Carrie and Lowell
Sufjan Stevens; "John My Beloved"; from the merch table at his concert
Through the mystic superposition of streaming platforms, there’s an entire generation of Sufjan listeners who got to know his first-person plaintive songs about feeling unloved at the same time as or before the minimalist-aping orchestral masterpieces on Michigan and Illinois. But there was a time, back when he was more twee MFA student and less gritty, that Sufjan was still trying to figure out how to capture his autobiographical life experience in a non-oblique way in his songwriting.
On the album before this one, he sang, "I'm not fucking around/I'm not," and, reader, he wasn't. In 2015, I wasn't expecting Sufjan to sing about "chasing the dragon too far," but there we were.
And where is "there"? “There” a car ride to visit friends in Boston, somewhere in the Poconos. It was V’s turn to drive, and I had fallen asleep during "John My Beloved," waking up partway through "Should Have Known Better." I noticed V had been intermittently crying, with fresh tears still on her cheeks. Clearly, the music moved her, surrounded by trees and mountains, mostly alone, connecting with these vignettes of grief and isolation.
At a certain point in the creative process, everyday life experiences become richer raw material than high-concept experimentation with form. As my creative writing teacher Lee Abbott used to say, "You can write a small-scale clockwork orange, or you can write something particular." Sufjan achieves the latter here, crafting something specific yet universal enough to connect with the core human desire to be with those who have left us.
Though this record centers on the death of Sufjan’s mother, it also explores powerful themes of rebirth. It focuses on building new ways of relating to family after a complicated relationship ends, redefining one's craft and output, and establishing a new way to inhabit your religion.
Even though I slept through her experience of doing so, V was processing something by listening to this record, inhabiting the same conceptual space Sufjan was when he made it. And when I listen to songs like “Fourth of July” or “No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross”, I am right there with both of them.
And it doesn't have to be all dour—rejuvenation can lead to unexpected joys, like the start of a relationship between our dear friends K and A. They went on an early date (was it their second or third?) to see Sufjan on tour supporting this record. Now they're married. Life, as complicated as it is, goes on until it doesn’t. Above all, that's what this album is about.
Verdict: Keep
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This album really touched me, coming as it did shortly after my dad's death and choking as it does on the loss of a troubled parent. I saw Sufjan on tour for it- I couldn't remember if I went with Paul or Casi, and examining my June 2015 calendar reveals that the show fell into the slim window when I was seeing both of them, trying to schedule my way to harmony with two people who didn't actually want to be nonmonogamous. I remember the show bringing me to tears. I hadn't ever really connected with emotions brought on by art the way that I did then. Since adolescence, I've been on a long arc toward actually feeling my feelings, with the most recent success along those lines coming in the aftermath of cancelling my wedding with Casi: no more logistics, no more fixing, no more long term planning. Only looking the ghosts around my apartment in the eye, listening to music, and not stifling the tears.