Sufjan Stevens

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Essential Albums

  • Carrie & Lowell
    Carrie & Lowell
    Carrie & Lowell

    Even on his grandest albums, Sufjan Stevens sometimes went it alone, recording himself solo, as he played all the parts of his kaleidoscopic compositions. It’s telling, then, that one of Stevens’ smallest-sounding albums—2015’s heartbreaking Carrie & Lowell—was recorded in a half-dozen studios or hotel rooms, with the assistance of multiple engineers, musicians and even a bona fide producer, Thomas Bartlett. Only two years before Stevens made the record, his largely estranged mother, Carrie, died of stomach cancer. Despite the tense relationship, the grief blindsided Stevens, who in turn rebelled against this face-off with mortality with loose sex, drugs and booze. He was coping inside a freefall, and he hoped writing and recording about his lack of a life with Carrie would ease the pain. He needed that help. Few albums look at death as unflinchingly as Carrie & Lowell. “We all know how this will end,” Stevens sings by way of introduction during the seemingly cheery opener, “Death With Dignity”. Carrie struggled with mental illness most of her life, and left Stevens when he was one year old, reuniting with him for a brief spell after her marriage to Lowell Brams, while Stevens was still a toddler. Carrie & Lowell is part travelogue of alternately painful and pleasant memories: At one point, Stevens recalls being abandoned by his mother at a video store; later, he remembers learning how to swim alongside Brams, a new but steadying presence in his life. Those were days of strange wonder and worry, vividly recounted here. But these gently gilded songs of ever-gorgeous folk are concerned less with the travails of the past than they are with the urgencies of the present. There is the bleary bar-side reflection of the dirge-like “John My Beloved”, and the unfeeling sex—or lack thereof—during “All of Me Wants All of You”. And at the centre of Carrie & Lowell is the breathtaking “The Only Thing”, in which Stevens softly owns the extent of his hardcore recklessness, as he considers driving off a cliff, or cutting his arms; he’s on an express route to wherever his mother has gone. “Do I care if I survive this? Bury the dead where they’re found,” he sings in the final chorus, his voice rising to reach out for connection. Especially at those depths, Carrie & Lowell is an honest encapsulation of someone else’s grief, flashing like a lighthouse for anyone who’s out there, dangerously drifting.

  • Illinois
    Illinois
    Illinois

    Sufjan Stevens has a secret to share: There are moments in his life—particularly when he’s posing, and finds himself playing a role he does not momentarily believe—when he might as well be a serial killer. He delivers this revelation in a tremulous whisper during the final minute of the devastating Illinois track “John Wayne Gacy, Jr”. In 1978, Gacy—a part-time clown who went by the name Pogo—confessed to the murder of nearly three dozen young men outside Chicago. Stevens doesn’t forgive Gacy, per se, but he does find empathy in the Killer Clown’s biographical details, and in the woes that pushed him toward acts so heinous. The past and present force us all to wear masks, Stevens reckons (though we don’t all wind up killing 33 kids as a result). The saga of Gacy is but one bit of history that Stevens invokes during Illinois, the 2005 album that marks the second—and, for now, final—entry in his series about American states (the first, Michigan, served as his breakthrough upon its 2003 release). Illinois finds Stevens travelling throughout the Prairie State, from the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago—where Cream of Wheat was unveiled—to a flood-prone graveyard full of Civil War dead to Jacksonville, a town named for a slave-holding president (and one that, ironically, became a hub of the Underground Railroad). It’s an album that functions as an elliptical and selective history of a place. But Stevens was never really writing about just a state. As heard on “John Wayne Gacy, Jr”, these songs are opportunities for Stevens to sort through ideas about himself, his country, his family and his outlook. After all, the album’s anthemic centrepiece, “Chicago”, is a personal history with the city, but not of it—a reminder of all the romance and drama a place so big can offer a young person. And while Stevens’ music has never lacked ambition, Illinois found him pushing himself not just emotionally, but musically. He was disappointed in some of Michigan’s compositions, telling the magazine Under the Radar in 2005 that he “didn’t feel like [he’d] achieved” some of his creative goals. And so, Illinois glistens and wows, from the dizzying motion of “Chicago” to the stomp-out-loud heroics of “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts”. In an instant, Stevens can turn from hushed folk for fans of Nick Drake, to maximalist pop informed by the minimalism of Steve Reich. It is little wonder Stevens’ Fifty States Project stalled after this; it’s hard to imagine how to improve on the glories of Illinois.

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About Sufjan Stevens

An explorer as much as an artist, Sufjan Stevens has created a body of work that includes gentle folk songs, glistening symphonies, re-imagined Christmas carols and fluttering electronics. Despite the diversity, there are universalities in his songs: The delicate heartbreaker “Mysteries of Love”, the martial “Decatur” and the solemn “Fourth of July” somehow all feel intimate, expansive, graceful and giddy. Born in Detroit in 1975 and raised in Michigan, Stevens released his stylistically omnivorous debut, A Sun Came, in 1999. He then moved to New York to get a master’s degree in writing, honing the storytelling that would weave into the layered orchestration of 2003’s acclaimed Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lake State. That album was the gentle setup in a joke he made about creating an album for each of the 50 states; 2005's baroque pop-esque Illinois was the series' second and final instalment. In the years to follow, Stevens contributed to the Call Me By Your Name soundtrack, collaborated with Son Lux and The National, produced a live show consisting of a film he wrote and directed, and whose score was performed by an orchestra (2007's The BQE), and put out more albums including 2015's Carrie & Lowell, which showed a likewise deep connection between places on maps and tender spots in his memory and heart. He joined his stepfather, Lowell Brams, on the 2020 instrumental Aporia, and dedicated 2023’s emotionally affecting Javelin to the memory of his partner, who died that year.

BORN
1975
GENRE
Alternative

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