This is from last year's Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lakes State. I totally missed out on Sufjan Stevens until yesterday (thank you for the suggestion, Sean). How could I? Rarely did I hear a piece of music which was so much in the spirit of the late Nick Drake without being as depressively detached than Holland.

It's a rather slow song full of space built up from the intricate interplay of an impressionist piano and a discrete acoustic guitar. Sufjan Stevens gentle, almost whispered voice adds a graciousness that completes the magical ballad. The humming develops and underlines the melody in a smooth way. In between the two verses it also alludes to the fact that words alone fail to evoke the blissfully sad memory of youth this song is about. Here we have a hymn on a city at Lake Michigan which is calm and airy at the same time. The fragility makes it even more powerful. Only at the end when the English horn joins in for the last 20 seconds of the song there is something like a warm breeze. Sufjan Stevens lived in Holland, Michigan so it doesn't come as too big a surprise that the wonderful lyrics are quite personal: