Sufjan album
It’s strange to think that Sufjan Stevens’ previous album, The Age of Adz, came out in 2010. The result of a kind of emotional breakdown that saw the traditionally folk- and baroque-pop-influenced songwriter turn to electronics and even Auto-Tune as a way of clamoring out from under the weight of his demons, The Age of Adz was a strange departure from Stevens’ usual work, leaving fans to wonder about the direction he’d take next.
Carrie and Lowell, prompted by the recent death of Stevens’ estranged mother, finds the songwriter worn down by loss and grief, stripping his music of nearly everything except his guitar and his voice. It’s a brutally sad album, a snapshot of Stevens’ life right now, coming to terms with the mother he never had a chance to truly know.
Carrie and Lowell pivots back to Stevens’ early folk work, with every song mostly composed of the simple but excellent formula of finger-picked guitar and slightly overlaid vocals. There’s piano and the occasional emotional synth, but for the most part, all the songs are more stripped down than anything Stevens has put out since the early 2000s (there aren’t any drums, for example).
The production brings to mind a melancholy Stevens, family photos spread on a table, looking out his apartment and contemplating his own death and that of his family. It lacks the whimsy of his last three releases, but such an emotion doesn’t really belong on an album that functions predominantly as a eulogy.
As a songwriter, Stevens has always blended his personal experiences with mythology, religion and history. Carrie and Lowell, however, serves as his clearest, most honest album. Lowell sees Stevens being as upfront as necessary to confront his real confused emotions while not entirely abandoning the “personal life as mythos” idea that underpins so much of his work. Even the imagined experiences in the songs are conversations between Stevens and his mother, such as in the incredibly sad “Fourth of July,” which describes his experience with his mother’s body while talking to her ghost and even has “we’re all gonna die” as a chorus.
Carrie’s life was not an easy one, discolored by her battles with schizophrenia, depression and alcoholism. And her marriage to Lowell lasted only five years before it collapsed. Stevens’ relationship with her was always strained, and he grew up with his father and stepmother in Michigan, rarely seeing her. Thus, the idea of Carrie as a mythological figure fits into Stevens’ songwriting world rather well; he never knew her deeply, but he can still grieve the loss of both the real Carrie and the mother he could have known if she was free from her own darkness.
The album isn’t only about his mother’s death; the fear of Stevens’ own mortality pervades most of the songs as well. In “John My Beloved,” Stevens sings, “There’s only a shadow of me; in a matter of speaking, I’m dead,” while comparing dead bodies to fossils, pleading for a paramour to love him despite these dark thoughts and asking Jesus for some way to confront and live with the specter of his own mortality. It even ends with all of the music fading and Stevens giving a short sigh, exhausted at the effort of plumbing his own fears and staring them in the face.
Religion, specifically Christianity, has always been important in Stevens’ work and life, but despite this prominence, it’s not always a comfort. The lead single “No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross” is a haunting culmination of all the themes of the album, referencing his search for solace in God and love (both of which seem to help but not as much as he hopes) as well as mythological figures such as dragons, vampires, ghosts and assassins.
Looking too deeply into the personal lives of artists to interpret their art is sometimes problematic, but Carrie and Lowell, according to Stevens, isn’t an attempt at art as much as it is his own attempt at confronting the shadow of the mother he barely knew. It’s as emotionally devastating as it is sonically beautiful, but it might be one of the best albums he’s ever made. It’s definitely one of the best of 2015 so far.
