Here’s a thing. An album that clocks in at 73 minutes and actually merits more than an hour’s worth of your attention. Not many of those around. For most of us, music plus Michigan adds up to Detroit: either Motown or garage rock. But Sufjan Stevens’s musical journey around his home state begins in Flint (the setting for Michael Moore’s Roger & Me) and takes in Muskegon, Mackinaw, Pigeon, Paradise, Marquette, Romulus and Ypsilanti. During the 17 tracks it takes us to tour the state, Stevens is, variously, a happier Nick Drake, a faster Low, a less eccentric Will Oldham, a more rural Mercury Rev and a 21st-century Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks. Along for the ride are a battered old piano, an oboe, a glockenspiel and a banjo. The songwriting starts out good and gets better and better as the album progresses. Indeed, if Paul McCartney and Paul Simon had engaged in a melody-writing contest in 1968, the winner still wouldn’t have come up with anything better than Oh God, Where Are You Now? (As good, maybe, but not better.) Anyone keen on Americana will be delighted to know that Greetings from Michigan is — allegedly — just the beginning of Stevens’s American-states project. Which means there should be 49 more like this. We can only hope.

Rough Trade

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