Sufjan Stevens
The album casts its generous gaze on 200 years of Illinois vitae, but though Stevens admits that his information on the state is almost entirely secondhand, dug from books and solicited from friends, he doesn’t get all high-school-civics-class on us, pulling down a map from above the blackboard, cracking the curriculum to page one, and working forward from Lincoln in his log cabin all the way to R. Kelly trapped in a closet. His raw materials might be a web of eyewitness accounts, downstate fun facts, and Sun-Times headlines, but he brings them to life from the inside out with an emotionally involving intimacy and immediacy.
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But what Stevens does best is involve us emotionally. His lines can trip your heartstrings so suddenly that your eyes well up almost before you know what you’re reacting to. In “Casimir Pulaski Day,” a story about hesitant teenage lovers from Christian families whose romance is cut short by bone cancer, every detail the bereaved narrator remembers is painfully poignant: “In the morning, through the window shade / When the light pressed up against your shoulder blade / I could see what you were reading.” Not even God is a comfort: “He took my shoulders, and He shook my face / And He takes and He takes and He takes.” More than just involving us, Stevens seems to involve himself. As he describes John Wayne Gacy’s victims (“They were boys / With their cars / Summer jobs”) he breaks down with what sounds like an involuntary “Oh my god,” the last syllable stretched out for two full measures in tender, quivering falsetto. His storyteller’s distance collapses in an instant. He, too, is right there–or, more accurately, right here with us.
