“Should I tear my eyes out now? Everything I see returns to you somehow. Should I tear my heart out now? Everything I feel returns to you somehow.”
I wish the line about masturbating wasn’t there in ‘All of Me Wants All of You’. And I’m ambivalent about the use of the f-word in ‘No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross’. That is the complete list of things that stick in my craw when I listen to Carrie & Lowell, an autobiographical mosaic from Sufjan Stevens, inspired by the death of his mother, that mythologizes and tragecizes his own childhood, and which I consider basically perfect. And even then, those things really only bother me in the sense that it shrinks the list of friends and family to whom I would feel comfortable recommending the album. Me: “Grandma, listen to this! It’s so heartfelt and delicate and poignant.” Sufjan: “You checked your text while I masturbated.” Eh, I’d rather avoid that scenario. Otherwise I’d say it’s usually good when art sticks in your craw a little bit.
There’s a devastating backstory that’s not strictly required for the album to pierce your soul: Stevens’ mother Carrie abandons her young children (Sufjan was one year old), commencing a dark period only brought to an end by the introduction of Lowell Brams (Sufjan’s stepdad, longtime business partner, and recent collaborator), whose presence steadied a turbulent life marked at various points by depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, substance abuse, and homelessness. She then divorces Lowell, dies of cancer, and is now recalled and metaphorically dissected and made into folk poetry by her suicidal son in a series of sketches that cycle through loss, grief, forgiveness, and catharsis, and really tell us much more about Sufjan Stevens than about Carrie or Lowell. On ‘Should Have Known Better’ he sings about the time she left them at a video store. On ‘Eugene’, a flashback which begins as young Sufjan is learning to speak and separates two painful, musically similar songs with a moment of bittersweet reminiscence, he laments, “Some part of me was lost in your sleeve, where you hid your cigarettes.” He turns his mother into a mythological figure—making an exaggerated legend of the summers he spent with her and his stepfather in Oregon, mythologizing the place itself (Tillamook Burn, Lost Blue Bucket Mine, Spencer Butte) in a miniature version of what he did for Michigan and Illinois—having hardly known her and yet compelled by intuition and instinct to manifest the bond that should have existed. He feels her ghost pass through him and contemplates how he might raise her from the dead, his rational senses overridden by magical thinking. A few lyrically-focused songs aside, the impressionistic writing throughout the album suggests that Stevens tried to capture the entirety of his thoughts and feelings each time he sat down to write a new tune, and as a result, we don’t get a coherent story but a restless lamenting, a constant circling and shy approach of his reeling psyche. Some of the songs cut off abruptly, others pivot from God to sea lion caves in the dark—incomplete thoughts, unwanted emotions, unprocessed grief. Others linger, soaking in the sweet sadness.
Still, much of the poetry here, while certainly drawn from Stevens’ tumultuous childhood, is vague enough to feel universal. The album’s apotheosis is the ‘Fourth of July’, in which the narrator simultaneously sits in hospice next to the dead mother and has a conversation with her as a child, one that may or may not have transpired. “Shall we look at the moon, my little loon? Why do you cry?” She asks. “Make the most of your life, while it is rife, while it is light.” He pauses to question how his own life has unfolded across the years: “Was it all a disguise, like junior high? Where everything was fiction, future and prediction. Now where am I, my fading supply?” Carrie expresses her sorrow, gives advice, seeks forgiveness. Sufjan empathizes, grieves, forgives. It ends with a repetition of the phrase “we’re all gonna die,” expanding the eulogy for Carrie to encompass Stevens’ own eventual death as well as the death of all mankind.
After the grandiosity of his second “state” album, Illinois, Stevens released The Age of Adz, which brilliantly combined his orchestral folk style with an experimental electronic sound (first explored on his early career outlier Enjoy Your Rabbit). As far as I’m concerned, Illinois and The Age of Adz both remain career pinnacles marked by high caliber songwriting and performances that sound utterly distinct from Stevens’ contemporaries and also the decades of imitators that have taken inspiration from those albums. All that to say, who knew what to expect from Stevens after a five year hiatus (okay besides the 58-track Christmas project Silver & Gold)? An even grander experiment in digital mayhem? Another state? Oklahoma? Kentucky? The moon?
Carrie & Lowell defies expectations by utilizing the sparsest sonic palette of Stevens’ career. It strips his baroque sound down to its barest essentials, a pure distillation of the artist’s deepest yearnings without any flashy decoration or affectation to blunt its emotional resonances. Once triumphant and bursting with zeal—“This is the Age of Adz—eternal living!” he screeched once upon a time—he now sounds ragged and defeated, with his falsetto transitions often sounding as if they might teeter into a wordless quaver. Its closest comparison album-wise is the pastoral Seven Swans, but this is really ‘Romulus’ (from Michigan) and ‘Casimir Pulaski Day’ (from Illinois) shorn of any whimsy and stretched to album length, a man embracing his anguish and turning it into haunted poetry.
Most of the songs are built around a fingerpicked guitar or other stringed instrument and Stevens’ vulnerable double or quadruple-tracked voice, accented by the graceful, tasteful, minimalist use of banjo, piano, synths, ukulele, organ, light percussion, and bass and electric guitars. You’d be forgiven if your impression after a listen or two was that it was all just Stevens and arpeggiated chord progressions, filching patterns and phrases from Nick Drake and Donovan and Elliott Smith, and in fact much of the album was reportedly recorded outside of a studio setting, in living rooms and bedrooms and hotels and tour buses. There is no mistaking this for the lush arrangements of Illinois, let alone the electropop maximalism of The Age of Adz. There are no orchestras, no neon angel-wing costumes.
Even at its darkest moments, Stevens’ temperament dictates that his anger and humiliation turn toward forgiveness and hopefulness, using delicate chords and melodies and lyrics to transmogrify his shame and grief into a sound I would describe as redemptive melancholy. He frequently appeals to God, the looming judge of all his music and life decisions, entangling figures of ancient myth with those of scripture, rarely gleaning any answers but sensing a supernatural presence in the small wonders that bring him comfort and keep him from total despair: lemon yogurt, French fries, moonlight, fireworks, swimming lessons. “Is it real or a fable?” he asks on the opening track (‘Death with Dignity’), finally confessing on the closer (‘Blue Bucket of Gold’) that he’s searching for things to extol because “the fables delight me.” A clear-cut list of facts are not what he is seeking, rather he is concocting an elegiac admixture of vivid memories, emotional impressions, and spiritual evocations that revise and bolster a tragic myth.
Which is not to say any of it is untrue. In some of its particulars, Carrie & Lowell unlocks cryptic imagery from Stevens’ earlier albums, showing his flamboyant state biographies to be chock full of personal confessions regarding childhood traumas, faith, sexuality. It’s the same sensitive emotional temper listeners have always felt, but Stevens is no longer hiding behind historical figures, local legends, and pop culture iconography that belong to other people. Everything on the album has roots that trace back to his own life.
I’ve read a few negative reviews of the album that take issue with the limited range of the songs—coming from people who confess a fondness for Johnny Cash and Chuck Berry, but I digress—however, I find that within its limited sonic palette, its nuanced flourishes resonate quite profoundly. Take, for instance, the outro of ‘Should Have Known Better’, which shrugs off the “black shroud” of his convoluted feelings to confront the “illumination” that his niece has brought into the world. It begins with a pleasantly layered synth riff and hand percussion, then gradually complements that simple loop with a shimmery synth, a tambourine on 1 and 3, then a shaker on 2 and 4, then a swell of falsetto oohs and ahhs and possibly a real stringed instrument mimicking the synth line. It’s a deceptively layered (if not complex) arrangement and yet it rings true with the confused heartache of the lyrics. One criticism I will grant, but which doesn’t bother me, is that the elegant music never challenges the listener in a way that matches the thrust of its lamentational lyrics, which often present Carrie as a mother/lover hybrid in the style of the Beatles’ ‘Julia’ or several songs on Lennon’s first post-Beatles album, Plastic Ono Band. These songs are musically simplistic compared to Stevens’ grander compositions (I am fairly confident that I, little more than a semi-skilled tinkerer of a guitarist, could learn them all pretty quickly), striking a sorrowful mood and then wallowing in it for three quarters of an hour without much deviation. This is not the sophisticated exploration of human emotions of Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen. It doesn’t make you feel uncomfortable in the same way as Sun Kil Moon’s Benji or Bill Callahan’s Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest. Sure, granted, acknowledged. But within that limited sonic realm and emotional range these songs effectively capture the wounded, reeling freefall that can result from a personal tragedy, as well as the permanently unresolvable anxieties that are side effects of the human condition.
Considered within the context of Stevens’ oeuvre, the album’s yearning for meaning and connection aren’t all that unusual, but he’s never been so raw and transparent with his lyrics nor as austere with his music. He’s tended to obscure himself in quaint projects like mythologizing a state or writing a love song about a serial killer. Backing away from that grandiosity and squeezing the sponge of his own memory has allowed him to process his human longings in a new way, one that forces him to stare the lion in the eye, to glimpse desolation, and instinctively shy away and seek reconnection with his God and his fellow man.
The album’s darkest moments, separated only by the title track, are ‘The Only Thing’ and ‘John My Beloved’. In the former, the singer actively considers various forms of suicide, while in the latter he considers his friendships, romances, and relationship with Jesus Christ futile because, in a “matter of speaking,” he’s already dead. Finally, at the end of ‘No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross’, the penultimate track, just after “fuck me, I’m falling apart,” the singer’s hushed, doubletracked vocal tracks both exhale and it feels like an existential weight has lessened, the emotions finally processed, catharsis granted, the grief processed if not comprehended. Compare this to the pensive sigh at the end of the previous track ‘John My Beloved’ that suggests maybe the lines were easier to write than to record. What all this confirms is that coming to terms with crushing loss is not something that comes naturally, even if we can transform grief into poetry and prose.
In any case, one would assume that these are the type of songs that you get out of your system and never want to think about again. But Stevens actually took the entire album on the road, playing all of the songs and then some older material on a worldwide tour. I was fortunate enough to catch him in Pittsburgh with one of my college roommates, to see him exorcize his demons by playing Carrie & Lowell, ‘For the Widows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in Ypsilanti, and, of all things, a cover of Drake’s ‘Hotline Bling’.
Favorite Tracks: Death with Dignity; Should Have Known Better; Drawn to the Blood; Eugene; Fourth of July; The Only Thing; John My Beloved; No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross.