Introducing Sufjan Stevens

About two months ago, Amy and I were driving in the car when a special segment came on NPR about a small town in the south. This town was blessed by being the home of a very rare type of bird nicknamed "The Great God Bird" (as in, "Great God, that's an interesting bird!"). Naturalists and tourists flocked to this novelty site to see the bird and the town made a name for itself. They then talked about a young songwriter who even wrote a song about this town and bird and had the track available for download on the NPR website (click here to listen to the song as you read the rest of this entry).

Fast forward about a month and a friend of mine named David was talking about this songwriter named Sufjan Stevens. I was told that, among other things, he writes songs about specific locations and has released an album about Michigan, one about Illinois and his lofty goal is to write one album for each of the 50 states.

Then fast forward to last night, David and I went to the University of Illinois to see Sufjan and his 8 member band perform tracks from his Illinois album. I can't say enough about this album and this songwriter other than that "Illinois" is literally a masterpiece. I highly recommend that you read the first two user reviews on amazon.com for this disc, for they speak about the album in a way that is right-on-the-money. While you're there, listen to a few of the samples (my personal favorites being 'The Tallest Man,' 'John Wayne Gacy', and 'Chicago').

And then go ahead and do yourself a favor by ordering the disc. Fantastic, fantastic, fantastic. You won't be let down.

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POST UPDATE: You can listen to that entire NPR story (which is a great listen) by clicking here and clicking the "Listen" button under the title.