Sufjan Stevens – Carrie & Lowell (2015)

I think it's fair to say that Sufjan Stevens is one of my all time favourite artists. His album Come on Feel the Illinoise made a huge impression on me the first time I heard it. That album, however was the last folk album by Sufjan Stevens in a long time. After this, most successful, album of his, he returned to his early roots to make strange noise music with lots of electronic elements. In his early musical career he had made this sort of noisy music. His parents ended up paying most of his living costs, because his music really wasn't commercial. Then his stepfather made Sufjan Stevens focus on more approachable styles. He then made a few amazing folk albums of which the album dedicated to the state of Illinois was the greatest one using innovative techniques to make one of the most amazing folk albums ever created. After that album was such a success, he felt more free to start experimenting again. He didn't return to folk properly again until Carrie & Lowell about a decade later.



The album is inspired by Sufjan Stevens' mother's death a couple of years earlier. Carrie was his mother and Lowell his mother's second husband, Steven's stepfather. The stories on the album are also inspired by the trips Sufjan had made to Oregon as a child, so in a way, this album is also inspired by a state. Carrie & Lowell is a major shift from Stevens' previous full-length album The Age of Adz, which was really experimental and which I didn't much care for. It didn't have the same heartbreaking emotion as Stevens' earlier albums.

I never had a chance to see Sufjan Stevens live during his early career and I thought my chance to see him play folk songs had gone past. To my amazing luck, Sufjan Stevens made this amazing album and I got to see him live at the Southbank Centre. It was an amazing gig. Not only were the songs from this new album absolutely astonishing, but he also played some of my favourites from his earlier albums, such as John Wayne Gacy Jr. which I'm playing quite a lot myself. Also, the last song on that gig was played on a huge pipe organ spiced up with strange hypnotic electronic effects. I will definitely remember that gig for the rest of my life.

Carrie & Lowell is probably not as experimental as Illinois, but it does have some electric sounds that make a haunting sound for a folk album. The songs on this album are absolutely beautiful. Whenever artists write about their authentic loss, the albums tend to be amazing. I think there's something amazing in making these kinds of beautiful things from personal tragedies.

The whole album is gorgeous, but my favourite tracks are Should Have Known Better, which has the echoes of the Illinois album. It has similar kinds of innovative changes between different parts and that same intimate and beautiful tone. All of Me Wants All of You is also an amazing song with subtle echoes and clean electric guitars and that heartbreaking melancholic melody. Fourth of July just gets all of the hairs in my neck stand up from sheer beauty. I'm almost weeping from just listening to this song here at work where I'm writing this post on my lunch hour. One of my favourite thigns about Sufjan Stevens is his delicate voice that trembles so gently that it sounds like it could break at any point. There's something incredibly beautiful in that voice. The best example of this voice can be found in No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross.

When Carrie & Lowell first came out I had heard that it was Stevens' return to folk and I was super excited. When I actually heard the album, it still took me a bit of time to really embrace these songs in full. Now it's probably my second favourite of all Sufjan Stevens albums.

Listen to the album on Spotify.