If I were a cynic, I might question whether he will actually finish that 50 States project of his...
I've always felt that it's probably not realistic to do an album for all 50. It would be awesome if he did, but he would be so old by the time he finished that project, not to mention the pressure of coming up with new musical ideas over the course of the project so that the albums didn't all sound alike! (This would also be crippling to Sufjan as an artist if he decided he wanted to do albums on other subjects and so forth.)
I figure he should do the states he's really interested in doing, and leave it at that. If he wants to do something else like
Seven Swans in between, that's cool - he shouldn't feel like he has to focus all of his energy on a project he declared several years ago that may have been tongue-in-cheek. (I sure as hell wouldn't want to be forced to commit to an idea that I had in my twenties for most of the rest of my natural life.) Plus I think he's mentioned doing a few of the smaller states as EPs. That's fine. I don't necessarily need a 22-track odyssey about Delaware.
I just wish he'd do
something already. Well, something that gets recorded under his own name (e.g. not The Welcome Wagon) and something that sees an actual album release (e.g. not this BQE business). Given that
The Avalanche was mostly recorded concurrently with
Illinois, and the Christmas EPs were mostly old recordings dug out of the vault,
Illinois still hasn't had a proper follow-up. I'm kind of starting to wonder if the immense amounts of critical praise that got lavished on that album (which it totally deserved) made the prospect of recording a follow-up impossibly intimidating for Sufjan, so now he's going the Peter Gabriel route.
NP: "Power", Revive
