Say Yes to Michigan
9:55 AM
Welcome back,
fellow indie folk worshippers. Don’t worry, your weekly installment of what I
think and why it matters starts in three, two, one. In this particular post, I
want to touch on what I believe to be the most important aspect of an album:
what drives it. What pushes an album from thought to pen to paper to the
multi-track masterpiece we eventually listen to on our monthly prescription
paid streaming services of choice (I’m looking at you, Spotify)? What ideas and
beliefs eventually bloom into an entire conglomeration of songs that represent
an entire concept bigger than themselves? There are a number of philosophies
and ideas that we see in the indie folk genre, from love and relationships to
heartache and loss, but when it comes to Sufjan Steven’s 2003 album, Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lake State,
Stevens has one thing on the brain, and that’s nostalgia. It’s funny that I
mention nostalgia, as I talk about one of my favorite albums that came out when
I couldn’t even tie my own shoes (I was six and the bunny ears were a very
difficult concept for me), but it runs rampant throughout the album, from start
to finish. Nostalgia represents a number of things, but mostly a sentimentality
for the past, usually accompanied by a hint of sadness. And this, ladies and
gentleman, is where melancholy comes into the picture, giving Stevens two
perfect concepts for the perfect storm. With Michigan, Stevens serves as a tour guide and an advocate for the
great state of Michigan all at once.
To
really get a grasp on the essence of nostalgia that Sufjan Stevens works to
evoke, we must first look at the title of Steven’s third studio album. Greetings From Michigan is what Stevens
titles the album, and rightfully so, as Stevens is a Detroit native. The entire
album is meant to pay homage to the Great Lake State and all its beauties,
while also lamenting over what its most populous cities have slowly devolved
into. Upon moving to New York, Stevens decided to embark on a “Fifty States
Project,” promising to record fifty albums with each being inspired by each
state in the United States. And of course when deciding to write fifty
different albums for fifty different states, one must start with their home state,
where childhood memories intermingle with teenage angst, followed by adult
understanding.
Stevens delivers the nostalgia for
Michigan on an ever deeper level with his tracks, “Flint (For the Unemployed
and Underpaid)” and “Oh, Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head (Rebuild! Restore!
Reconsider).” Here, Stevens touches on the kryptonite to Michigan’s tremendous
pines, great lakes, and low valleys: its once booming, but now decrepit industrial
cities. Detroit and Flint were once both booming automobile hubs, but now one
city has some of the highest murder rates in the country and the other is
having one of the biggest water crises since Los Angeles began to run out of
water in 1913. In “Flint (For the
Unemployed and Underpaid),” we get a devastatingly delicate look at the wayward
city, with lyrics like “Since the first of June/Lost my job and lost my room/I
pretend to try/Even if I try alone” set against a tranquil combination of piano
and trumpet. There’s a love and a longing there, not just for the city of
Flint, but the people within it, as well as a mourning for the booming industry
that once drove the city. But what makes this presence of longing and loss so
present in the song isn’t even necessarily the lyrics, but more so the
instrumentation. The soft piano in the background works to heighten the tinge
of sadness that usually accompanies nostalgia. Likewise, in “Oh, Detroit, Lift
Up Your Weary Head (Rebuild! Restore! Reconsider),” Stevens pleas with the city
of Detroit to recapture its former glory, albeit it this time more ecstatic and
excited than in “Flint.” The lyrics “Once a great place (once a great
place)/Now a prison (now a prison),” are repeated over and over throughout the
song to chronicle Detroit’s rise and fall from the golden automobile age to its
spiral into poverty. However, the instrumentation of the song offers a glimmer
of hope for the city, letting us look forward to another rise from the ashes
from the Motor City.
Again, to grasp the essence of
nostalgia, we have to take a look at what that word really means and the feelings
it is meant to evoke. Nostalgia is related to the Portuguese and Galician word saudade, which represents feelings of
wistful incompleteness and a longing for something lost. Similar to Detroit and
Flint, Portugal’s inner cities were failing, and the rise of saudade coincided with this. When
Portugal’s cities began to recover, this concept was incorporated into the
national anthem with the lyrics, “Let us once again lift up the splendor of
Portugal.” And like the Portuguese, Stevens is working to once again lift up
the splendor of both Detroit and Flint, one song at a time.
In Greetings From Michigan, we don’t just receive Steven’s feelings of
nostalgia for his home state, but also for his own past, and two tracks, “Holland”
and “Romulus,” highlight this the best. We’ll start with “Holland” because it
has been one of my all-time favorite songs since I heard it many, many years ago
(and by many, many years, I mean like five). The song is short and sweet and
describes a lazy and hot Michigan summer. Stevens recounts, “All the time we
spent in bed/Counting miles before we said/Fall in love and fall apart/Things
will end before they start.” With “Holland,” there’s no bigger, underlying metaphor
in the works, just Sufjan Stevens looking back on his time spent in Holland,
Michigan while attending college there. The line about falling in love and then
subsequently falling apart suggests a reminiscing on a failed relationship,
while the lines “Lose our clothes in summertime/Lose ourselves to lose our
minds/In the summer heat I might” elicit fond memories of summer for the both
the audience and Stevens as well. With “Romulus,” we get an up close and
slightly uncomfortable glimpse at Stevens’s childhood, as well as his difficult
relationship with his mother. The lyrics suggest that the mother has been
largely absent throughout Stevens’s upbringing, with lines like, “Once when
moved away/She came to Romulus for a day/Her Chevrolet broke down/We prayed it’d
never be fixed or found/We touched her hair, we touched her hair.” The first
half of the song almost reads as Stevens looking back on the situation from the
point of view of a child, mentioning details that a child would remember, but
later evolves into the point of view of an adult who realizes how fucked up the
whole situation is. Stevens describes, “We saw her once last fall/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, I was ashamed of her.” Following the storyline
of the lyrics, Steven’s mother returns because of the death of her father, who
took Stevens and his siblings in when she took off, however she seems
nonchalant about the whole thing, and this is where Stevens finally loses his
last shred of respect for her. Like “Flint (For the Unemployed and Underpaid),”
the soft instrumentation of the acoustic guitar heightens those feelings of
melancholy that follow the feelings of nostalgia that the lyrics inspire.
For these more personal soundbites,
I want to take a look at the Buddhist interpretation of the word ‘nostalgia.’
In Zen Buddhism, the term is wabi-sabi, and it means to “accept a state of
transience from a person, place, or thing in order to foster a sense of serene
melancholy and spiritual longing, and with it, liberation from the material and
mundane distractions of the everyday.”[1]
This particular interpretation covers the two aforementioned songs the best out
of all of them, as Stevens writes and reflects on those parts of his life,
takes the time to be wistful or sad about them, then moves on and never looks
back. Looking at the instrumentation of the music is, again, important because
its simplicity offers an authentic feel to the thoughts and feelings of
nostalgia that arise when hearing the music, and stays true to its vision of
delivering these feelings.
What’s
important about the sentiments of nostalgia and melancholy that drive the album
is that they are real and they are raw, but most importantly, they are hopeful.
The observations that Stevens points out in Greetings
from Michigan are sad and hard to swallow at times, whether it’s about the
working class people or the failures of Michigan’s metropolitan areas. However,
these observations don’t make the audience take pity on the people of Michigan,
it makes us root for them. It makes us want to celebrate their victories with
them and mourn their losses with them. It makes us want to see the cities of
Detroit and Flint booming once again. With Greetings
from Michigan: The Great Lake State, we get a retrospective view of all
things Michigan, mixed with its current state, and it evokes feelings of beauty
and anguish, but also optimism. And like I said, that's the most important thing about
nostalgia after all. To look back on those moments that changed us or changed
the places around us, lament and mourn them, and then turn around and celebrate
them, whether it be for the life that was or the life that is.
[1] Burton, Neel. "The Meaning of Nostalgia."
Psychology Today. Sussex Publishers, 27 Nov. 2014. Web. 01 May 2017.
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