I get it, I always took it as a desire to be private and to let the art speak for itself, but I totally understand how it could be more impactful without the ambiguity. Given his Christian upbringing, and that he was in his late 20s/early 30s in the first half of the 2000s when he was coming out with Michigan and Illinois, my thought was always that he comes from a time and place where he built up that ambiguity as a self-defense mechanism. I think it was somewhere around the mid 2010s that it became much less ambiguous to me, given his involvement with Call Me by Your Name’s soundtrack and him releasing a bunch of Pride Month songs.
“Casimir Pulaski Day” is one of my favorite songs ever too. Illinois as a whole is just a total masterpiece of a record. I don’t really like much of his electronic-leaning material in the 2010s, but Carrie & Lowell was another record that turns me into an emotional wreck.
