Sufjan Stevens- Greetings From Michigan

The first thing to know about Greetings from Michigan, the third album from Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter Sufjan Stevens, is that its creator was born there. Few albums more clearly evoke their namesake: Towering pines, highways paved through granite walls, great lakes and deep valleys resonate in its gentle piano, muted trumpets, and close-mic'd production-- which is particularly odd, given that Stevens' home city is Detroit. It leads you to wonder how one could craft an album so delicate from an inspiration its author calls a "monstrous concrete prison" which has been "destroyed by its infidelity." Certainly, the album is run through with a wistful melancholia, with lyrics that reference the city's dead machinery and empty warehouses. But there's a reason the album's title greets its listeners from the state and not the city: The record is a beautiful, sprawling homage to the self-described pleasant peninsula.

Fittingly, Stevens opens the record on a pensive note: "Flint (For the Unemployed and Underpaid)" is a lulling, depressive hymn comprised of dew-drop piano and a shimmering backgrounded trumpet. Like Roger & Me, the song focuses on the titular city's impaired economy and empty rust-belt factories, albeit with a more bathetic and singular approach than the everyman journalism of Michael Moore: Stevens softly sings, "Since the first of June/ Lost my job and lost my room/ I pretend to try/ Even if I try alone."

"All Good Naysayers, Speak Up! Or Forever Hold Your Peace!" follows, offering the first of only a handful of upbeat tunes. Here, the pace shifts to a sound more informed by the metropolis at the opposite corner of Lake Michigan, echoing the tight, sophisticated arrangements of Chicago's post-rock scene. The lengthier "Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head! (Rebuild! Restore! Reconsider!)" follows suit, also invoking a vaguely Sea and Cake-inspired background over which Stevens layers an extensive list of shoutouts to Michigan cities, as well as a warped guitar solo and nice tempo implosions.

"For the Widows in Paradise, For the Fatherless in Ypsilanti" is a banjo-led boy/girl bluegrass spiritual, dour but uplifted by the kind of sighing instrumentation Jim O'Rourke made his name on, while the strumming of "Romulus" evokes the fragile folk of Eric's Trip and Nick Drake. Here, Stevens' pen most achingly depicts the everyday sadness of muted familial disruptions. The song's narrator remembers his mother distantly: "Our grandpa died in a hospital gown/ She didn't seem to care/ She smoked in her room and colored her hair/ I was ashamed of her."

Equally beautiful are the sporadically placed instrumentals. If Philip Glass wrote pop songs, they might sound something like these, as Stevens often uses Glass-like patterns as the foundation for his lushly produced, moody indie pop. "Tahquamenon Falls" is what I took to be a glockenspiel clocked with a number of mallets and buried within a diaphanous echo of reverb; it varies and shifts slightly for over two minutes before trailing off upward. "Alanson, Crooked River" is similar in tone, perhaps using ice cubes or the rims of wine glasses as instrumentation. The mostly instrumental "Redford (For Yia-Yia & Pappou)" is a gently repetitious piano piece with whispered notes at the end: The human voices that resound here do so as isolated elements of a winter breeze, not as fully articulated words or thoughts.

If Stevens can be at all faulted on Michigan, it's for erring on the side of indulgence, with the occasional track running too long. "Oh God, Where Are You Now? (In Pickeral Lake? Pigeon? Marquette? Mackinaw?)" drags somewhat over its nine-minute runtime, though to be fair, it does bloom icily towards the end. Its sleety water crystal feel reminded me of the almost anonymous hoarfrost of mid-period, pre-Kinks-fixated Lilys and the vastly underrated work of the 90s D.C. indie pop band Eggs. On the ebullient eight-minute "Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head!", the repetition works: Nowhere else on the album is the Philip Glass influence quite so notable, as its note patterns occur and recur, adding layers and resonance through chance sonic meetings.

On "The Upper Peninsula", Stevens harmonizes with The Danielson Famile's Megan and Elin Smith: "I live in America with a pair of Payless shoes.../ I've seen my wife at the K-mart/ In strange ideas, we live apart." It's this kind of sad observation of the lives of the working class that repeatedly moved me on this album, as Stevens offers both realism and idealization in his portrait. The record is stacked with impressive space for Stevens' shimmering geography, and it manages a melancholy beauty; Michigan is a frost-bound tone poem in which average people live out their victories and defeats with a shadowy, dignified grace.

I've lived all but one of my twenty-four years in Michigan; twelve years of that spent in the wilds of the Upper Peninsula and the rest like a roving wart on the middle of the mitten. I'll be the first to tell you it's a beautiful state, but I'll follow that with a whisper about how desperately I'm looking forward to getting out of its grip. I have a kindred spirit in Sufjan Stevens, and he has already succeeded in our common goal by relocating to Brooklyn. This distance has given him the ability to reflect and craft the most beautiful document inspired by Michigan I've ever heard.

Twelve of the album's fifteen tracks feature specific locations in their titles, but Stevens merely uses the locations as an evocation of mood. Stevens eschews the garage sounds of Detroit and opts for the jazzy post-rock spirit of Chicago crossed with the broken folk of popish troubadour Badly Drawn Boy. From the slushy backwoods banjo of "The Upper Peninsula" to the twinkling vibraphone ripples of "Tahquamenon Falls" to "Detroit," with its playful time signature changes and chiming chords, to the lovely Vince Guaraldi piano with Stereolab-ish backing vocals on "All Good Naysayers," Stevens has all of the bittersweet bases covered.

Having read some of the lyrics in the liner notes prior to listening, I was ready to take umbrage at the less than flattering take Stevens turns in on "The Upper Peninsula." After listening to them in context though, I don't see the song -- with its lines about Payless Shoes, K-Mart visits, snowmobiles and broken windows -- as satire or ridicule but as a slightly more isolated or removed microcosm of middle America. Stevens commiserates with all of his characters because he's so familiar with the surroundings in which he has set them.

Like I said before, this album has me floored. It doesn't lessen the desire to leave Michigan but it does make me smile to know there is another person out there who experienced the state with the same breathlessness and exasperation I have. I've made it a small goal of mine to get all of my fellow Michigan-living friends to listen to this album at least once, but honestly anyone who is now living, or has ever lived, in rural America will be greeted with wave after wave of familiar sentiments and sounds on this record.

~Aaron Shaul