Earlier this year, Sufjan Stevens released Carrie & Lowell, his seventh studio album which was roundly lauded as his best work. But the definitive Sufjan album—the one that best exemplifies his ambition, his cinematic scope, even his silliness—is 2005's Illinois, which came out 10 years ago this week.
Where Carrie & Lowell was born from a place of intimate mourning, with Stevens channeling the grief from his mother's death, Illinois originated as pure artifice. A continuation of the ludicrous "50 States Project," a semi-jokey attempt, that began with 2003's Michigan, to chronicle the vastness of the entire country, one album at a time. It was a traveling salesman gimmick, but it brought out the grandeur in his songwriting—regional folklore unearthing universal emotions.
A multi-instrumentalist with a music theory background, Stevens has always composed with an appropriate breadth—his discography branches from electronic chaos (2001's Enjoy Your Rabbit) to folky, minimalist spirituals (2004's Seven Swans). But with Illinois, that endless experimentation coalesced into a more comprehensive and satisfying sprawl. "I always like to think of my performances as sounding like a sixth-grade band," he admitted in a hilariously dated MTV News "You Hear It First" report. Indeed, some Illinois expanses feel like they originated in the frantic brain of a middle-school musical prodigy. As he did with Michigan, Stevens played over a dozen instruments himself, from his reliable oboe to guitars and keys. Illinois is nuanced, due in part to the diverse overdub team he employed while piecing the songs together.
Rob Moose, co-founder of New York City classical ensemble yMusic, played an integral role in the sessions, crafting lush string arrangements for tracks like "Chicago" and "They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!" He met Stevens in 2004 after being introduced by My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden, then a member of Stevens' touring band. The violinist later knocked out "something like 10 songs" in three hours in the living room of a Washington Heights apartment.
"[Stevens] seemed serious and curious, mellow but controlling, haphazard," Moose reflects. "We did the string session with a four-track and some cheap mics, Sufjan engineering. He later told me he never listened back until much later and realized that only the violin one and cello mic worked. My signal was really loud, so he turned it off."
"Sufjan had everything scribbled out," Moose says of the album’s string arrangements. "There are one or two tracks that are just the string quartet. It sounds kind of ragged but awesome. I think it was one of the first sessions I ever did. He basically tacked it onto a My Brightest Diamond rehearsal we were having and just used those players because he knew Shara. I got an email earlier that week saying he wanted a few hours of our time and had a hundred dollars for us. My friend seemed excited about that, and I thought she was crazy. A hundred dollars? But I was 22, so I did it. I'll never forget seeing Little Miss Sunshine and hearing the strings from 'Chicago' featured prominently in one scene, and thinking back on that paycheck. I told Sufjan about it; he said 'best hundred dollars I ever spent.'"
Drummer James McAlister first entered Stevens' orbit in 2003, joining the "Michigan Militia" touring band after an introduction from singer-songwriter Denison Witmer. (Twelve years later, McAlister's still performing with Stevens—most recently developing stage-friendly percussion arrangements for the Carrie & Lowell material.) But they established their musical chemistry on Illinois during a three-day recording sprint at The Buddy Project in Queens. Using a cheap digital 8-track, Stevens led the percussionist through challenging, unorthodox sessions wherein McAlister played drums to the singer's Wurlitzer piano—and nothing else.
"I instantly wanted to impress him and perform well for him," McAlister says. "He didn't really have scratch tracks or demos—he had it all in his head, which is crazy. I remember being like, 'How did you make this record from that?' I have a CD-R of us playing, just the Wurli and drums, and it's strange—it doesn't even sound like music. When I got the record back after six or eight months, it was like, 'Oh my gosh, I can't believe this is what happened from that.'"
"I wasn't really sure where we were going with all of that music," he continues. "He didn't give the whole landscape of the plan. It was very casual but, at the same time, very musically challenging. It felt like the process was pretty sacred, and I think our friendship weaved into that —it's a strange example of where you work with someone first and become friends through that."
Craig Montoro (bassist of Brooklyn indie-rock band Takka Takka) was recruited in the same word-of-mouth route as McAlister: After Stevens' previous trumpet player, Tom Eaton, was unavailable to tour behind Michigan, publicist Daniel Gill recommended multi-instrumentalist Montoro (then a member of Volcano, I'm Still Excited!!) as a replacement. He stuck around, spending a few days on horn parts for Illinois and the album's 2006 pseudo-sequel, The Avalanche.
"The days when we were in the studio tended to blur together," Montoro says. "I have fond memories of driving to Astoria in Suf's tiny old Mazda 323 hatchback with the radio tuned in to a station that only played Christmas music."
The sessions were fascinating and a bit strange for Montoro, who—like McAlister—worked piecemeal on his parts without grasping the project's full spectrum. Plus, he never even thought of himself as a proper trumpet player: "It still cracks me up that after growing up on punk rock, playing bass and guitar in bands for years and years, that my most notable musical credit is for playing an instrument I had hardly played since high school."
Still, the process was eye-opening, as Montoro helped Stevens "translate what was in his head into the voice and range of the trumpet," experimenting with harmonies and other variations. "We rarely worked linearly," he says. "Many of the arrangements were still in flux or incomplete, making it difficult to know how the finished product might turn out. I'm sure the big picture was in Suf's head, but I wasn't yet sure which lines I was painting between; each segment we worked on felt like its own little étude."
"He's one of the hardest workers I know and looks at the process in a very consistent, kind of blue-collar way," says Moose. "We might have had some dialogue about articulation, expression, dynamics, but I have always tended to play things the way that are intuitive to me rather than to ask a lot of questions. Later on, we worked together on adapting the album's string arrangements for the tour we did in support of The Avalanche. He had us all wear butterfly wings and put on sunglasses during 'Jacksonville'. A cult classic, that tour. Then we spent a week in a church in Brooklyn creating orchestrations for our show with the Kennedy Center Opera Orchestra that I conducted. By the time he did [2009's] The BQE, though, he had learned how to use the notation software and was pretty much doing everything himself."
Stevens' musical demands actually forced McAlister to re-think his entire approach to drumming—tracks like "Come On! Feel the Illinoise!" are built on jazzy rolls and unconventional kick drum patterns, set in ever-shifting time-signatures. After finishing that specific piece—a "hybrid of super-calculated and improvisational" playing—he felt like he'd "just finished climbing a mountain."
"He pulled me into his approach on drums that I filtered through my style," McAlister says. "He always got me to go two steps further than I ever would have gone. Even when we finished the drum session, I remember thinking, 'I don't think this is going to work.' The drumming is so busy. It was really fun, but I said, 'Good luck with that—I don't know how this is going to go.'"
But that bizarre approach paid off. McAlister is the only Illinois contributor to stick around for every subsequent album and tour—and the magic of those sessions is fresh in the drummer's mind.
"I really think Suf was firing on all cylinders: the storytelling side, the narrative side, the musical side," he says. "That was enough to make it a great record. There was no budget, no production value, none of the stuff you think of as being important. With Illinois, it's all content and all musical creativity. The depth and quality of the content is the thing that makes it great."
Moose admits he hasn't listened to Illinois in years. But a decade later, he realizes the magnitude of his modest session.
"Sufjan is such an important artist, a searcher and yet someone who is capable of this direct, simple sincerity, a unique way of distilling something vast into a whisper," he says. "I guess that's what struck me the most about Illinois, how he was able to look at a landscape and to create these personal narratives. The arrangements are so quirky too, and they are both big and small. There is an intimacy to the string quartet, and yet it occupies a huge space. The trumpets, the flutes and oboes, the cheeky bombast, but then the mystery and intimacy of the 'UFO' song. The album really has a lot of range. Maybe I'll give it another spin."