Art of the State: Banjo-strapped songwriter gracefully straddles the sullen/silly divide  Full text...

You’ve gotta hear it to believe it. A Midwestern state has never been so exciting.  Full text...

Highly recommended. That is, unless you're from Illinois, in which case you'll probably be disappointed he found so little actually about Illinois to sing about  Full text...

Consequently, Illinois is less about place than spirit. Stevens dutifully celebrates and indicts all the appropriate landmarks, isolating the highest and lowest points in Illinois history, but at its best, the album makes America feel very small and very real: A boy crying in a van, a girl with bone cancer, stepmothers, parades, bandstands, presidents, UFOs, cream of wheat, trains after dark, a serial killer, Bible study  Full text...

The bittersweet twists and turns of a lifetime eloquently described in a folk-pop song -- it really doesn't get much better than this; these songs that must be heard to be believed  Full text...

Vast in scope and breathtaking in its beauty, Illinois may very well be the album that heralds Sufjan Stevens as one of this young century's most talented artists  Full text...

Illinois certainly isn't perfect, but it does do a couple important things: it proves that Sufjan has the skill and the talent to prove flexible and long-lasting, and that it's not much of a stretch to expect even better albums from him in the future. Even if it takes 48 more states to get there  Full text...

In short, Illinois is simply a more uplifting state than Michigan  Full text...

He radically conflates the sophisticated and the naive while maintaining a social thrust, both textually and sonically -- and he does so with such skill, ambition and commercial and critical success that Illinois cannot be ignored, even by those who might find it exhausting, middling or innocuous  Full text...

Now, we get equally well-structured music, but music that, maybe due to its historical leanings or maybe Stevens's emotional detachment from the land, doesn't move us with subtlety. Or maybe we didn't survive the song titles.  Full text...

Sufjan Stevens has grown into one of the best song-makers in indie rock. His idioms are familiar to fans mired in Nick Drake and the quieter moments of Death Cab For Cutie, but at his most musically elaborate, Stevens sounds touched by the same human and magisterial forces he surveys through folky layers of allusions and illusions  Full text...

I can't explain the state that I'm in/The state of my heart," Stevens sings, and ultimately that's the state Illinois  Full text...