( continues...) young friend's death from cancer.
"It's really about a sensory experience and getting fully involved and fully entrenched in the pageantry of Illinois," Stevens says of the album, which he released on his own label, Asthmatic Kitty.
"But then also being slightly suspicious of that, and what does it mean and what is all this advertisement about the world's fair and great architecture and about great presidents and great generals and farming and industry and things like this — like what is behind all that?
"There was a kind of veneer and propaganda I was up against. And once I scrutinized more deeply into the character of Illinois I found that there's actually some terrible, awful things that went on in the state.
"The history is really a series of possession and genocide and selfishness and greed and the marking of arbitrary borders and dividing people, kicking out indigenous cultures for modern cultures. And I found that there's a kind of horror story in our own history, which is who we are and where we come from."
The album's U.S. sales figure of around 20,000 doesn't pose a threat to Stevens' small-scale comfort zone, but his rising profile can be measured in other ways.
His current concert tour has played to mostly sold-out rooms, and Metacritic.com, a website that gives records, books and movies a numerical score based on published reviews, rated "Illinois" 91 on a scale of 100, the website's most favorably reviewed album of the year.
Rolling Stone noted that "the music draws from high school marching bands, show tunes and ambient electronics; we can suspect Steve Reich's 'Music for 18 Musicians' is an oft-played record in the Stevens household, since he loves to echo it in his long instrumental passages. But he holds it all together with his breathy, gentle voice, reminiscent of Neil Young circa 'After the Gold Rush.' "
Ryan Schreiber, editor in chief of the prominent indie-rock website pitchforkmedia.com, which took the unusual step of rerunning its "Michigan" review to call more attention to the artist, says, "There's something about him that spans audiences. It's got the sort of teenage romanticism at the same time it's got this forlorn world-weariness and this sort of adult perspective as well. Lyrically it's an all-encompassing thing."
In the geography of indie rock, Stevens might seem to be wandering in a wilderness all his own, a place of historical epics such as the states records and spiritual meditations such as his 2004 album, "Seven Swans."
But though he says he feels "a little isolated," he's actually in the good company of a growing subgenre of musicians with a pronounced literary underpinning.
There's the New Mexico-based Handsome Family, whose lyricist Rennie Sparks holds a master's in creative writing and has issued books of her short stories. New Englander Joe Pernice of the Pernice Brothers is an ex-grad student and a published poet, and the ranks of word-aware, narrative-conscious acts are swelling with the likes of the Decemberists, a group of epic yarn-spinners from Portland, Ore., and the surreally slanted Fiery Furnaces, like Stevens a Midwest-to-Brooklyn transplant.
"I think a lot of people who dream of being writers in this day and age end up writing songs," observes the Handsome Family's Sparks. "It's the only real popular form of short story or poetry we have. People who couldn't be bothered to read a whole book can listen and love a little short story within a song."
"I do wonder if people aren't just interested in music that has meaning," Stevens suggests when asked why he's attracting an audience. "Because there's been kind of an exhaustion through forms and genres, like rock and electronica, doing away with melodies, and I think maybe we're always interested in songs — folk songs, hymns. Whatever. Patriotic songs with strong melodies. It's kind of the basis of what I'm doing now, just focusing on traditional songwriting."
And (continued...)