Sufjan Stevens: Beauty and the beastliness of Illinois

Henry Blanke in New York

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWpvMm27WIM

Sufjan Stevens’ music is as difficult to categorise as his first name (it is of Arabic or Persian origin). His debut album was a kind of lo-fi chamber folk while the second one delved into electronica. On Michigan in 2003 the sonic palette changed again with multi-instrumentalist Stevens playing oboe, English horn, glockenspiel, recorder and other instruments rarely heard in popular music. He was born in Michigan and the record is a poetic homage to that state.

Stevens had announced that he was planning to record an album for each of the 50 states and was almost taken seriously when Illinois was released in 2005. More so than on Michigan, here he explores the state’s historical events, personages and places ranging from the 1893 Columbian Exposition to Abraham Lincoln and Carl Sandburg and touching down in Chicago and Decatur. Alongside these vignettes are songs about Stevens’ personal experiences and reflections inspired by his Christian faith.

The music on Illinois (with its cover subtitle of Sufjan Stevens Invites You To: Come On Feel The Illinoise) encompasses folk, pop, classical, disco and Reichian minimalism. Stevens creates an orchestral effect using multi-tracking and his classical training allows him to employ baroque counterpoints and shifting time signatures. And he plays many of the instruments himself alongside a band, choir and string quartet.

However, on John Wayne Gacy, Jr. only piano and guitar accompany Stevens’ gentle, affecting voice. This song is about the notorious serial killer who terrorised the Chicago area from 1972 to 1975 and tortured and murdered at least 30 victims. It is a disturbing, controversial track: was Stevens showing sympathy for the devil?

The lyric describes a childhood incident which no doubt contributed to Gacy’s sadistic sociopathy. His mother was ‘folding John Wayne’s T-shirts when the swing set hit his head’ resulting in a blood clot in his brain. This changed Gacy from a child whom ‘the neighbours adored for his humour and his conversation’ to what he would become. ‘Twenty-seven people/ Even more, they were boys/ With their cars, summer jobs.’

The final words of this verse, ‘Oh my God’, are sung in a quavering falsetto as if Stevens is overcome by the horror he is describing. ‘He dressed up like a clown for them/ With his face paint white and red/ He took off all their clothes for them/ He put a cloth [with chloroform] on their lips.’ As chilling as these lines are about a man who called himself Pogo The Clown while performing charitable work but was dubbed Killer Clown by the press, it is the childhood detail which is remarkable as it shows Stevens trying to understand a serial killer’s behaviour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsPhQXrRUu8

The New York-based Stevens considers his religious beliefs to be a private matter and will not discuss them with the press. But his songs are suffused with Christian imagery. On John Wayne Gacy, Jr. he goes beyond trying to comprehend evil to actually empathising with a heinous killer. ‘And in my best behaviour/ I am really just like him/ Look beneath the floorboards [where Gacy hid his victims]/ For the secrets I have hid.’

This is a stunning observation about humanity’s capacity for cruelty and together with the song’s lovely, lyrical melody and tenderness of the vocal it is a moment of compassion and Christian love unlike anything else I have heard in contemporary popular music.

Stevens explained in an interview: ‘I made a concerted effort to scrupulously evoke the series of events which led to his crime, and, considering the circumstances, that was not a pleasant task. In all the crime novels I’d skimmed and in all the news clippings I read, there was a deliberate obsession with finding the source of his depravity. What went wrong, everyone asked. What made him this way? Was it his abusive alcoholic father? Was it a head injury? A doting mother?

‘I’m less interested in cause and effect, in terms of human iniquity. I believe we all have the capacity for murder. We are ruthless creatures. I felt insurmountable empathy not with his behavior, but with his nature, and there was nothing I could do to get around confessing that, however horrifying it sounds.

‘Looking back, I see another thing going on here. It’s no mistake that the song follows a diatribe against the pretences of commerce, advertisement and bad art. John Wayne Gacy embodies the crime of disguise in the most human way possible.’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmJwraC4p5A

Over the last 20 years Stevens’ music has become increasingly wide-ranging and ambitious and include Academy Award-winning contributions to a film soundtrack (Call Me By Your Name) and an orchestral multi-media project about the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in New York. And Illinois has been turned into a Broadway musical, Illinoise. His last album, his 10th studio offering, was Javelin in 2023.

Musically, John Wayne Gacy, Jr. is one of his simplest pieces. But it is expressed with an exceedingly rare degree of grace and empathy. When Mother Teresa was asked how she could work amidst such misery she answered that it was because she was aware of her own capacity for evil.

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