“Chicago” - Sufjan Stevens
(Words/music: Sufjan Stevens, available on Come On and Feel the Illinoise!, Asthmatic Kitty 2005)

At his core, Sufjan Stevens sings folk songs.  He specializes in first person narratives focused on a few individuals and their struggles – sometimes with spirituality, sometimes with interpersonal conflicts, sometimes with internal emotions.  We rarely talk about his stories, or at least not within the first few breaths.  The spotlight gravitates towards his ambitious declaration to write an album for each of the fifty states (don’t hold your breath) or his sprawling, symphonic arrangements.  Whether intentional or not, Stevens buries his songs beneath layers of strings, album-sized ambitions, and paragraph-sized song titles.  He offers so many different paths to enter his work that we often overlook the most obvious ones.  We’re seduced into scouring the details he includes from a given state or marvel at the grandeur of his arrangements (or, on some occasions, his religious identification) yet look right past the universal narratives starring right back at us.

Compared with much of the rest of his album, “Chicago” sounds straightforward and confessional.  There’s an economy of language in the song’s lyrics (and the title, one of the few without a compound sentence), focusing less on the details (even if he gives locations) and more on his character’s feelings.  We don’t know what he’s running away from (or who he’s running to), we only know that he’s running. However, Stevens gives some clues into his narrator’s mindset – he repeatedly acknowledges his mistakes and refers to the way things come and go freely in life.  The city might change and the details may be different, but his narrator still cries in his van and longs to do it better the next time.  He knows that he’s erred and sees his shortcomings, yet he has an understanding that he’ll end up in the same story again.  His arrangement works in conjunction with this story, gracefully accentuating the melancholy feelings in Stevens’ song.  He layers these strings and the female vocals in the chorus but pulls the adornments back when he needs focus on his words rather than his arrangement.  Even with a song named after the state’s biggest city, Stevens isn’t hiding his uncertainty nor his personal revelation on this song.