Carrie & Lowell
By Sufjan Stevens
Distributed by Asthmatic Kitty
I’ve lost loved ones. We all have. My grandfather died a couple of years ago now. I miss him, but we were never particularly close. He was a difficult man to be close to, I think. One of my best friends during elementary school died during high school, and it didn’t set in until years later how uniquely sad that was.
The loss Sufjan Stevens feels on his latest album is something more immediately powerful, raw, and nuanced. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the death of his mother, with whom he never had a stable relationship, compelled him to abandon the high-wire electronic ambition of his previous album, The Age of Adz, and turn to something more familiar: the quiet, mournful folk album.
While Stevens has always been achingly sad, it is more palpable than ever on Carrie & Lowell. Used to songwriting in the abstract, these are incredibly personal songs, a style befitting the grim subject matter. “We’re all gonna die,” he repeats on “Fourth of July,” and it stings.
There is no concept here. There is only his whispers, his guitar, some spare synths, and the sound of his air conditioner whirling in the background.
Stripped to nothing, he lays bare the neglect he still feels, the pain, and the loneliness. These are complicated feelings, because she wasn’t a perfect mother, but love is strange. We have complex relationships with those closest to us, and we are bearing witness to Stevens navigating these harried moments.
“I should’ve wrote a letter / Explaining what I feel, that empty feeling,” he sings on one of the best and most tender tracks, “Should Have Known Better.” With a synth line resembling Owl City playing underneath him, the song becomes a call to recognize the beauty amid all the ugliness.
It’s uplifting, and that is ultimately what I take away from the album. “My brother had a daughter / The beauty that she brings, illumination,” he sings on the same song. Death is scary. He is enveloped by its grasp in these sorrowful songs.
But moving on is scary, too. This song, and the album as a whole, seem to be his little prayer that he can do it. That the ashes of trauma can be put aside for the beauty around him. Sounding as if he is singing from his bed hiding under the covers, he prays for solace. I hope he finds it.
