About “Chicago” by Sufjan Stevens.
The gut-punching “Chicago” cagily celebrates the innate (and deeply American) tendency to employ highways as escape routes, ditching old mistakes for new swatches of land, new plates of eggs, new parking lots. Impossibly propulsive, each calm, harmonized, Illinoisemaker cry of “All things go!” pushes harder, promising liberation, by death or by automobile: “If I was crying/ In the van with my friend/ It was for freedom/ From myself and from the land,” Stevens chokes, voice shaking over a haze of drums, strings, and shimmering keyboards. (Pitchfork Media).