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Stevens seems convinced that to own up to evangelicalism would amount to professional or artistic suicide, and he is probably right. Though Christian culture warriors are put off by his calculated ambiguity, fans and critics are captivated. The high praise he has garnered from The New York Times and Rolling Stone—let alone thousands of fans around the world—may be the direct result of Stevens' willingness to grapple, in a suitably cryptic fashion, with issues of faith. Indeed, the secular music press now views the spiritual component of his work as an asset, best summed up by the Village Voice, which called him "the Next Flannery [O'Connor]."3

In the long run, Stevens may find that his greatest challenge lies in the genre he's chosen. As rock's answer to the song-cycle of the classical tradition, the concept album is a self-consciously "artistic" attempt to forge a large-scale, unified whole out of a succession of autonomous songs. The success of a concept album rests upon its ability to lead the listener on a journey from beginning to end. Like a scene in a film, each individual song must both cohere internally and contribute to the overall experience of the album. This hierarchical view of musical relationships is central to the language of classical music, but it is almost completely absent from rock. Hence, the concept album presents daunting hurdles for rockers of all stripes. The few successful examples in the genre work because the relationships between their constituent songs are as compelling as the individual songs themselves.

This is precisely where Stevens' latest project, Illinois—and its companion The Avalanche—collapses under its own conceptual strain. Despite his skills as a lyricist, his limitations as a musician hinder any over-arching artistic unity. Stevens is in many ways a capable composer. Quite a few of his melodic ideas are fresh, interesting, and distinctive, and his arrangements are meticulously crafted. The trouble is that his creativity is limited to essentially two different song-types: an introverted, folksy one and an extroverted, symphonic one. In short, there is a major disconnect between the subtleties of Sufjan Stevens the poet and Sufjan Stevens the composer. His music lacks the carefully modulated gradations of tone, meaning, and mood that distinguish his poetry.

Great pop musicians use music to provide "color" to their lyrics: to give them a different, sometimes deeper, expressive power than they would have if they were just poems. The best songs are those whose lyrics and music complement each other, making them more than the sum of their constituent parts. In Stevens' albums we hear the same four or five ideas, regardless of the mood or lyrical theme: the twee toy-town march, the ebullient five-beat rhythmic pattern, the melancholic four-chord progression, the nostalgic guitar and banjo duet. Each of these ideas is compelling in itself, but when they are set to so many different lyrics, their energy and appeal are dissipated.

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