wide gamut of emotions from pain and critique to reveling and optimism, and it works so well because Stevens uses his assured tone as a strong common thread.

Illinois is an album shaped by the many hats of sound and story it wears to illustrate its central interchange between the factors of America. While Sufjan Stevens is one in an extensive lineage of artists with something to say about this country, the balance in his empathetic tone and his taming of magnitudes is what influences what he says and how he says it.

The American experience of today comes prepackaged with the most turbulent ends of the country’s complexity, and whether it’s through an organized push for what’s right or the latest oasis of outrage, the experience has found increasing definition inside the space between what it stands for and what it condones.

The final crescendo of Illinois, seeing the everyman starting his next adventure in “the great laugh of mankind,” accompanied by triumphant fanfare, is a resolution that seems out of reach to an extent. If there is a “great laugh” that governs us, it may very well exist to placate a great scream at our own unrest.

However, Illinois labors on being nothing if not truthful to the values of a modernized country, and even if Stevens’ interpretation exists as a distant beacon, there’s something vital to be found within the harmony of the album’s acknowledgment that our darkness and light are equally elemental, firmly communal forces. As “The Man of Metropolis” puts it: “We celebrate our sense of each other/ We have a lot to give one another.”

It goes without saying that no songwriter of this generation could tame the beast that is the story of America quite like Sufjan Stevens, but it doesn’t end with his 74-minute odyssey — it continues in us. Illinois is a tale written by the everyman in us all, and it’s still being written to this moment, which poses one question: How will the story of America continue?" (The Consequence of Sound)

Sufjan Stevens live at KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic, part 3:

Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts

Sufjan Stevens and the

Curious Case of the Missing 48 States

"Remember when indie rock turned into a whimsical, state-by-state geography lesson? Sufjan Stevens was our banjo-plucking pied piper, traversing the map while delivering two outlandishly baroque masterpieces about specific U.S. states. First came Michigan. Then Illinois. Then Illinois again, sort of. And then—well, we’re still waiting.

Michigan and Illinois seemed to unite the whole cynical swath of music lovers: Here were two kid-friendly, parent-friendly, grandparent-friendly concept albums capable of topping Pitchfork’s year-end lists and delighting your history teacher all at once. Yet by the last decade’s end, the singer’s overarching conceit had been mysteriously abandoned: Sufjan Stevens did not write and record an album about all 50 states. He didn’t even make it out of the Great Lakes region. No wonder millennials have trust issues.

I was reminded of the 50 states project recently while traveling through Michigan. As I passed Ypsilanti and Romulus—names familiar to me, I confess, because of Sufjan Stevens—I couldn’t resist revisiting the singer’s tribute to his home state. Then I thought of the years I spent waiting for 48 more state albums, and I wrote a silly tweet. It touched a nerve. “This hits hard,” one fan responded. “I even paid to see him dance in neon in 2010 cause I craved that sweet sweet Dakotas double album that never was.” I’d tapped into a diaspora of Sufjan fans, of people who’d spent their college years sipping Natty Light while secretly wondering when the singer might tackle Alabama.

My subsequent investigation has uncovered indie-folk corruption of the most galling degree: Stevens never really planned on recording 50 state albums. That was a joke. We were duped, our trust stolen in an audacious act of grand theft banjo. (Stevens was not available for comment for this article, and while I’d love to tell you that is because he is busy conducting scrupulous research into Delaware, that’s just wishful thinking.)

It’s hard to stay mad. Without this absurd PR stunt, two of the greatest indie-pop albums of the 2000s might never have been heard by a wide audience. That they were is largely a testament to Daniel Gill and Marie VanAssendelft, the two publicists who worked on Michigan. The untold story begins in 2002, when Gill briefly became Stevens’s manager. Back then, Stevens was a little-known 27-year-old songwriter from Michigan, a skilled multi-instrumentalist with a wispy voice and unabashed Christian faith. He had two albums under his belt and a close association with the indie-pop sibling outfit Danielson Family, but did not, by most measures, seem headed for household-name status.

Then came a kernel of an idea. In late 2002, Gill took Stevens to dinner at a Chinese restaurant in New York. They chatted about the songwriter’s budding career. Stevens mentioned he was working on two albums: one he wrote on piano—a concept album about Michigan—and another he wrote on banjo, which became Seven Swans. “I was like, ‘OK, you’re doing a concept album about the state of Michigan. Why don’t we just say in the press announcement that you’re going to do an album about all 50 states?’” Gill says. “It seemed like such a ludicrous idea. Because even if he puts out an album a year—which is ambitious—it would take 50 years. And he was already in his late 20s. We were all like, ‘No one’s really going to believe that you’re gonna do this. People won’t take it that seriously.’”

Stevens liked the idea—even if he had zero intention of making 50 albums. He has admitted as much in later years. “I have no qualms about admitting it was a promotional gimmick,” he said in 2009.

“From my perspective, it was like: Let’s just try to get you some attention,” Gill says. “At the time, he had no fan base. No one was paying attention.”

When Michigan (sometimes styled as Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lakes State) was completed in 2003, it was clear that there was something worth paying attention to. The record is fantastic: a sprawling and melancholy song cycle rich with geographic references and compositional eccentricities. But not many knew who Stevens was. “We were struggling, as most music publicists do sometimes, where you know you have an amazing album but just trying to get people to listen to it is super difficult,” says VanAssendelft, then a senior publicist at the music marketing firm Fanatic Promotion. “That’s where we really just pushed forward this 50 states [concept]. ... It was definitely what we used as a hook, in addition to ‘This is a great album.’”

As for actually completing the project, “I think we all knew that was never happening,” VanAssendelft says. But Stevens seemed excited by the prospect of people hearing his music.

The PR team chose to emphasize Stevens’s supposed (read: fictitious) bid to cover all 50 states in his bio and press packet. When people asked whether Stevens was serious, Gill would never give a straight answer. “It was definitely a PR stunt,” Gill says. “He knew it and I knew it.” But journalists were intrigued. “Their first question was, ‘Well, what state is next?’” VanAssendelft recalls. “Because we knew he would eventually be putting out an album about Illinois, that … gave it credibility.” (Gill remembers differently—he says they did not know Stevens would do a second state until later.)

The tipping point came in late July. Pitchfork, the increasingly influential arbiter of indie (full disclosure: I am a contributor there), had given the album a lukewarm review—“a 7.5,” Gill claims, “and it wasn’t Best New Music.” Except the site’s top editor, Ryan Schreiber, had not actually heard it. “We were bugging him to actually listen to it. And then he listened to it and he freaked out and he was like, ‘I can’t believe we gave this album a 7.5,’” Gill says.

What happened next is a matter of some disagreement. According to Gill’s recollection, Schreiber deleted the original review, reassigned it, and published a far more glowing endorsement, with a Best New Music designation and an 8.5 score. Schreiber, however, says he simply republished the same review but tweaked the score. “The review had been sent to me by the writer, Brandon Stosuy, on a night when I was short on material for the next day, and I didn’t have a chance to listen before publishing,” Schreiber says in an email. “I think the score was originally a high 7 or flat 8. Over the weekend, I fell completely in love with the record and asked Brandon for his thoughts on republishing the review with a higher score.” The copy, Schreiber says, was unchanged; the original review does not appear to be archived on Wayback Machine today. Stosuy did not respond to a request for comment.

In any case, word got out. “Once they re-reviewed it, I remember getting calls like, ‘Hey, can you send me that album’—which I had sent, like, three times,” VanAssendelft says with a laugh. Subsequent reviews mentioned that this guy was recording 50 albums about 50 states, spreading the information to newly converted fans. An Irish Times review declared it “the beginning of a career-long project.”

Months before names like Joanna Newsom and “freak-folk” lit up blog comment threads, Stevens was a minor sensation. Here was a Christian singer with an odd first name who made it cool for indie rockers to put down their Pavement and pick up a banjo. On tour, the singer’s shows grew bigger, his crowds more rapturous. “The devotion is the thing that really struck me,” says John Thomas Robinette III, who played drums on the Michigan tour. “It wasn’t the head-bopping type of devotion. It was, ‘I’m going to do whatever it takes to get into the green room after the show to hang out with this guy.’” Robinette had never seen anything like it.

Part II: The Prairie State

Despite the success of Michigan, Stevens did not immediately lean into the 50 states concept. Instead, he quickly followed that album with Seven Swans, a small-scale folk record with a biblical motif and no discernible songs about U.S. states. It was well-received, if not what fans of Michigan had expected.

“I was trying hard to convince him to change the name of Seven Swans and make it a state album,” Gill says. “It doesn’t make any sense. Why would you put out another album right afterwards and not make it about a state? He was like, ‘Well, it’s not about a state.’ I was like, ‘Who cares? Let’s just call it New Jersey or whatever.’ He was like, ‘No, no.’ He fought me on it for sure. He was like, ‘There’s no way I’m gonna make this album a state album.’”

“I think he thought it was funny to release Michigan and quickly follow it up with an album that’s not a state album,” Gill adds. “He likes to play with the audience a little bit.”

Stevens’s prolific drive was astonishing. By the time Swans was released, in March 2004, he was already at work on songs about Illinois, the next target in his star-spangled geography lesson. Why Illinois? “I feel like specifically Illinois and Chicago are sort of the center of gravity for the American Midwest,” Stevens later told Dusted Magazine. He was attracted to the Midwest because it was where he’d grown up. But he planned to branch out. “I think my next state will definitely be in a different region, a different time zone,” he said. (When asked if he’d really cover all 50, he kept it vague: “That’s the intention, we’ll see how far I get,” he told The Guardian.)

In April, Stevens played an early version of “Chicago,” Illinois’s centerpiece-to-be, during a show at New York’s Knitting Factory. The 2006 Danielson Family documentary captures the moment: Stevens tentatively strumming the tune backstage, then debuting the future classic in front of an adoring crowd. “The saying goes that I am recording a record for each of the 50 states,” he tells the audience (a coy choice of words). “Seven Swans is a little break from that. Now that we’ve had time to breathe and reassess the entire project, I’m moving on. We’re gonna end our set with a song from a record I’m working on now called Illinois.” The crowd cheers, thrilled to be let in on this little secret. In the documentary, this leads into a montage of press clippings signifying Stevens’s newfound stardom. One headline proclaims: “The 50 States of Rock.”

That year the singer flung himself into research about Illinois: visiting towns, reading biographies of Abraham Lincoln, studying early immigration records, even browsing local newspapers and police logs. While Michigan drew heavily on Stevens’s personal experiences in that state, Illinois spanned outward. “He just went all in, studying the entire history of the state,” says Craig Montoro, who played trumpet on the album and tour. “In retrospect, that was another giveaway that this was either going to be a lifelong pursuit⁠—he’d be near death by the time he got to the 50th state⁠—or maybe it wasn’t gonna happen.” According to Montoro, this became a running joke among Stevens’s bandmates: “How was he gonna finish this? How old was he gonna be? Which joints would have been replaced.”

If Michigan was ambitious, Illinois was doubly so: a 74-minute symphonic fever dream outfitted with oboes, glockenspiels, sleigh bells, and dramatic overtures. The arrangements were bolder, the song titles lengthier, the time signatures weirder, the emotional stakes higher. The record’s investment in local history ran deep, with sad songs about UFO sightings and John Wayne Gacy Jr. holding court with rousing sing-alongs about Andrew Jackson. Lincoln, of course, was mentioned. That a certain other Illinois senator began capturing headlines and presidential speculation around the time it was released was so perfect you’d think Stevens planned it.

Upon release (during the week of July 4, no less), Illinois was roundly hailed as a masterpiece. Pitchfork did not waffle this time; Amanda Petrusich awarded it a 9.2, calling it “a staggering collection of impeccably arranged American tribute songs.” “Illinois got the best press of any album I’ve ever worked in my career by far,” Gill says. “It was just ridiculous. Pretty much everyone said it was the best album of the year.” (Indeed, Pitchfork, Stereogum, and NPR all crowned it as such.)

Midwestern fans were particularly moved. “Sufjan always felt like an especially important musician that the entirety of the Midwest could claim,” says Aaron Calvin, a longtime fan from Iowa. “Especially since he seemed so interested in elevating Midwestern stories that took place in those specific settings. Growing up in Iowa, it always felt fun to imagine him writing a song about a small town in Iowa because it seemed very possible.”

The singer’s runaway success was surely a function of his ability to write songs that were as emotionally resonant as they were musically and textually intricate. But the gimmick helped. How could it not? In the absence of a fluke hit, indie rock requires a hustle to break through⁠; in some cases, it needs to be “eventized” to be noticed on a wider scale. The imaginative sprawl of the 50 states project promised the former and delivered the latter. It was, for many listeners, genuinely irresistible.

Stevens was more popular than had ever seemed possible, but he remained press-shy. “Letterman and Conan were calling me all the time, like, ‘When can we get Sufjan on the show?’” Gill says. “And he didn’t want to do it. He thought it was crass or something to play on TV.” The singer did submit to non-televised interviews, and the 50 states project was a frequent topic of questioning, given that journalists now took it quite seriously. In a chat with Dusted Magazine, Stevens waxed philosophical about American identity and songwriting. “The states themselves are just kind of the fabric,” he said. “They’re kind of the canvas, and they create very helpful arbitrary guidelines.” Speaking to The A.V. Club in July 2005, he was surprisingly candid: “I’ll admit that it’s all advertising, and all gimmick,” he confessed. “Initially, it was intended just to get attention.”

If that was meant as a veiled admission that he wouldn’t complete an album for all 50 states, the message was not received. During the fall tour, Stevens and his band wore University of Illinois cheerleading outfits. They even opened shows with “The 50 States Song,” a joyous theme song that mentioned every state by name. “Fans were coming to the shows and bringing him stuff about their home state,” Gill recalls. “Like: ‘Here’s an idea for when you do my state’; ‘Here’s a book I think you should read when you do Utah.’ It was crazy. I think I went to three of the California shows—people were like, ‘You have to do California next!’”

The speculation carried over to Stevens’s backing band. “It kinda was a contest among us to try to influence what the next state would be,” Montoro says. “I’m from Texas; I was trying to push him towards that. Other people were like, ‘What about Washington state?’ They were trying to sneak in a little influence in case his mind wasn’t made up.” Band members got in the habit of finding state quarters for Stevens and even gifted him a map of the 50 states where you could plug each state’s quarter into a corresponding hole. “Every time somebody would get a quarter with a state on it, we would say, ‘Oh, hey, does he have this one yet?’ We were all in. Everybody believed it.”

Tom Eaton, who contributed trumpet to Michigan and backing vocals to Illinois, was more skeptical. “I sensed kind of an ambivalence about it,” he says of the 50 states conceit. “I had a hard time seeing him locking himself into that specific project for the next 75 years.”

Part III: The Unsung States

Which state was next? A bluegrass album for Kentucky? A gritty, Lou Reed–inspired New York opus? After Illinois, fans and journalists were eager to speculate, and Stevens seemed happy to join in.

“He played along with the 50 states thing to an amazing degree,” Gill says. “He was going to launch this website—I think he bought the URL, like The50States.com. It was an interactive map of America.” The project never got off the ground. At some point, Gill even floated the idea of outsourcing smaller states to other acts on the Asthmatic Kitty roster: “Every time there was a new Asthmatic Kitty signing, I was like, ‘Just have them do a state album and farm it out!’” But that idea never took.

In a clever segment, NPR convinced Stevens to come up with a song about Arkansas. That song, “The Lord God Bird,” was inspired by an ivory-billed woodpecker rediscovered there. Then, in October 2005, The Guardian reported that Oregon was a “likely contender” for Stevens’s next state. Stevens had spent several summers there as a child, visiting his mother and stepfather. “The state has so far inspired some very simple guitar-based songs from Stevens,” the reporter, Laura Barton, noted.

But the Oregon album never materialized—not unless you count Carrie & Lowell, Stevens’s grief-borne 2015 album, which is thick with references to the Beaver State. (“It is essentially his Oregon album,” Gill says.) Nor did we ever get a Rhode Island 7-inch, as Stevens mused about releasing in that same Guardian profile (“Not all of the 50 states will be awarded a full-length album,” Barton wrote). Instead, he released another album about … Illinois. The 2005 album had yielded such an overflow of material that Stevens released an album of outtakes a year later, called The Avalanche. Here we got tunes about Saul Bellow and Adlai Stevenson and three different renditions of “Chicago.”

In the press release for The Avalanche, Gill wrote: “Sufjan has still not made an official decision on the next state he’ll tackle in his epic 50 States project, but we will definitely keep you posted.” Privately, though, Stevens seemed to be growing bored with the project. At some point—nobody knows when—he abandoned it. Though his next project, The BQE (2009), was also rooted in an exploration of place, he would never release another album about a state.

Meanwhile, fans saw signs everywhere. Calvin, the fan from Iowa, remembers hearing around 2007 that a relative had served Stevens at a local Jimmy John’s sandwich shop. “That kind of fueled our imaginations,” Calvin says, “like, what if he’s going around Iowa getting material or working on an Iowa record?”

By 2009, the faithful were growing impatient. Early that year, Paste editor Josh Jackson practically begged Stevens for another state entry: “Chinese Democracy miraculously saw the light of day last year,” he wrote. “Would it be too much to hope that 2009 is the year of Oregon? Or New Jersey?” Nine months later, Stevens publicly admitted the whole project had been a “promotional gimmick.” This concession was largely buried in a Guardian interview about the BQE project. Many fans never saw it. But the singer’s next proper album, The Age of Adz, was a jarring enough stylistic departure that it was clear he had moved on. (By this point, he had also moved on from Gill, having hired a new publicity team.)

And yet the 50 states project continues to exert a patriotic pull over the indie-rock imagination. Maybe it’s a nostalgic signifier of indie folk’s early-aughts golden period, or an unfulfilled promise, or just a nice fantasy to believe that 48 albums as great as Illinois are lurking just around the corner. Even as Stevens has graduated to Oscar nominations and Pride Month songs, some fans still carry the flag for his unfinished geography project. As the comedian Avery Edison tweeted in 2015, “Don’t keep asking where Frank Ocean’s album is if you’re not doing the same for the 48 U.S.-themed ones we’re owed by Sufjan Stevens.”

The following year, after Donald Trump’s election, an Illinois writer named Nicky Martin called on Stevens to finish the project as a matter of national urgency. “Once Sufjan releases a record for every state, we’ll understand ourselves better as Americans,” Martin wrote in a hilarious and bizarre Medium post. “When we understand our American heritage, we’ll stop voting against our own interests!”

Is there any chance Stevens might eventually resume the project? “I don’t think there’s any way he would consider doing another state release,” says Gill (who, it should be stressed, is not speaking on the artist’s behalf in any capacity). “But you never say never with Sufjan. He already has two box sets of Christmas songs—that’s crazy.” (theringer.com)

In 2006, Sufjan Stevens surprised everyone by releasing an album called The Avalanche: Outtakes and Extras from the Illinois Album! aka The Avalanche. The album is “shamelessly compiled by Sufjan Stevens” and consists of outtakes from the Illinois sessions.

On the sufjan.com site,

Stevens described The Avalanche album as follows:

"The little secret behind the Illinoise record is that it was originally conceived as a double album, culminating in a musical collage of nearly 50 songs. But as the project began to develop into an unwieldy epic, common sense weighed in—as did the opinions of others—and the project was cut in half. But as 2005 came to a close, Sufjan returned to the old, forsaken songs on his 8-track like a grandfather remembering his youth, indulging in old journals and newspaper clippings. What he uncovered went beyond the merits of nostalgia; it was more like an ensemble of capricious friends and old acquaintances wearing party outfits, waiting to be let in at the front door, for warm drinks and interesting conversation. Among them were Saul Bellow, Ann Landers, Adlai Stevenson, and a brief cameo from Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls. The gathering that followed would become the setting for the songs on The Avalanche: Outtakes and Extras from the Illinois Album.

Sufjan gleaned 21 useable tracks from the abandoned material, including three alternate versions of Chicago. Some songs were in finished form, others were merely outlines, gesture drawings, or musical scribbles mumbled on a hand-held tape recorder. Most of the material required substantial editing, new arrangements or vocals. Much of the work was done at the end of 2005 or in January the following year. Sufjan invited many of the original Illinoisemakers to fill in the edges: drums, trumpet, a choir of singers. The centerpiece, of course, was the title track—The Avalanche—a song intended for the leading role on the Illinois album but eventually cut and placed as a bonus track on the vinyl release. In his rummaging through old musical memorabilia, Sufjan began to use this song as a meditation on the editorial process, returning to old forms, knee-deep in debris, sifting rocks and river water for an occasional glint of gold. “I call ye cabin neighbors,” the song bemuses, “I call you once my friends.” And like an avid social organizer, Sufjan took in all the odd musical misfits and gathered them together for a party of their own, like good friends.

From the sufjan.com website: "A careful listener may uncover the obvious trend on this record: almost every song on the Illinois album has a counterpart on the outtakes. Carl Sandburg arm-wrestles Saul Bellow. The aliens landing near Highland salute Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered Pluto. The loneliness of “Casimir Pulaski Day” deepens even further in the foreboding soundtrack to “Pittsfield.” At its best, The Avalanche is an exercise in form, revealing the working habits of one of the most productive songwriters today. As an illustration, the avalanche refers to the snow and rubble that falls off the side of a mountain, or, in this case, the musical debris generously chucked from an abundant epic. It’s unlikely you’ll find a mountain in the Prairie State so the metaphor will have to do."