Sufjan Stevens and the Enduring, Unearthly Magic of Michigan

When you think about Sufjan Stevens, you think about 2005’s expansive, tomelike Illinois. Maybe then you remember the 50 States Project. And then, perhaps, after all that’s out of the way, you remember 2003’s Michigan. Stevens’s breakout third album suffers from constant comparison to its broader-scale, more polished sibling. On its face, Illinois may be a greater feat, if just for the man-hours it demanded from Stevens in its creation—the Midwestern instrumentalist did months of eyeball-straining research on the state’s history, from Saul Bellow to Casimir Pulaski to John Wayne Gacy, Jr. The record is tall and proud, a far-spanning, painstakingly hand-sewn tapestry of the Prairie State.

But we’re not talking about Illinois today, really; it’s been raved about enough. Turn your gaze northeast instead, over to an awkwardly shaped duo of peninsulas cradled tenderly by four of the Great Lakes. Look to the Canadian border and watch deer bound through enormous forests of aspen and fir. Trace your fingers along the peeling paint and green-gray metals of the Rust Belt’s belly, imagining what it must have been like when the factories shut down and the wheels stopped turning. You’re in Michigan now, where Stevens spent the first 22 years of his life, and everything he’ll tell you about the state is interfused with the years he spent there, becoming himself.

You can’t expect Michigan to be as historical as Illinois—and if mapping the state’s geography is your main concern, may I point you away from folk revivalism and toward Fodor’s Travel Guide. There’s no way to call for Stevens to pan out to a birds-eye view of the place he knows all the darkest nooks and crannies of, where he’s gone through those thousand tiny heartbreaks that make up our youth. Michigan isn’t really a concept album, at least not in the way Illinois is. It’s a personal, ancestral history; a self-portrait wrought in the negative. Through images of fractured faith, of railways and rust, shopping malls and snowstorms, Stevens cracks himself open for us. It’s microscopic and injured and real in a way that Illinois is not, and only the two albums together can create a complete picture of the American tragedy Sufjan exorcises from his chords.

Michigan was produced and recorded almost entirely by Stevens himself, with album art by Martha Stewart Living crafts editor Laura Normandin. It traces its way through the state in 66 minutes, with songs ranging from barely a minute to almost 10. Most of its song titles reference the cities and towns which dot the large state’s frozen sprawl, or the working-class people who fill them. It tells tales of Detroit, where Stevens was born; Alanson, where he grew restless and left home; and Holland, the small town which housed Hope College, his private Christian alma mater. What Michigan lacks in the mysticism that permeates Illinois, it makes up for in the throbbing pathos of working-class, Midwestern hurt.

Much of the album’s anguish is expressed in only 86 distinct words, a testament to Stevens’s incredible evocative abilities using nonverbal vocalization and the kinds of shimmering, swelling instruments your middle-school orchestra teacher could only dream of. Glockenspiels, banjos, recorders, vibraphones and horns emphasize the idiosyncratic landscape of Stevens’s musical mind—creating a sound unmistakably his own. These irreplaceable melodies are the snow falling on the ground, the fresh skates on frozen lakewater, the cars towed and coats fluttering of Stevens’s formative years. Close your eyes during “Tahquamenon Falls,” an instrumental piece cushioned safely in the middle of the record, and listen to the water cascading over the rocks. Or “Alanson, Crooked River,” whose notes read like droplets flitting forth atop a rushing tide. It’s balletic.

But even amidst the roiling rivers and falling snow of the country’s expansive north, that special American hurt suffocates Michigan like cozy chloroform. What nostalgia there is to the record—look to the idyllic “Say Yes! To M!ch!gan!” for a fitful loveletter to Stevens’s upbringing in miniscule, rural Alanson—is challenged by a pervading sense of working-class grief. In the early 1980s, when Stevens was not yet a teenager, Michigan led the nation in unemployment. As he reached college, the state began a slow, unsteady rebound from a recession which had seen its population decrease and its poverty levels rise to almost 17%.

“Oh, Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head! (Rebuild! Restore! Reconsider!)” demonstrates both its creator’s proclivity toward grandiose titling and a grotesque side-by-side of historical optimism with present-day reality. The track reads like a monstrified candidate’s speech, crescendoing in an internal back-and-forth about whether its narrator will “(hesitate to) burn the buildings” in his bid for “everything [he wants.]” The tension between self and state is stretched to its limit, as Stevens smashes against the walls of his auto-imposed entrapment. Funereal organs lift the song to its finish, an epic tragedy played out in an 8:20 runtime: Michigan will haunt you, even after you leave.

You can find this kind of unrest on Illinois, though perhaps not interfused so searingly with Stevens’s own persona. But where Michigan really triumphs is its exploration of the songwriter’s childhood and religiosity breaking into being in the Great Lakes State. He has long detailed his new-age Christianity in his writing, both heartbreakingly and wholeheartedly. It’s agreed on, though, that Stevens isn’t a Christian musician—he’s a musician who is a Christian. His beliefs are embedded necessarily through his work as an identifier, just as strongly as his Midwestern roots and his wispy alto. This part of him comes to the foreground in Michigan, as it does with any child learning about the world through the lens of their faith.

He prays for his city to come back to life, for its inhabitants to find contentment, for his mother to stay with him—for that last gutwrencher, see “Romulus,” a breakout song from the record whose description of his mother Carrie’s fragile humanity will leave you misty-eyed. Michigan is a cry for help, both to its own residents and an apathetic God. Stevens’s faith wavers and soars at disparate parts of the album, a stunning recreation of a child needing to believe in a power whose eyes seem to pass uncaringly over the world he knows. Michigan twists painfully between the sublime and the filthy, painting a raw, unkempt snapshot of human experience in the presence of a dull, ever-pulsing inadequacy.

Sufjan Stevens doesn’t want you to pay attention to Michigan; he needs you to. It’s smaller than Illinois, but in a way that reads as intimate, not inexperienced. The album is a log of a sweet, shattered childhood; an honest exploration of American melancholy and an expired cry for help. The wild magic of the Midwest, the childhood wonderment of home and away, is washed out by the experience of growing up there. It serves as the perfect anchor for the doomed 50 States Project because of its own broken promise, a portrait of the unfulfilled wish of an America that gifts you what you need with outstretched hands and a sunny smile. It’s an orchestral, pigmented picture of why Stevens is who he is—pain and God and trees and all. Every chord reveals a bit of himself, so close your eyes and listen to those first piano notes on “Flint (For the Unemployed and Underpaid).” You’ve made it to your destination: The Michigan inside Stevens’s mind.

Miranda Wollen is Paste‘s music intern. She lives in New York and attends school in Connecticut, but you can find her online @mirandakwollen.