2025

So smoking is what the people my age are doing
Usually not cigarettes, vaping if that counts
but I don't trust either. So I take one or two
single hits, single-use, and it's beautiful out
A big blue sky, the cemetery across the street
if I look down towards the water I forget we're
in a small city. So another time I'm embarrassed
I fell asleep on your couch. I've fallen asleep
in your bed before this, but that's different
I meant to do that, or something, whatever it is
Curled my arm around your shoulders like I was sure of it
So I cough and it hurts when we drive up into the snow
In the actual woods, its cold on our hands and our faces
outside of this big empty house. Puts me off smoking from a bong.
So sex is what the people my age are having, so I've heard
and I want it like an obsession. I don't want it, but
I'm obsessed, a curiosity like heat in the walls of my throat
I quell with 2 and a half bottles of water while I'm at your house
My experiences are half of what they should be. When I get my first kiss
it will be like in 3rd grade, how my lips brushed against the face
Of a boy I didn't like, and because I wasn't looking where I was going.
Felt red. So warmth is what I need, or sight, or thoughtlessness
because people my age are not that special but I'm afraid
I don't have the capacity for any of this. That I will sit
in the mud that pools out after an orgasm, the one that helps me sleep
tugging that makes me writhe I am tempted into the satisfaction
undoing a knot. Being sticky. And so I'm afraid my questions
will be smoke in my lungs, hacked in uncontrolled bursts, and
I'm still looking for a reason to be this way. There may be something
I'm forgetting and it has happened before, but I need history,
dull blade, I am the only one who is doing this all for attention. I don't
want attention. I just want to watch.

Sufjan Stevens has since admitted that his ambitious '50 states project', announced in 2003, was more for the purpose of promotion than it was a true intention. There were only three albums that came directly out of this project— Michigan (2003), Illinois (2005), and The Avalanche (2006). Michigan is the state where Stevens grew up, and the album dedicated to it reflects that fact. Filled to bursting with personal experience, stories of complex relationships, and intimate tributes to working American life, Michigan was a promising first installment to this short-lived series. While an incredible work in its own right, just two years later Michigan would be overshadowed by the masterwork that is Illinois. On Stevens' official website, the album is boasted as “the highest-rated album of 2005 on the Metacritic review aggregator site”, citing glowing reviews from various music media sources, and accolades such as Album of the Year from The 2006 PLUG Independent Music Awards. The Avalanche contains outtakes from Illinois, though Stevens says it was only publicly released due to its preceding album's broad popularity.

Compared to Michigan, Stevens does not have as close of a personal connection to the state of Illinois. He spent the latter half of 2004 researching and writing the album. Although he says in an interview with Pitchfork that his research habits are “hit or miss”, his dedication to the subject matter is obscenely obvious when regarding Illinois' lyrics. Tracks such as “Come On! Feel the Illinoise! ...”, “Decatur...”, and “The Tallest Man, the Broadest Shoulders...” (many of these songs have quite lengthy titles) feature ample reference to Illinois history and culture, nearly overwhelming on a first listen. Even still, recounts of personal experiences like the ones prevalent on Michigan are quite present on Illinois. Interwoven with and influenced by references to broad societal and cultural history, Stevens explores his own personal history and ideas of self-conception.

Sufjan Stevens is an indie rock artist, often influenced by folk and orchestral music in his compositions. He comes from a large, Midwestern family, has a complex relationship with his mother, and identifies himself as Christian. Despite his statement to Village Voice that “I don't think music media is the real forum for theological discussions,” and his resistance to being called a Christian artist, his faith frequently makes its way into his lyrical content, simply by way of Stevens being the one writing. Stevens is also a queer man, a fact that has only been confirmed recently as of my writing. His music has alluded to his sexuality in the past (as is to be seen on Illinois), however his most recent album, Javelin (2023), was explicitly dedicated to his late partner, Evans Richardson. All of these facts influence not only his writing, but also how fans interpret and analyze his lyrics. Stevens is rather private, even in interviews, about these personal and delicate subjects. This allows his writing to be all the more intimate. In interpreting his lyrics, especially those autobiographical, audiences will inevitably filter their analysis through their own inner worlds— and a lack of defined facts will make that bias stronger.

“Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois” directly references what it claims in the title. Also known as the St. Clair Triangle or The Southern Illinois incident, on January 5, 2000, Melvern Noll witnessed a large, triangular UFO-- a vision that was later backed up by local police. Referred to as a “revenant” in the first line of the song, Stevens immediately draws connection between the UFO and a divine vision. The words “three stars” reference the three lights in the sky (two white, one red) reported by witnesses, and the Holy Trinity, and to the guiding star that led the three wise men to the birth of Jesus. “Then to Lebanon, oh God” Stevens croons, naming both a city near Highland and a country referenced in the Bible as part of the promised land. In this, the opening track, Stevens uses a well-known Illinois historical event to explore a theme which relates to his identity— a holy sign, an alien form.

There is another track, later in the album, that tackles similar ideas. “The Seer's Tower” is a pun on Illinois' Sears Tower in name. The Willis Tower, colloquially referred to as the Sears tower, boasts the highest occupied floor of any building in the United States. Repeated between this song and “Concerning the UFO…” is biblical allusion, a theme of bearing witness to the world-changing and supernatural.

In the tower above the earth
There is a view that reaches far
Where we see the universe
I see the fire, I see the end

The speaker sees the apocalypse, the end of the world. Stevens evokes the Tower of Babel, divine punishment due to human hubris. And alongside, he works his personal history into the words:

Oh, my mother, she betrayed us, but my father loved and bathed us

Perhaps a reference to mother earth or God, turning against the wills of man, or perhaps a reference to Stevens' own complicated relationship with his mother. She left his family when he was only a year old, having struggled with mental illness and addiction. For Stevens' family, that may have felt apocalyptic. Where “Concerning the UFO…” opens the album, a vision of a revenant, “The Seer's Tower” comes much later on the album, signaling the end.

“Come On! Feel the Illinoise! (Part I: The World's Columbian Exposition -- Part II: Carl Sandburg Visits Me in a Dream)” is where the true onslaught of Illinois references first appears. Part 1 speaks to the 1893 World's Fair held in Chicago. The commerce, the advertisements, inventions— diet soda, cream of wheat products, the ferris wheel. In one breath it is a celebration of product, carnival, while in another it is a critique of it.

Oh, God of Progress
Have you degraded or forgot us?

Part 2 is a counterpoint. Illinois-born writer and poet Carl Sandburg visits Stevens in a dream, asking him to write.

I was hypnotized, I was asked to improvise
On the attitude, the regret
Of a thousand centuries of death

Made to confront his own morality, and by extension the morality of all people—

Even in his heart, the Devil has to know the water level
Are you writing from the heart?

Even the Devil must know right from wrong— are you being honest? Stevens' individuality reflects on all peoples in part 2, whereas the universality of the Worlds' Fair influences all individuals in part 1.

Perhaps the clearest example of personal introspection via well-known history comes in the track “John Wayne Gacy Jr.”. Gacy is Illinois' most prolific serial killer, famous both for the horrors of his crimes, as well as being a real life version of the 'killer clown' troupe. Stevens approaches this story with a strange tenderness, both in musicality and lyric content. “In all the crime novels I'd skimmed and in all the news clippings I read, there was a deliberate obsession with finding the source of his depravity. What went wrong, everyone asked. What made him this way?” Stevens says in an interview with Gapers Block. The opening verse describes some of the childhood experiences that may have influenced Gacy's later violence— his father's abuse, a traumatic head injury. Then, the song recounts how Gacy was well-liked by the people around him,

The neighbors, they adored him
For his humor and his conversation

It was a shock to the local community when his crimes were exposed.

Twenty-seven people
Even more, they were boys
With their cars, summer jobs
Oh my God
Are you one of them?

Gacy's victims were all young boys. Not just a number, but people with lives and commitments. By asking “Are you one of them?” Stevens could be referring to the listener, drawing upon a shared humanity with the victims. Or perhaps asking himself, once a young boy with a summer job. Or he could be speaking to Gacy, abused in his childhood. The next verse covers the horrific details of Gacy's crimes. He sexually abused his victims, often when they were sedated.

He took off all their clothes for them
He put a cloth on their lips
Quiet hands, quiet kiss on the mouth…

The way that Stevens sings is somber, delicate. The descriptions feel uncanny when paired with his almost-whispered vocals. The words “quiet kiss”, as if from a lover, rather than a violator.

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

In the song's outro, Stevens compares himself to John Wayne Gacy. “I believe we all have the capacity for murder. We are ruthless creatures. I felt insurmountable empathy not with his behavior, but with his nature, and there was nothing I could do to get around confessing that, however horrifying it sounds.” He explains in the aforementioned interview. This intention, on the surface, contrasts with the message of “Come On! Feel the Illinoise!…”, in which he alludes to the inherent goodness within people. Though, perhaps both are true. It takes an incredible amount of bravery to display sympathy for, compare oneself to, a serial killer— especially considering that both Gacy and Stevens have struggled with their sexualities. Stevens says that he, too, is capable of great cruelty. That he, like everyone, hides the darkest parts of himself “beneath the floorboards”. Gacy is a perversion of that complex humanity, the seed of which exists in all of us.

In his interview with Gapers Block, Stevens discusses the lack of distinction between fact and fiction on Illinois. Although many of the experiences referenced on Illinois bare resemblance to experiences from his real life-- many of the locations are places he has never been. However, the fictional aspects of these lyrics are presented with the same sincerity as the factual ones. This serves Stevens' goals in that it allows him to inject his personal stories with no regard to setting, rather using Illinois as the vehicle to explore his most difficult moments.

This idea is present on the most well-known track of the album, “Chicago”. It does not particularly matter that Stevens drove to the city of Chicago specifically. The song is, at large, about gaining a change of perspective in order to work through difficult times. This could have happened in almost any location, but the fact that Stevens sets the scene in Chicago lets the song slot nicely into his concept album.

Further, the track “Decatur, or, Round of Applause for Your Stepmother!” explores Stevens' complicated relationship to his Stepmother. He describes how he “did everything to hate her” in the opening verse of the song, but later questions that hatred, and instead calls for her celebrations. All throughout, he refers to the city of Decatur, Illinois (a place that he likely did not grow up with his stepmother), rhyming every verse to its name. He mentions Illinois historical figures-- Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln-- and speaks on the remerging of Civil War soldiers who were buried in shallow graves. Stevens weaves these aspects together expertly, to the point where a listener cannot tell where fact ends and fiction begins.

“Casimir Pulaski Day”, a track named after an Illinois state holiday, is a tenderly devastating song about Stevens losing a romantic partner to bone cancer. It returns again to the motif of Christian faith, now confronting how one's faith is challenged in the wake of personal tragedy.

Tuesday night at the Bible study
We lift our hands and pray over your body
But nothing ever happens

And in the final lines of the song:

All the glory when He took our place
But He took my shoulders and He shook my face
And He takes and He takes and He takes

It implies that God is not powerless to stop the tragedies that we experience, but rather that tragedy only happens through the ever-intentional hand of God. It is a difficult and traumatic thing to grapple with-- how grief and loss can change one's world view. While it can be assumed that, like many of the other songs, the events described in this track's lyrics are at least in part autobiographical, it cannot be assumed that the events are entirely factual. The lines “On the first of March, on the holiday / I thought I saw you breathing” could represent reality as it was, or it could have been fictionalized to fit the album. March 1st is Casimir Pulaski Day.

One track that is undoubtedly tied to factual history is “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts”. Temporarily abandoning personal narrative, Stevens instead explores morality through the city of Metropolis and Superman. Metropolis, Illinois is a real city which claims itself as Superman's hometown, due to Superman being from a fictional city of the same name. It sports a large painted bronze statue of the hero in front of the county courthouse, and hosts an annual Superman celebration over the second weekend of June. Stevens got himself into some copyright trouble in regards to this song-- although Superman is only ever referred to as “man of steel” in the lyrics, the inclusion of this track inspired a graphic of Superman to appear on the original album cover. As Stevens' bio on his website says-- “Though slated for general release on July 5, 2005, the album was briefly delayed by legal issues regarding the use of Superman in the original album cover artwork. In the double vinyl release, a balloon sticker has been placed over Superman on the cover art of the first 5,000 copies. The next printings had an empty space where the Superman image was, as with the CD release.” In the second chapter of “Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics”, author Jeff T. Johnson recognizes the strange morality of this change-- how copyright infringement is considered a more serious wrong than the references to molestation in “John Wayne Gacy Jr.”. “The Man of Metropolis…” inherently deals with peoples' morality, similar to “...Illinoise!”. In the lyrics, Stevens struggles with the inherent goodness of people, a desire & obligation to help those around you (contrasting with how he paints cruelty in “John Wayne Gacy Jr.”) as well as the qualities one needs to be a lover. Must one be cold and strong as steel, or warm and hurting? The question goes unanswered.

The final track that I will speak on in this paper, although it is only slightly over halfway through the album, is “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!”. This song was the primary evidence of Stevens' queerness before Javelin, and relays a romantic/sexual encounter Stevens had with another boy at a Methodist summer camp. Stevens has given various accounts of this story. In an interview with Salon regarding Planetarium (2017), a later project from Stevens, he describes a relationship that is likely the same one outlined in this track. He refers to it as his first sexual experience, one that happened when he was around 16. He tells a more robust story in live performances of the song-- that he attended this summer camp every year, and one year he became friends with another kid. He describes them doing everything together-- “We go swimming, we were swimming buddies, and we go sailing and we were sailing buddies, and we go canoeing and we were canoeing buddies…”. At some point Stevens and his camp friend have an encounter with a large, intimidating wasp-like creature. From a live performance in 2018, “We saw this thing in the sky… at first we thought was a hawk or a vulture, but then it made a buzzing sound, and it had this funny little stinger sticking out of it, and it had wings like a pterodactyl, and it sounded like a unicorn when it was singing sweet songs of the angels of heaven, coming out of this thing… crazy.” Stevens describes this thing in such a fantastical way that it garners laughter from the audience, unsure of what to make of this strange creature. He goes on to recount how the thing tried to bite him and his friend, how they escaped and were then forever haunted by the memory.

“The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!” is framed as a memory. It's first verse:

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

Seeing the wasp triggers the memory of this intense experience from Stevens' childhood, and the instrumentation sweeps the listener away to recollection. In the song, Stevens describes the events non-linearly, but of course the facts of the story don't matter. The vitality of the song exists wholly in the essence of the story, fictional or factual, and the emotions it brings with it. The listener is brought into the tenderness of Stevens' relationship to his camp buddy, the fear at both the unidentifiable wasp, and the newness of the sexuality between them.

Throughout this paper, I have covered most songs on Illinois, however it is important to note that I have certainly not highlighted every track. Many songs contain few or no words, leaving only their (often lengthy) titles, or present ideas that are reflected similarly in other songs. Mentioning the fullness of this album is important to me, as I believe that this paper simply cannot give any reader a full understanding of the album on its own. I grew up closely to Illinois, and other Sufjan Stevens projects. My parents are fans of his, and I will always associate “Chicago” with putting up Christmas decorations. Similarly to Stevens himself, I grew up in the church (although I don't personally identify with Christianity anymore) and I belong to the LGBTQ+ community, having struggled with my identity because of these facts. It goes without saying that my personal lense will skew how I read Stevens' lyrics, but it is because of my close connection to Stevens' work that I retain confidence in my analysis. I believe that Stevens' writing has shaped my own taste, and my own work, teaching me to abstract and fictionalize my own personal experiences in order to be better understood by more people. It is a feat to have written Illinois on its own, not to mention the masterful instrumentation and atmospheric composition that brings Stevens' art to life. More than anything, Illinois is a collage. Of history, personal and impersonal, fact and fiction. It is a series of events tied together by a singular subject, a theme that builds itself around all other aspects of the work. “Even native Illinoisans will approach this record as tourists,” Stevens says, “because everything's been rendered through a particular imagination that naturally transcends reality.”

I'm sorry for drawing you the roach, Gram
I'm sorry for feeling nothing, not crying
And I'm sorry for making you speak for me, Mom
As if I was too good for myself, too good for love
I'm sorry for forcing tears, forcing screaming, red-faced in a shitty quarter-home bathroom
For hiding in my room so long
I'm not at risk, I'm lucky,
I'm lucky to have you at all

I'm sorry that I don't believe, God
that I don't go to church,
how I stand but don't sing
I tried, I did, I want to say
How quickly I forget
that the clouds parted over prayer,
your moon shone down on my head

I'm sorry your first child never lived,
And I got her name a year spoiled,
would be better valued on a grave