Sufjan Stevens supposedly recorded “Carrie & Lowell” in the living room of his Brooklyn apartment. Such is the closeness of the album that you, the listener, could be sitting on an adjacent couch, humming along with the apartment’s air conditioning unit. In past albums, Stevens presented his emotionally damaged myths with bombastic kitsch orchestras, either analog or digital. Even “Seven Swans,” of “low-fi” fame, possesses a showmanship that just isn’t present in “Carrie & Lowell.” Instead, we find music that is stripped of Stevens’ particular talent for doing gaudy in just the right way. Gone are the trumpets, the ’80s-inspired drum samples and any trace of the Christmas Unicorn.
In “Carrie & Lowell,” Stevens confines himself to a guitar and banjo, a synthesizer, God and his emotions — all revolving around Stevens’ drug-addicted, schizophrenic, and depressed mother, the eponymous Carrie. She is the album’s focal point. Her death in 2012 launched Stevens into all the emotions you find herein (see a Pitchfork interview titled “True Myth” for more background — like all of Stevens’ albums, this one requires some homework). The album is about a boy abandoned by his mother, and a man now grappling with her death. The pain of her abandonment, Stevens tells us, became the center of his life: “everything I see / returns to you somehow,” he sings on “The Only Thing.” For those of us blessed with intact homes and in-fact parents, the breadth of brokenness Stevens shows us here is, perhaps, hard to grasp fully. But “Carrie & Lowell” helps us understand.
The first track, “Death with Dignity,” starts, “Spirit of my silence / I can hear you / but I’m afraid to be near you.” Here returns an ever-present theme in Stevens’ music: the tension between peace and destruction inflicted by the presence of God. I think it’s fair to say Stevens is obsessed with the paradox — a paradox he applies to his relationship with Carrie. He wants to be near her, she abandons him; she brings him peace, she destroys him. Once you notice how deliberately Stevens employs ambiguous pronouns, it will drive you nuts with mystery and admiration. Is the spirit of Stevens’ silence God or Carrie? I suppose both.
Look to the next song, then, “Should Have Known Better.” Put simply, it’s gorgeous. For its first three-quarters, the lyrics loop through mythic regret and depression relating, of course, to Carrie. But then comes the breakdown, which channels, of all things, the emotional uplift of “Impossible Soul,” the 25-minute psychosomatic technological fever dream that concludes Stevens’ 2010 offering “Age of Adz.” It’s all black shrouds and demon spells until Stevens’ guitar abruptly gives way to a piping synthesizer: “I should have known better,” he repeats, “Nothing can be changed / the past is still the past / the bridge to nowhere.” Perhaps out of context, those lines sound dark; in reality, they are anything but. Instead, they represent a sad-eyed, but relieved, realization about the world. Stevens rejects the pasts’ bridge — a path that undoubtedly leads to Carrie-inspired self-pity and bitterness — and turns to a new one that leads to…where? to what? Stevens answers at the song’s end: “My brother had a daughter / the beauty that she brings / illumination.”
Biography abounds in “Carrie & Lowell.” Take “Eugene,” for instance. We hear a story of toddler Stevens knocking
over Carrie’s ashtray (“I just wanted to be near you”). We hear another anecdote about the man who taught young Stevens to swim and who couldn’t quite say Stevens’ first name: “Like a father / he led / community water on my head / And he called me ‘Subaru’ / And now I want to be near you.” First, notice how much heartbreak and longing Stevens’ packs into the work “like.” Then follows the parental absence, a reference to baptism, a funny detail, the inescapable abandonment — and all this draws us deeper and deeper into Stevens’ emotional space. These stories build on each other until the title track, “Carrie & Lowell.” When Stevens whisper-screams, “Carrie come home!”, we need her to come home, too.
The album’s last three songs swing into a definitive final movement, starting with “John My Beloved.” At the end of that track, Stevens tells Jesus, “I need you / be near me.” But the next song, “No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross,” returns to the holy terror of Christ’s sacrifice in relation to Stevens’ sins. So where is Stevens going with this? He tells us on “Blue Buckets of Gold,” the petite finale: “Search for things to extol,” he sings, “Lord, touch me with lightning.”
Present until the end is that tension between peace and destruction in God’s presence. Also still present is Stevens’ fear of abandonment. “Carrie & Lowell” does not end happily. But as Waugh’s Sebastian points out, happiness doesn’t seem to have much to do with it.
Caleb Whitmer ’14 majored in English and minored in journalism through the Dow Journalism Program. He was Editor-in-Chief of the Collegian from 2013 to 2014. He is a reporter for the Star newspaper in Auburn, Indiana.
