My eyes threaten to well up during two successive songs, but I restrain myself from letting loose and betraying my non-Midwestern roots. I’m people watching, listening to an advance copy of Sufjan Steven’s second release in his 50 States project, Illinois. It’s rush hour, but Midwesterners are so stoic that even their yuppies don’t audibly sigh and complain, choosing instead to share their cell phones to call in late for work before returning to their paperbacks and Game Boys. We’re stuck between two stops behind a malfunctioning car up ahead. I’m riding the Brown Line of the city’s famous El transit system. Husband drawls on the final track, “but it was all in good fun, so hopefully he’s not too ticked off about it.It’s a sparkling blue spring morning in Chicago. “I feel like we gave ol’ Sufjan hell,” Mr. It’s a low-stakes, countryfied tribute to the rarely celebrated Appalachian state. Husband released a Sufjan-inspired album of his own titled Hey Sufjan, You Took Too Long So I Went Ahead and Made West Virginia. Months later, the prolific songwriter known as Mr. “Researching the project inspired us to try to help Sufjan out.” “My daughter told us about the legend of the 50 States Project, but that it would take Sufjan over 100 years to finish the other 48 states,” Picone tells me. Picone says his teenage kids were “clinically insane over Sufjan” and performed his songs at a hippie bakery. Last winter, a Maine father named John Picone and his three kids released a folk album about their home state called Welcome to MAINIA: The Way Life Should Be. There’s a history of cult fandoms attempting to complete a musical visionary’s unfinished work- Beach Boys obsessives spent years exchanging bootlegged versions of Smile-but Clift’s project is distinguished by its immense scope.Ĭuriously, it’s not the only time Stevens fans have made their own state albums.
Our Fifty States Project stands out both as an outlandish expression of quarantine boredom and as a curious distortion of the traditional tribute album: Fans are not covering his songs but instead creating their own Sufjan-style songs en masse to finish what he started.
“I remember driving home my last day on the job,” he says, “thinking about how any creative person is probably unemployed and looking for stuff to do.”īut this joyful bastardization of his project doesn’t really belong to Stevens, no more than the millionth YouTube cover of “Hallelujah” belongs to Leonard Cohen. Clift sat on the idea for years until this past March, when the world stopped, and he got laid off from his job writing for the Quibi show Useless Celebrity History. Even though Clift didn’t love the music, he was drawn into the imaginative spectacle of the 50 States Project and the possibility that Stevens would eventually make a record about his home state of Washington. states, finishing the job Stevens had once vowed-and famously failed-to complete?Ĭlift had been introduced to Stevens’ work in 2005, when the singer’s breakout album Illinois was as inescapable as capri pants.
But during the early weeks of the pandemic, the 36-year-old comedian and television writer recalled an idea he’d been weighing for years: What if he recruited an assortment of people to record albums about all 50 U.S. Joey Clift never considered himself to be much of a Sufjan Stevens fan.
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