Thank God for Carl Sandburg & the World's Columbian Exposition

I remember the first time I listened to Sufjan Stevens' Illinois.  I remember I heard a few tracks from it over my spring break, senior year of high school. I got a job as a dishwasher at Redfish where a guy named Tony would put Sufjan tracks on shuffle in the kitchen. I eventually copied Illinois from him and knew it was going to be awesome.  I had already heard a few tracks, the classics- "Chicago," "Casmir Pulaski Day," "John Wayne Gacy Jr," "Come On! Feel the Illinoise!" So I had the thing sitting in my mp3 player for a few days before I decided to listen.
I remember hiking alone up to the Shangri-La lakes and getting intensely lost on my way back.  I was worried sick until I remembered how to read military time: The shuttle boat doesn't arrive in 1 hour, it arrives in 2 hours. So I stopped running around like a chicken with its head cut off and walked by the river until I rediscovered the trail.  I had some time to kill at the dock, waiting for the shuttle to come. So after experiencing some horror and feeling a lot more comfortable with myself, I decided, what the hey!  Lets listen to that Sufjan Stevens guy! And yes, I took a picture at the docks that day. So this  is exactly where I was & what it looked like the first time I heard Illinois:

...Not bad, eh?
So not all of the songs hit me at first. "Concerning the UFO Sightings Near Highland, Illinois" has become one of my favorite tracks, but it wasn't at the time. And I didn't even get to hear the whole album yet- by the time Mikee Linville rolled in with the shuttle boat, I was kinda lost on a track where Sufjan was singing about Abraham Lincoln. He then took a pee in the trees behind me. Anyways, the song that stuck out to me that day, and even the first time I heard it a few months prior, was "Come On! Feel the Illinois!" Now I know, "Chicago" is one of the greatest things of all time, and it makes me question divine intervention associated with songwriting. "Come On! Feel the Illinois!" however, is my track.
The song is divided into 2 parts (Part I: The World's Columbian Exposition/Part II: Carl Sandburg Visits Me in a Dream). The song title in itself is cleverly ingenious, the divisional titles are just as enjoyable. Part I is the definition of life and joy in music. I remember listening to it in the Redfish kitchen and Chad asked if we were listening to the Charlie Brown theme. It indeed sounds like Vince Guardali's "Linus & Lucy," only in 5/4 and and with some bright, extra instrumentation. The city of Chicago has a lot of Columbian immigrants who have helped out with the building of the city. It's a fun, insightful lightbulb of a history lesson. The history lesson lasts for a little over 2 minutes, then the song shifts (VERY suddenly).
The 2nd part has even more layers of instruments, including an Americana strings section (qunitet? gah! i'll never know!) that's hard to forget. He sings about writing poetry and the conversing the meaning of life and death with the ghost of Illinois poet Carl Sandburg.
The songs ends nearly 7 minutes later, and it's a very eventful 7 minutes. The composition is brilliant. The background singers, vibraphone, trumpets, electronic organ solo, strings, piano, the hidden woodwind parts, the jazz drumming- I realize now that these are all standard Sufjan habits. But hearing it for the first time, a midst Mother Nature; in the sunshine... was life-changing for me.
"Oh, God of Progress
Have you degraded or forgot us?
Where have your laws gone?
I think about it now...
I cried myself to sleep last night
And the ghost of Carl, he approached my window
I was hypnotized, I was asked
To improvise on the attitude, the regret of a thousand centuries of death...
And we laughed at the beatitudes of a thousand lines
We were asked at the attitudes they reminded us of death...
And I cried myself to sleep last night
For the Earth, and materials, they may sound just right to me...
Are you writing from the heart? Are you writing from the heart?"