we are nothing, if not a mosaic of the places and spaces we inhabit; history is a documentation of the skin we shed on our journey to purpose, and the ground we walk on is filled with the dust of the bodies of previous generations now long decayed. Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois, a bombastic musical extravaganza about its titular state, is a beastly museum where the personal and historic collapse into, and inform each other, and are woven into a pointed take on the human condition. the second (and last) of Stevens’ purported 50 states project, Illinois soars because the titular area it highlights is merely a backdrop for more poignant tales on love and loss; innocence and regret; faith and death. Stevens’ songwriting is laser sharp, almost deliriously so, that reading through his poetry is to pierce your own heart and bleed out. you think of a song like “Casimir Pulaski Day” and feel the emotion of losing a loved one in death (and the grappling with faith that immediately follows it), but Sufjan’s strength here goes beyond just the words: his lush orchestral instrumentation is ethereal and moving — it evokes and complements the largeness of his stories, sure, but there’s a paradoxical intimacy in the compositions too. every sound is so perfectly placed, tied closely to the sound before and the sound after. you combine the sounds with the words, and what you have is a juggernaut: songs that sound like life itself, that trace the very idea of being, from birth to love to death and even beyond. this is such a human album — challenging and complex and difficult to digest, but also light and jovial and ultimately rewarding. it is a tribute to the spaces that make us who we are; and just like a literal geographical location, it is vast in scope and scattered, but also raging with passion and romance — a glass-stained cornucopia of details and people and laughter and tears and bodies and monuments and buildings that, at its very core, just sounds thankful to be alive.