Sufjan Stevens is a really nice guy. That, at least, is the attitude that permeates his music, which romanticizes the struggles of the workingman in sounds and words designed to appeal to the young and sensitive. His latest album, “Come on Feel the Illinoise” (Asthmatic Kitty) is the second installment of the Brooklyn-based songwriter’s quixotic 50 states project, which began two years ago with the release of “Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lakes State,” and will presumably continue until the soul of every state has been sung.

This latest album takes a deep breath of late 1990s Chicago indie rock, American folk, and the stage musical, exhaling cutesy, quirky, and shamelessly sincere songs. The sound is unmistakably akin to that of “Michigan” – understandable given the popularity and acclaim it has won him since its release.

The range of styles is matched only by the diversity of instruments. Stevens alone plays something of a folk orchestra, including a banjo, accordion, vibraphone, alto saxophone, oboe, and sleigh bells, to name only a few. In addition, he boasts a choir, a string quartet, a trumpet player, and a handful of backup singers. Navigating between brassiness and quiet poeticism, they are arranged around Stevens’s soft, breathy voice with handclaps, shouts, blasts, and flute warbles.

Stevens again strives for a progression of narrative from song to song that typifies the Broadway musical. The theme of a place is used to make the ostensible plots cohere, but we quickly gain access to Stevens’s personal histories. At the end of “Chicago,” the song quiets down and Stevens sings, “If I was crying / In the van with my friend / It was for freedom / From myself and the land / I made a lot of mistakes.”

The greatest appeal of “Illinoise” is its pure, unironic sappiness: Stevens’s confessions are like notes from the diary of a sweet, shy boy, and there’s no reason to believe they aren’t exactly that. This style reaches perfection in the fourth song, a ballad of John Wayne Gacy Jr.

The events of the serial killer’s life are sung vibrato to airily plucked guitar, simple piano, and an anchoring bass line. The song begins, “His father was a drinker / And his mother cried in bed / Folding John Wayne’s T-shirts / When the swing set hit his head” and by the time we hear “Twenty-seven people, even more, / They were boys, with their cars, / Summer jobs, oh my God” the hair on your neck and arms is already standing up. The music is in totally sympathy with this horror story, but its prettiness is seductive and irresistible.

In the last stanza, Stevens brings the song back to himself and quietly sings, “And in my best behavior / I am really just like him / Look beneath the floorboards / For the secrets I have hid.” It would be easy to dismiss this as indulgent and grandly precious, but the song is meant to make the listener feel empathetic, then uncomfortable, then wholly disorient him. In other words, to make him feel.

If it’s at first disappointing to hear “Illinoise” sounding so familiar, that’s only because nothing could’ve been more exciting than the promise of 49 albums as new and beautiful sounding as his first. If Stevens continues with his 50 states project, we can look forward to what I hope might result from a dip below the Mason-Dixon Line – that is, more of the same, but fewer bells and whistles.

August 19-23 at the Bowery Ballroom (6 Delancey Street, between Bowery and Chrystie Streets, 212-533-2111).