Issue 14.07 - July 2006
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It’ll Play in Peoria 

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Sufjan Stevens is on a geeky mission: make a concept album about each of the 50 states. While that sounds about as exciting as a five-hour layover at O’Hare, when he followed up the first installment, 2003’s Greetings from Michigan, with Illinois last year, critics swooned over his astounding odes to Prairie Staters like Carl Sandburg and John Wayne Gacy Jr. But the Land of Lincoln proved a bit too inspirational for the singer-songwriter – 21 tracks that didn’t fit on that album debut July 11 as The Avalanche. Wired talked to Stevens about the stories behind his schoolhouse art rock.

One song alludes to Chicago Tribune advice columnist Ann Landers and her feud with twin sister Abigail Van Buren of “Dear Abby” fame.

The two failed presidential bids by Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson merit their own song. “He was smart, yet not clever enough,” Stevens says. “People can relate to that.”

Stevens read Saul Bellow’s novels as a Hope College undergrad. Now he’s written a ditty about the Nobel-winning University of Chicago prof.

One track mentions the work of outsider artist Henry Darger, a Chicago janitor who wrote and illustrated a ­bizarre 15,000-page epic.

A Moog-laden space-out is dedicated to Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer and UFOlogist from La Salle County who discovered Pluto in 1930.

Stevens name-checks civic organizer and criminologist Saul Alinsky of Woodlawn.

- Eric Steuer

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