Remember when we used to wonder what state Sufjan Stevens would make an album about next? I definitely wondered, but I also did the math and figured it would be unlikely for someone to spend their entire career making albums about states. Fortunately, that was all a big joke and Sufjan Stevens has spent the intervening years since 2005’s Illinois releasing the skritchy experimental pop record The Age of Adz (2010) and the sparse, breathtakingly gorgeous tribute to his mother and stepfather Carrie & Lowell. The album is one of the most hushed and gorgeous records you will ever hear, and yet it’s not an album you need to prepare yourself for like, say, Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked at Me (an honorable mention, only missing the list because I only listened to it once, wept deeply, and never wanted to listen to it again even though it is a profound work of art). You can spend time with this one without it ruining your day, and despite how quiet it is, there are serene moments of joy and comfort. It’s an album of fractured nostalgia, tarnished by reality and the passage of time and life’s inevitability. I saw Stevens perform at the Bottleneck when he was touring Illinois, and I thought that show felt a little hollow. He seemed burnt out, and the songs didn’t carry the gravity that they did when I listened to them at home. Carrie & Lowell feels like Sufjan Stevens re-centering himself by recording his sparsest album to date and yet also his most affecting. It’s nice to see that sound has carried over into his recent singles (“Tonya Harding” and the Oscar nominated song from Call Me By Your Name “Mystery of Love). It’s not that I’m a Luddite, and that I think he should throw his synthesizer and computer into the trash, I just feel like he communicates so well in this form that I don’t ever want him to stop.
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