In revisiting Sufjan Stevens’ Michigan ahead of its 20th anniversary this Saturday, it’s useful to not think of it as a test run for Illinois. In fact, it’s best to discard any thoughts of the Detroit-born artist’s purported 50 States Project altogether.
The 50 States Project has curdled into one of indie rock’s most irritating running jokes two decades after Stevens announced he would follow up his third album and breakthrough with an album about each state. To this date, he’s completed only Michigan and Illinois, though 2015’s Carrie & Lowell can be seen as an unofficial Oregon installment. Fans continue to half-jokingly demand Stevens commit to all 50 states, an endeavor that would entail nearly an album a year, even assuming the hearty, hale, and buff Stevens lives to the age of 100. Would you really sacrifice Seven Swans, The Age Of Adz, or even The BQE at the altar of this lifelong commitment, which was always pretty clearly a joke? Yes, it’s fun to imagine a Stevens album called California or Hawaii that could out-Brian Wilson Brian Wilson. But Mr. Bungle and the High Llamas got there first, respectively — and besides, it’s a lot more fun to see what this unpredictable, uncompromising visionary has done with his music since then.
It’s more useful as a thought experiment to approach Michigan from the other side — from before the era of big-budget, collegiate, clean-cut indie rock it helped usher in, from before Sufjan’s establishment as one of that scene’s most fêted and popular figures, from before Illinois scooped up accolades from around the board by expanding Michigan’s mapmaking frenzy into one of the richest, most complex, most rewarding albums of its decade. Sufjan first found regional fame as part of a band called Marzuki in the late ‘90s and as a sideman for Danielson Famile, a cultish collective whose leader Daniel Smith was prone to wearing a nine-foot-tall tree costume onstage. American underground rock was gripped with a spirit of eccentricity and possibility around the turn of the 2000s, and early in the internet age, before the mainstream-indie boom, most of that music stayed underground. Chicago post-rock bands were pushing further out into pre-punk realms of excess and exploration. The bands on Drunken Fish were conducting astral rituals at the tempo of bubbling hash. The New England free-folk scene was mining American folkways for their rich veins of weirdness. Elephant 6 leaned into the bad-trip prayers of the Beatles and the Beach Boys. East Coast noise-niks like Animal Collective and Black Dice were embracing childlike goofiness and primary colors.
From this spirit came an embrace of pageantry. With the Brian Wilson auteur tradition in vogue and stripped-down honesty no longer necessarily a virtue in underground American rock, artists indulged, and within a few years the Decemberists would be fighting with a whale puppet onstage. Hearing the 27-year-old Sufjan sing “oh, sleeping bear” in unison with an untrained choir might bring to mind all the painfully twee, watered-down indie-folk bands that emerged in the years since, many of them internalizing Stevens’ affectations while misunderstanding his brilliance. But at the time, his emergence with such a complete and towering pop statement felt like a total left turn, and in retrospect, that’s how we should look at Michigan as well. Imagine being an indie rock fan in 2003 and knowing Sufjan for the low-key folk of A Sun Came, the instrumental IDM frenzy of Enjoy Your Rabbit, or his harmonizations with the Danielson Famile. Even if you had him pegged as someone who could potentially do anything, you probably wouldn’t have expected something like this.
Michigan opens on a quiet note that betrays none of the head-spinning prog excess that would come later. “Flint (For The Unemployed And Underpaid)” is a solitary prayer by a homeless and out-of-work Michigander, his dreams shattered by the decline of the Rust Belt. Any American odyssey in the tradition of the Beach Boys’ Smile ought to confront the country’s failures rather than simply singing its praises, but Michigan’s social consciousness is not central to its genius, and “Flint” is more dazzling as a gesture of empathy than one of protest. Yoopers sick of being given the shaft by the Lower Peninsula might take umbrage with “The Upper Peninsula,” named for one of Michigan’s most rural and conservative regions, opening with the line “I live in America with a pair of Payless shoes.” More poignant than rote symbols of American doldrums like TV news and K-Mart is the desperation of the protagonist’s journey to find his son. “The window is broken out and the interstate is far/ I drove all night to find my child/ In strange ideas he’s been reviled.” Sufjan is likely gay or bisexual, and it’s easy to read this line as the concerns of a homophobic, conservative parent, but “The Upper Peninsula” works best if you don’t lean too hard into the social commentary and instead take away the image of someone driving all night in freezing cold and darkness to find someone that might not even be there.
The darkness and cold damp down the entirety of Michigan, and Sufjan reaches with wonder beyond Detroit and the Great Lakes into the state’s coldest and most inhospitable parts. The ambient miniature “Tahquamenon Falls” suggests not only a cascade of icy water but of the wealth of beauty tucked away within the vastness of America, far off the main roads. With one grand gesture, he sweeps up four small Michigan towns into a nine-minute piece called “Oh God, Where Are You Now? (In Pickerel Lake? Pigeon? Marquette? Mackinaw?)” Look these places up and you get the sense that maybe God is there now, and that if he is, he’d be pretty easy to miss. Sufjan approaches the task of chronicling his home state like a kid filling in a map, and if you love poring over atlases either real or imagined (like Tolkien’s classic Middle-Earth map), you’ll find something to love about Michigan. The meticulous research that would color Illinois is not present on this album, which Sufjan says is more about his own memories than about the state’s history. But his shout-outs to far-flung locations — plus his penchant for tracks that sprawl to eight or nine minutes — creates the impression of a vastness.
The Sufjan Stevens catalog has no shortage of mind-bendingly proggy moments, many of them on the 2010 album The Age Of Adz, one of the most formidable works of auteurist excess of the 21st century. Yet my favorite of all of them comes during “Oh Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head! (Rebuild! Restore! Reconsider!),” one of the pieces on the album most explicitly influenced by Chicago post-rock, where a frenzy of bells, woodwinds, and strings creates the impression of traffic moving unceasingly across a grid. Cue a chord change, and Sufjan’s co-ed choir begins reciting the names of towns in Michigan before the bandleader echoes them in a dizzying call-and-response. “Wolverine, Wolverine… Wolverine.” “Saginaw, Saginaw… Saginaw.” Finally the inevitable: “Michigan, Michigan… Michigan.” There’s a filter on Stevens’ voice, the kind Damon Albarn uses to insert his vocals into the margins of his guest-heavy Gorillaz songs, or that Timbaland uses for his ad-libs. It’s the voice of a producer, not a frontman: a tiny voice emerging from the heart of the work. His voice is hushed, bosomy, slightly staid. He sounds like he’s using his voice as a vessel for ideas rather than emotions — that is, until he hits us with those shattering high notes on “Romulus.”
Michigan sounds for all the world like a small-town Christmas pageant directed by some kind of sober, analytical, wide-eyed choirboy genius bleeding his private obsessions and neuroses into the work: his mystical Christianity, his family trauma, his opinions about the state of the Rust Belt and solutions for its improvement. It isn’t confessional in the same way as Carrie & Lowell, but we get a glimpse into his personal history on “Romulus” as he describes his mother’s indifference to his grandfather’s death: “She smoked in her room and colored her hair/ I was ashamed, I was ashamed of her.” You imagine the townspeople in the audience shifting uncomfortably in their chairs as the spectacle abruptly turns personal.
Michigan tends to be most poignant at its most abstract, as on the heartbreaking closer “Vito’s Ordination Song,” in which Stevens sings in the voice of God and promises to guide a man through his life with such unconditional love and tenderness it’s liable to make the audience feel unworthy. But the integration of Michigan’s broader treatment of the Great Lakes State with Stevens’ personal concerns animates the entire album, and that’s just as true of his relationship with his faith and family as the sense of awe and fear that courses throughout the record. It’s the kind that comes from knowing you’ll never be able to completely explore, quantify, or understand your home. But by integrating his memories with these mysteries, Stevens came frighteningly close.
