The extraordinary achievement of Sufjan Stevens’ ‘Michigan’ and ‘Illinois’
In 2003, the concept album was falling out of favour. The first iPod arrived in 2001, and the top model allowed you to hold 1000 songs. Thus, when uploading a record, often it was only the big hits that found space on the prized device. Naturally, artists reacted to this in kind and looked to load up on singles; album tracks were deemed less important. Sufjan Stevens, however, spectacularly went against the grain and helped to change the rhetoric of times with the extraordinary achievement of two back-to-back records: Michigan and Illinois.
In 2003, Stevens decided to pen a record in homage to his home state. This wasn’t too much of a Promethean leap. In fact, it was pretty much a replica of what Bruce Springsteen had done with his debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., right down to the font used on the album cover. He had simply found himself waxing lyrical about Michigan and decided to dwell in that creative headspace. However, the DIY recording process and self-production on pro-tools was an innovative step.
During an era where the coffers of the music industry were relatively loaded with cash, an artist taking full dominion over their work was a rarity. In many ways, right down to the lo-fi aural aesthetic, it was actually rather punk. As John Lydon recently told Far Out: “Record labels are very much a death by committee. They have their little committee meetings or rather BIG committee meetings, and they decide what blah-blah-band should be doing for the next ‘hit’ single, right? This is a dangerous world to be trying to navigate through. I’ve always been accused of being ‘difficult to work with’. Yes, of course, I am!”
Stevens swerved the confines of record labels at a time when they were pushing plush sounds set to match the crispness of new MP3 definition and the need to chart rather than make art. Instead, he humbly relied on his own devices and banked on the connective potential of crafting something earnest. As a result, Michigan swaddled a legion of music fans disenfranchised by the zeitgeist with the comfort blanket that they had been waiting for. And he didn’t even have to be difficult to work with because the ace up his sleeve was that he could do all the work himself.
Thus, he doubled down on his efforts when it came to the follow-up in his ’50 States’ project. This time, he took the creative leap over to Illinois and decided to really knuckle down in the extremes of what a concept album can be. He read literature from the region’s most prominent authors, Saul Bellow and Carl Sandburg. He swatted over historical documents, crime reports, its geography, history and the characteristics of the sprawling greenery that makes up the “centre of gravity” in the American midwest, as he put it.
This level of artistic sophistication alone was a creditable sui generis mark of creative integrity, but this even stretched beyond his painstaking concept. Stevens is listed as playing the following in the credits for the record: “Accordion, acoustic guitar, alto saxophone, banjo, bass guitar, Casiotone MT-70, drums, electric guitar, electronic organ, flute, glockenspiel, oboe, piano, recorders, shakers, sleigh bells, tambourine, triangle, vibraphone, Wurlitzer, and vocals.”
Beyond that, he also arranged, engineered, recorded and produced the record. Also, despite the wild amount of instrumentation he is credited for, there are a further eight musicians, a string quartet and a choir listed on the album’s involvements, sporting a cornucopia of weird and wonderful musicology that truly upholds the scope of music from the region it beholds.
In essence, Stevens was the conductor of a folk orchestra. And then he had the wherewithal to still abide by the DIY production tools that at once make the album progressively contemporary while also imbuing it with the tonality that made it such a comforting world to escape in. He reinvigorated what a concept album could be in an era when the art of extending the possibilities of an LP looked to be waning.
This was an inspiring move, but its impact wouldn’t have truly been felt if it didn’t have the heart to transfigure the creative effort into something truly connective. In many ways, the album’s beauty and the pinnacle of its triumph is that much of what makes it masterful is lost on the listener. In the embrace of its endearing humility, the song credits, carefully curated production style, endless hours of research and reappraisal of the tenets of an entire zeitgeist that went into Illinois are subsumed by come hither of the welcoming world that the welter of that curating creates; instead, like a kid in a candy store, the notion that somebody actually makes these treats is a moot point when you’re caught up in the alchemy of what they offer.
