Would Sufjan Stevens’ unfinished ‘50 States Project’ have been any good?
When Frank Sinatra said ‘Somethin’ Stupid’ in the 1967 duet alongside his daughter Nancy, “I love you” was hardly a particularly idiotic thing to come out with and is instead a sentimental gesture towards the unnamed recipient of the song. When Sufjan Stevens said something stupid in 2005, two concept albums about US states deep into his career, his claims that Michigan and Illinois were the opening parts of an elaborate and grandiose plan to write a further 48 albums that each pay tribute to an individual section of his home country were met with near-universal ridicule.
Firstly, if there’s anyone in this world who doesn’t deserve to be laughed at for coming up with highfalutin ideas, it’s Sufjan Stevens. Many of his projects throughout his career have taken on a lofty concept, and on the majority of occasions, he’s nailed his chosen subject matter with aplomb. Seven Swans is a beautiful folk record that retells stories from the Bible, while The Age of Adz is an art-pop epic that draws heavy inspiration from the troubled life of outsider artist Royal Robertson, and this is only scratching the surface of the projects he’s worked on.
Admittedly, there’s a handful of misses among the hits. Enjoy Your Rabbit is a somewhat awkward early foray into glitchy electronica that explores each sign of the Chinese zodiac in the form of a song cycle, and nobody really needs a five-disc compilation of original and traditional Christmas songs, let alone two of them. After all, I did say it was the majority of his concept albums that got things right.
However, not all of his concepts have managed to come to fruition, and his ill-fated ‘50 States Project’ is something that we’re unlikely to ever hear a finished version of. Despite his talents as a songwriter and composer, there’s more than a slight chance that this undertaking was a tad too much for him to be able to manage, and while the two chosen states that did get entire albums dedicated to them have a rich history that Stevens is more than familiar with, he might not have been the right man to write Wisconsin or New Hampshire.
There’s an argument to be made that subsequent releases of his have managed to subtly tell stories of other states, but his 2007 avant-garde composition The BQE only really pays tribute to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway rather than the entire state of New York and his 2015 masterpiece Carrie & Lowell is set in Oregon but only really tells stories of his own childhood growing up there rather than of the Beaver State. But even if we were to generously include those releases as entries into the series, 4/50 isn’t exactly making a massive dent into the mammoth task that he set himself.
If Stevens had potentially enlisted the help of others to contribute to the project with him still overseeing the creation of albums as an executive producer, perhaps we could have seen something come of the project, and by now, we might be just over a third of the way through if as much care and attention to detail was put into researching and writing about the history of all the other states as Michigan and Illinois received.
It’s clear that a number of artists would be up to the challenge of putting together their own tributes to states close to their own hearts, and a group of 200 musicians gathered over the internet clubbed together with the aid of comedian Joey Clift to complete the Our 50 States Project during the pandemic in an effort to pick up “the ball Sufjan Stevens was too scared to carry”.
It’s a touching, if at times, tongue-in-cheek gesture to Stevens’ abandoned project, but was it worth it? For those who participated, of course, it was – it offered them a chance to insert themselves into the history of the songwriter’s failed stunt and have their work heard by the thousands of followers on the project’s official Soundcloud page. For Stevens, he told Paste in 2009 that he didn’t see much point in carrying it on. “The whole premise was such a joke,” he declared to the magazine, “and I think maybe I took it too seriously. I started to feel like I was becoming a cliché of myself.”
