Meanwhile, the music on Michigan could best be described as “a very prog rock Christmas.” Only a few steps removed from Manheim Steamroller’s overwrought orgies of holiday embarrassment, Michigan was an enormous artistic risk and a hard sell to fans of indie rock - an offshoot of punk rock, which was itself a reaction to the same musical excesses Stevens embraced.īut Stevens’ talent, charisma, and earnest devotion to his vision were too powerful for even the crustiest punks to resist. Arriving four years before the global economic crisis - and over a decade before #FeelTheBern became a rallying cry for broke white Millennials - Michigan was a prescient omen for Americans who would soon join the citizens of Detroit in absorbing the impact of the wealthy’s decades-long campaign of reckless, criminal impropriety. But unlike folk singers like Woody Guthrie, Stevens’ observations were largely apolitical, as mini-tragedies like “Flint” and “They Also Mourn Who Do Not Wear Black” aimed straight for the heart, leaving behind gaping emotional wounds that couldn’t be healed by swing state politics. Stevens was hardly the first musician to document financial squalor with such empathy and poignancy. Its emotional power center, however, lay in the album’s somber laments of the economic decay plaguing erstwhile industrial centers like Detroit. A boldly ambitious and extraordinarily unique record, Michigan celebrated the quiet, pristine beauty of the Upper Peninsula, the Great Lakes, and other windswept natural wonders.

In 2003, following a pair of less-than-extraordinary LPs, Stevens stunned the independent music community with the epic concept album, Greetings From Michigan. And perhaps no artist took better advantage of this confluence of technological and cultural trends than Sufjan Stevens. But thanks to technological circumstances and the growth in popularity of independent labels, the first decade of the 2000s was arguably just as grand an era for the album as any other - not financially-speaking, no but in terms of offering a form for musicians to deliver big artistic statements? Absolutely.

Conventional wisdom states that Undisputed Era Of The Album took place in the 1970s.

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