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"Chicago" ("Go! CHICAGO! Go! Yeah!" on the vinyl edition) is a track from Sufjan Stevens 2005 concept album "Illinois", released on Asthmatic Kitty. The song tells the semi-autobiographical story of a young man on a road trip, and his youthful idealism. The track is one of Stevens' most popular songs, and he usually ends his live shows with a version of this song. The song has been recorded in five different versions by Stevens himself, the versions not on "Illinois" being included on the collection "The Avalanche", and one demo released digitally on Stevens' website, later released as a 12" single bundled with the Illinois: Special 10th Anniversary Blue Marvel Edition. The track has also been sampled by Chiddy Bang on their single "All Things Go" as well as featuring a shortened version as the opening theme for the Netflix show The Politician.
The year after the track was released on Illinois, three further versions were included on the outtakes album, "The Avalanche: Outtakes and Extras from the Illinois Album", these being an acoustic version, the "Adult Contemporary Easy Listening Version", which is a baroque pop version of the original track, and a "Multiple Personality Disorder Version", of which Stevens stated: "James, my drummer was in town, and we decided it would be kind of fun to deconstruct the song". One further demo version was recorded during the album recording sessions in 2004 and released digitally on Stevens' homepage on February 25, 2016. It was released as a 12" bundled with the "Illinois: Special 10th Anniversary Blue Marvel Edition" on April 1, 2016.
The lyrics of "Chicago" are a particularly striking aspect of the song, in Pitchfork's review of the album Illinois it was said that ""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."
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