Sufjan Stevens and the Enduring, Unearthly Magic of Michigan

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20 years ago this month, Sufjan Stevens released his breakthrough album 'Michigan.' Today, we look back at the project's legacy and how it opened the door for Stevens to make 'Illinois' two years later.

. Maybe then you remember the 50 States Project. And then, perhaps, after all that’s out of the way, you remember 2003’s. Stevens’s breakout third album suffers from constant comparison to its broader-scale, more polished sibling. On its face,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.

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.

“Oh, Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head! ” 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 “ burn the buildings” in his bid for “everything [he wants.

 

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