Like the self-proclaimed "Spiderman" who climbed Chicago's Sears Tower with no harness, Sufjan Stevens scales dusty prairies, steel factories, and two hundred years of history in the second installment of his 50 State Project, "ILLINOIS", a 22-track anthematic tone poem to The Prairie State.

An engrossing musical road trip, "Illinois" takes you through ghost towns, grain mills, hospital rooms, and the City of Broad Shoulders, with guest appearances by a poet, a president, a serial murderer, UFOs, Superman, the goat that cursed the Cubs, and Decatur's famous Chickenmobile. Sufjan weaves variegated musical styles (jazz, funk, pop, folk, and Rodgers and Hammerstein-like flourishes) and the textures of 25 instruments into a tapestry of persons and places famous, infamous, iconic and anonymous. Invoking the muse of poet Carl Sandburg, "Illinois" ushers in trumpets on parade, string quartets, female choruses and ambient piano scales arranged around Stevens' emerging falsetto.

Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Concerning the UFO Sighting
2. The Black Hawk War
3. Come on! Feel the Illinoise
4. John Wayne Gacy, Jr
5. Jacksonville
6. A Short Reprise for Mary Todd
7. Decatur
8. One Last Woo-Hoo
9. Chicago
10. Casimir Pulaski Day
11. To the Workers of the Rockford
12. The Man of Metropolis Steals O
13. Prairie Fire That Wanders Abou
14. A Conjunction of Drones
15. The Predatory Wasp of the Pali
16. They Are Night Zombies!!
17. Let's Hear That String Part Again
18. In This Temple, as in the Hear
19. The Seer's Tower
20. The Tallest Man, the Broadest
21. Riffs and Variations on a Sing
22. Out of Egypt