Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois, one of my favourite albums, turned 20 this July. It’s the second in a series of concept albums Stevens originally intended to encompass every state in the US. Michigan, its predecessor, is a very good album, but you can tell that it was only a first step for Stevens; a promising experiment. The lush orchestral arrangements (most of which are played by Stevens) that make so much of Michigan excellent are much more cohesive and complex in Illinois, deftly stepping between gentle coming-of-age vignettes and epic orchestral and choral arrangements retelling the state’s history and urban mythologies. The album is meticulously researched, and rich with detail.  “I wanted it to be a real survey,” Stevens told Dusted in 2005. “Kind of a historical survey, but I didn’t want it to be heavy with information; I didn’t want it to be too political, and I didn’t want it to be too didactic… I wanted it to be almost like a movie soundtrack, but without the movie.” 

The first time I listened to Illinois I was on a double-decker bus that was taking me from Auckland to Tauranga. It was summer. The bus had red pleather seats and broken air conditioning. From my seat on the second storey I could watch as Auckland’s industrial outskirts thinned and gave way to endless, absurdly green farmland. Illinois was the only album downloaded on my phone, I think by accident. 

The album opens looking at the sky. The syncopated piano rhythms of Concerning the UFO Sighting Over Highland, Illinois build and lull, their avoidance of a satisfying conclusion creating a sense of uncertain awe that continues throughout the album. Rural New Zealand is very different to the dense urban landscapes and mythical road-trip Americana that Stevens goes on to describe in Illinois, but both had the same weight at that moment. Though most of the track titles in Illinois refer to specific elements of the state’s past, nothing in the album is a straightforward history lesson, and “Concerning the UFO Sighting” doesn’t provide any easy answers about its depiction of the 2000 St. Clair Triangle sighting. 

Stevens has described Illinois and Michigan as “populist”, which I think is an apt, if dispassionate way to describe the way Illinois’ collective voice urges us to take responsibility for each other’s actions, even when we do awful things. The album’s fourth track, John Wayne Gacy, Jr. mythologises the infamous Chicago serial killer by invoking intimate details of Gacy’s fraught childhood and personal life. As the song ends, the sparse piano backing picks up, and Stevens’ breathy voice becomes frantic as he reaches an uncomfortable conclusion: ‘In my best behavior, I am really just like him,’ he confesses, ‘Look beneath the floorboards / for the secrets I have hid.’

By the time Illinois was released, Stevens was already moving away from the accessible, catchy acoustics of his earlier work on Seven Swans and Michigan. In 2006, he released The Avalanche, an Illinois outtakes album he “shamelessly compiled,” as the album’s cover put it, to avoid continuing the 50 States Project. “I feel like my whole music career has been an exercise in calling my own bluff,” Stevens said in a 2022 Vulture interview. “I go on all these excursions and I feel they’re indulgent and slightly megalomaniacal in their approach. At some point, I realize how absurd and unhealthy and unsustainable it is, so I am fine moving on.”

Since The Avalanche was released, his musical output has been impossible to pin down to a single sound or genre. The Age of Adz, his first proper album since Illinois, is a sprawling, maximalist project that abandoned any clear sense of narrative in favour of glitchy electronics, heavy autotune and improvisational guitar. “[The States project] isn’t even as much about the U.S. as it is about myself and my imagination,” he told Duster. “The states themselves are just kind of the fabric, they’re kind of the canvas, and they create very helpful arbitrary guidelines.” Once a framework has served its purpose as a mechanism through which for understanding himself, and America, Stevens was unsentimental about moving on.  I occasionally wonder what an album about New York might have sounded like, or how he would have approached a sparsely populated state like Montana or Wyoming. But Illinois is such an achievement that in some ways it makes sense that he chose not to continue. Where could he have gone? 

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Music, like scent, can snag insistently at memory. To me, Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers feels like the walk between my house to the State Library during Year 11 SWOTVAC, because it was all I listened to at the time. Lungs by Florence and the Machine reminds me of the smell of hair gel and popcorn, because my mother would play it while she drove my siblings and I to and from dancing competitions. I have listened to Illinois too many times in too many contexts for it to retain any specific feeling. Only the opening track still carries that visceral reminder of where I was when I first heard it. I take it with me everywhere, and it has picked up a patina. 

The album’s third-to-last track was playing over the speakers at my summer job last December while I cleaned the deli.  A customer in a high-vis jacket approached the till with a block of chocolate. 

“Nice taste,” he said. He gestured at the speaker. 

“Thank you,” I said. “My manager isn’t in, so I get to choose the music. It’s my favourite album. I really like the second half.” I don’t know why I said that. To have something to say? It’s not even true, to the extent that “I really like the second half” implies I think the first half is inferior. It’s all excellent. 

He didn’t miss my confusion. “The second half?”

“Yeah, I mean, I like the first half too. I introduced it to my mother and she plays it when she’s working. She says her coworkers like it.” That was at least true, but not precisely what I wanted to say. Writing this, I’m very aware of how difficult it is to explain your feelings about art you really love. It’s even more difficult to convey those feelings, off the cuff, to someone you don’t know. I wanted to explain to him why I cared so deeply about this album, and how delighted I was that he wanted to talk to me about it. 

“I got really into it,” he said, breaking the silence. ”Researching the whole area, the history of the state. I used to do a lot of long-distance driving and I didn’t change out the CD for like 4 years. I would just listen to the whole thing over and over, like it was a movie.” 

We talked about Stevens’ other music for a little longer, and I recommended A Beginner’s Mind, another concept album Stevens made a few years ago in collaboration with Angelo De Augustine. I rang him up, he left, and the music kept playing.