Canter Bridge

Sufjan Stevens and his toss-off-an-album-for-each-of-the-fifty-American-states gambit is like collecting stamps, baseball cards, fountain pens, or—say—old beer bottles. From a distance, you say ‘Oh, yuck!’ if in fact you get close enough to the enterprise to say anything at all.

Then, in an unexpected moment, the sheer methodical, meticulous glory of it dawns on you like an epiphany. After that you pity the people who don’t.

Stevens and his Illinois album were urged upon me by the two Murdy daughters of Medford, Massachusetts, two wildly intelligent young women who read and listen to all manner of off-the-track stuff, convinced that people who stay on the track have been sucked up by a pop culture flood that is fourteen miles wide and on a good day perhaps a quarter inch deep.

It took me many listens until the beauty of it finally dawned. Prior that that moment, Stevens’ voice seemed unappealing, his musical tastes lurching from one unfortunate corner of the room to another. It was hard, in truth, to find rhyme or reason.

Then something happened and I stepped inside of his brain to take his look at Illinois—a state in which I once lived and which I now frequent on business—and bingo!. You can see what the man is doing.

I suspect loyalty to the Sufjan Stevens-ian genre is going to be intense and spotty until he reaches a critical mass of, say, a dozen states. Then this thing is going to take off like a rocket and he’s going to be receiving hand-written, death-bed missives from states he hasn’t chronicled yet pleading with him to do so before the imminent you-know-what happens to the writer.

One of those may come from Indiana …

He’s not a fantastic singer and the music itself will not grab you by the aesthetic throat and drag you helplessly away. But once you look at Illinois or Michigan through this music.

I’m tellin’ you, you’re gonna’ be a collector.