A Conjunction Of Drones Simulating The Way In Which Sufjan Stevens Has An Existential Crisis In The Great Godfrey Maze: C4: The Predatory Wasp Of The Palisades Is Out To Get Us! • Although the official album title is 'Illinois', the cover art reads 'Sufjan Stevens invites you to: Come on feel the ILLINOISE' Barcode and Other Identifiers. Stevens joins host David Garland to talk about his album, and brings his group, The. Liar game 2007 indonesia google drive. Craig Montoro, Sufjan Stevens The brilliant young singer/songwriter/multi. Stevens returns to Spinning On Air to present his forthcoming album, 'Illinois' (due. Subject - Broadcasting; Creator Postal Code - 10013; Creator Region - NY.

Illinois Sufjan Stevens Asthmatic Kitty 4 July 2005 It's a sparkling blue spring morning in Chicago. I'm riding the Brown Line of the city's famous El transit system.

Well, I shouldn't say riding. We're stuck between two stops behind a malfunctioning car up ahead. It's rush hour, but Midwesterners are so stoic that even their yuppies don't audibly sigh and complain, choosing instead to share their cell phones to call in late for work before returning to their paperbacks and Game Boys. I'm people watching, listening to an advance copy of Sufjan Steven's second release in his 50 States project, Illinois.

My eyes threaten to well up during two successive songs, but I restrain myself from letting loose and betraying my non-Midwestern roots. The songs in question are opposite in scope and mood, but they can both cause a public display of emotion without warning, a testament to Stevens' growing power as a writer and performer. Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lakes State was a paean to civics and geography with exquisitely detailed character studies, epic song titles, and kitchen sink folk orchestral arrangements. Illinois follows suit and even extends its ambitions further in each of those respects. The first song that put a lump in my throat this morning was 'Come on!

Feel the Illinoise! -- Part I: The World's Columbian Exposition -- Part II: Carl Sandburg Visits Me in a Dream'. And that's one of the shorter titles. Such indulgences might strike some as a wee bit precious or pretentious, but I suspect Stevens is both winking good-naturedly at his audience, and trying to make his titles as ambitious as the songs they represent. But back to the crying: 'Come on!'

Overwhelms me with pride for all of its Chicago references, and not just because it's my surrogate home. There is a deep Walt Whitman vein in this project, an exultant cataloguing of humanity that inspires no matter where you're from. Shout-outs on 'Come on!'

Include the Ferris wheel (which debuted at the 1893 World's Fair in the Windy City), Frank Lloyd Wright, and the poet Sandburg. Musically, 'Part I' rocks out in the tricky 5/4 time signature Stevens is so fond of, and then segues into 'Part II' with a Cure reference that slips the song into 4/4. The instrumental selection is as all-encompassing as the popular nouns -- bells and whistles, a string quartet, a backing choir -- but the song requires nothing less than that grandeur. Stevens himself sings 'I cried myself to sleep last night / And the ghost of Carl, he approached my window /.

Dangerous liaisons 2012. I was asked to improvise / On the attitude, the regret of a thousand centuries of death'. No other writer I can think of is working with this amount of simultaneous scale and vulnerability. On the flipside of this US Mint issued 50 States coin is 'John Wayne Gacy, Jr.'

, which focuses on one particular Illinois native, in this case the notorious serial killer. The challenge of writing and pulling off this song is monumental for wholly different reasons than the rest of Illinois. How does one create an affecting piece of art centered on a cultural figure so extreme and reviled without being obvious/trite, or (even worse) sounding sympathetic to his actions by the plain fact of writing a song about him? The answer is 'John Wayne Gacy, Jr.' : horrifying, tragic, and deeply sad without proselytizing. Who needs a song to tell them that murdering twenty-seven people is wrong? Instead, Stevens makes you feel it, describes the events in ways that strip away sensation and make you care, rather than numb, 'Twenty-seven people, even more / They were boys / With their cars, summer jobs / Oh my God'.