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Album reviews: Sufjan'€™s redemption for his distant past

The prayers of Sufjan Stevens’ hardcore fans have been answered

Dylan Amirio (The Jakarta Post)
Fri, April 10, 2015

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Album reviews: Sufjan'€™s redemption for his distant past

The prayers of Sufjan Stevens'€™ hardcore fans have been answered. After a colorful, electronic freak-out in celebration of his ego in 2010'€™s The Age of Adz, he returns to the folk world, along with his bare emotions and rawest desires.

Stevens'€™ latest album, Carrie and Lowell (Asthmatic Kitty Records), sees the almost 40-year-old come out unscathed from the wild and spazzy electronic years that made him burst out of his humble shell of Bible-reading, serial killer-immortalizing, piano-and-banjo-playing self of the 2000s, into a creature of ego.

Five years after Adz'€™s youthful outburst, a matured, contemplative and nostalgic Sufjan made a return that was as sudden and as unexpected as the music he released. Carrie and Lowell saw him return to his stripped-down folk roots.

The album is as bare as 2004'€™s Seven Swans, but with heavier feeling caused by the immense personal weight put on his voice and every word he sings. While Seven Swans based itself around stories and characters in the Bible and presented itself like a fictional work, Carrie and Lowell is based on eternal longing for the moments and people (person, actually) that occurred in his almost 40-year-old existence and reads like part of his autobiography.

His voice grew deep with age, which made his vocal delivery in this record all the more spine tingling.

A particular, frequent memory is that of his mother, Carrie, for whom the album is named along with his step-dad, who eluded him most of his life since age 1 and died in 2012. Stevens explained in an interview with Pitchfork that contact between him and Carrie was intermittent and sporadic throughout his life, but beneath the distant relationship, he grew to accept her absence and understood her unpreparedness as a parent.

What he couldn'€™t shake off was the desire to be with her. The entire album'€™s narrative and emotional background is revealed on the first track '€œDeath and Dignity'€, where he sings: '€œI want to be near you mother, but every road leads to an end, your apparition passes through me.'€ At the end of Carrie'€™s life, Stevens never gets the connection he always desired.

After her death, he went through a period of intense grief that saw him trying to compensate for his loss. Years after, he chose to channel all his childhood nostalgia and a hindsighted desire to communicate his love for her through what he does best: giving the world Carrie and Lowell.

In the same interview, when he was asked about what was going through his mind when she died, Stevens was quoted as saying: '€œMake amends while you can. Take every opportunity to reconcile with those you love or those around you. It was in our best interest for our mother to abandon us. God bless her for knowing what she wasn'€™t capable of.'€

Carrie and Lowell is a true and terrific example of a mid-life introspection on looking back on the relationships that matter in one'€™s life, especially that of family, and always appreciating them however distant they are.


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