Sufjan Stevens’ ’Carrie & Lowell’ Will Gently, Quietly Break Your Heart
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'Carrie & Lowell' (Courtesy of Asthmatic Kitty Records)
March has been a strong month for aggressive hip-hop. On the one hand , Kendrick Lamar drops his massively anticipated Triple-A sophomore effort, “To Pimp a Butterfly,” and on the other hand the noise-rap phenomenon that was Death Grips comes to an end with the release of “Jenny Death.”
Its a good thing, then, that a folk album like Sufjan Stevens’ “Carrie & Lowell” snuck in at the end of the month. With an album cover that looks like a Polaroid of somebody’s parents they pulled out of an attic shoebox, the stripped-down sound and soft delivery that characterize Stevens’ seventh album could easily have been overwhelmed by the strident cries and pulsing vigor of Kendrick and Death Grips.
And that would have been a damn shame, because “Carrie & Lowell” is Stevens’ most accessible, immediate and affecting work in a decade.
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Instrumentally, Stevens is back on familiar ground. Gone are the bombastic big-band efforts of his last album, “The Age of Adz”; instead, front and center is the sensitive Detroit songwriter with the weird name and the guitar, whispering that “we’re all gonna die.”
Clearly, Stevens is hurting. Songs like album highlight “The Only Thing” vainly ask what’s keeping Stevens from driving “jackknife into the canyon at night”; over trembling guitar, Stevens wonders if he should “tear his heart out now.” But he already has, and Carrie and Lowell is the sleeve where he’s placed it.
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Opening track “Death With Dignity” is as sorrowful as the title implies, and the song is rife with an indelible sense of loss and being lost: he doesn’t know “where to begin,” but “we all know how this will end.” “Dignity” perfects a feather-light delivery and gentle strumming that develops and becomes impossibly fragile, like a relative on a hospital bed who could break from a hard hug.
That sense of things that used to be big becoming small is tremendous and heartbreaking, and Stevens holds onto it moving further into the album. “Should Have Known Better” is a five minute guitar-into-synth threnody for somebody from when Stevens was around“three, three maybe four,” mixing Stevens’ grief at their disappearance with happiness over the birth of his neice.
“Drawn to the Blood” is an aggressive guitar track that would easily be a highlight on an album by Seawolf, Okkervil River, Fleet Foxes, or any of the myriad disciples of Stevens’ folk style, but Stevens manages to make the song angrily sad while also not sounding like he’s parodying himself. There’s no irony here.
Just because Stevens isn’t ironic doesn’t mean he’s no fun, and songs like “All of Me Wants All of You” remind you that, sad or not, Stevens will make a joke when somebody “checks their texts while [he] masturbated.” Album halfway point “Eugene” even brings up the ol’ name issue: Stevens’ eponymous swim teacher couldn’t pronounce “Sufjan,” (Soof-yan, in case you were wondering) so he just called him “Subaru.”
That whimsy pops up all over the album, including the relatively bright title track, but Stevens uses his wit as a foil to the abiding feelings of loss, emptiness and grief that whisper through the album’s 44 minute runtime. Stevens revealed in an interview that the album was partly based on the death of his mother in 2012, but his expert and uniquely Sufjan songwriting make the music just as heart-wrenching without that knowledge. “Carrie & Lowell” is an album about how it is to feel small and lost and hurt, and the deep, deep ache in Stevens’ voice is that of a man losing someone he loves “more than the world can contain.”
Contact Staff Reporter Andy Vasoyan here.
