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Apr 25, 2025 By Arden Green

A daring artistic response to the sweeping maximalism of 2005’s landmark Illinois and the arty experimentalism of 2010’s The Age of Adz, Sufjan Stevens’ seventh studio album Carrie & Lowell arrived at the tail end of a pivotal period for the then 39-year-old indie wunderkind. The 2012 death of Stevens’ estranged mother, Carrie, from stomach cancer had left him shattered, forced to retread his history of familial trauma and abandonment. The resultant project—an achingly intimate and introspective return to nature, devoid of bells and whistles—is ultimately elevated by Stevens’ acoustic soundscapes and raw, spiritual poetry, with the decision to pare down his sound subtly revolutionary within the context of his career. Greeted with universal acclaim, Carrie & Lowell further cemented Stevens’ much-deserved reputation as one of his generation’s most significant singer/songwriters, with the album itself comfortably ranking among the greatest releases of the 2010s. This era’s aesthetic return to bedroom pop and lo-fi experimentalism served, in a sense, to liberate countless artists from the maximalist excesses of the previous decade, with Stevens arriving at the helm. Carrie & Lowell, in such a rare fashion, achieves a timelessness through its confessional simplicity, serving simultaneously as a profound statement on the nature of loss and mourning, an immersive anti-nostalgia trip concerning childhoods lost, and a burning tribute to the natural world alongside the ghosts and gods inhabiting its vast forests and fathomless lakes. In short, Carrie & Lowell was and is the album of Stevens’ career.

Opening cut “Death with Dignity,” an instant classic of its genre, finds a downtrodden Stevens confessing, “I don’t know where to begin / Again, I lost my strength completely.” The track’s delicate picking accentuates Stevens’ heartbroken musings as he wanders funerary settings, bitter memories, and ultimately back toward the natural world. He seems haunted by the frayed relationship shared with his mother—her schizophrenia, substance abuse, and abandonment of Sufjan in his native Michigan at the age of one, in order to relocate to Oregon. Here, we find the weary indie pop troubadour sighing, “I forgive you mother, I can feel you, and I long to be near you / But every road leads to an end,” his desire to make amends perhaps arriving too late. These childhood recollections are rendered with the grain and gloss of old polaroids on delicate folk-pop number “Should’ve Known Better” and aching Pacific Northwestern daydream “Eugene.” On the former, Stevens recalls, “Once I was three / Three, maybe four / She left us at that video store,” while the latter details hazy childhood memories of visiting his mother on the West Coast and Stevens’ burgeoning bond with his stepfather Lowell Brams, his frequent creative collaborator and business partner, as co-founder of Asthmatic Kitty records. The atmosphere of “Eugene” is thick and as alienly nostalgic as Saturday morning cartoons or a snapshot of pale sunlight through evergreen branches.

Carrie & Lowell’s plucky title track continues the history of Stevens’ mother and stepfather, documenting their tumultuous marriage, marred by addiction, instability, and mental illness. “Ephemera on my back,” Stevens sings in a moment of pure poetry, “She breaks my arm.” Of course, no conversation regarding the power of Carrie & Lowell’s memory may be complete without consideration of the monumentally devastating “Fourth of July,” still easily Stevens’s greatest achievement as a songwriter. “The evil had spread like a fever ahead / It was night when you died, my firefly,” Stevens begins a stirring back and forth with his deceased mother by revisiting the night of her death. Experiencing some clarity, Carrie responds gracefully, “Well, you do enough talk, my little hawk / Why do you cry?” What unfolds is a heartrending lyrical poem concerning love, loss, mourning, forgiveness, and the inherently apocalyptic nature of mortality. Here, as though a fresh-faced prophet of doom, Stevens gently prods us with repeated reminders of the inevitable: “We’re all gonna die.” This is a song to reduce the listener to tears and leave them, hands shaking, eyes bleary, wanting to contact their nearest loved one to catch up, reminisce, and perhaps seek forgiveness.

Though much of Carrie & Lowell is informed by memory, Stevens warns early on against becoming overdependent on recollections of the past, when, at the closing of “Should’ve Known Better,” he sings, “Nothing can be changed / The past is still the past / The bridge to nowhere.” Accordingly, a large portion of the album concerns Stevens’ present as he self-destructs, questions his faith, and descends into a state of alienation. Such tracks as the mystical “All of Me Wants All of You” and cosmic “Drawn to the Blood,” another crucial cut, find Stevens on his own, driving through the night, preparing, and attempting to rediscover himself as a man, independent of his youthful traumas. Throughout, Stevens is haunted by mythological omens and personal ghosts, translating his grief into a vast spiritual quest. Likewise, the darkly enchanting “Only Thing,” which wastes no time with its opening lines—“The only thing that stops me from driving this car / Half-light, jackknife into the canyon at night / Signs and wonders, Perseus aligned with the skull / Slain Medusa, Pegasus alight from us all”—intimately details the search of a man in throes of a crisis. “Do I care if I survive this?” Stevens inquires. “Bury the dead where they’re found.” “The Only Thing” serves as an especially revealing composition, a cosmic collision of innocence and experience, returning to Stevens’ ultimate question, “Should I tear my heart out now? / Everything I feel returns to you, somehow.” Likewise, “John My Beloved” continues to document this spiral, Stevens resigning himself to “sweetly pretend, before the mystery ends.” A down-and-out Stevens passes his days “painting the hills blue and red,” surrounded by visions of heroes and ghosts, birds and lovers estranged—several of his career-long fascinations—as new mornings dawn and blue nights fall, the world turning without him. He has become but a shell of a man, declaring “There’s only a shadow of me / In a matter of speaking, I’m dead.” The listener, by now commiserating with the shattered artist, cannot help but wonder, Is there some redemption yet to be had?

The answer, however, remains ambiguous on the album’s final two entries. “No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross” finds Stevens at rock bottom, beset with paranoia that he may very well be following in his mother’s self-destructive footsteps. For children of especially dysfunctional parents, such a grim prospect may haunt them their entire lives, uncertain as to what may be environmental and what is the result of some toxic genetic inheritance. At this point, Stevens becomes alienated from every facet of himself, including his faith, hence the track’s concluding verse, “There’s blood on that blade / Fuck me, I’m falling apart / My assassin like Casper the Ghost / There’s no shade in the shadow of the cross.” Only the ghosts remain on closing “Blue Bucket of Gold,” on which Stevens refashions the claims of a 19th century Oregonian myth into a plea for salvation, not just from his current state of degradation, but his mother’s legacy as well as from the grasp of mortality itself. The track serves as a delicate fade-out to an ultimately harrowing tale, though it offers little in the way of comfort or conclusion. Isn’t this, after all, the way of life?

Though Sufjan Stevens had long established himself as a major figure of the ’00s indie scene, having received numerous accolades from both critics and fans, Carrie & Lowell allowed him to genuinely establish himself as one of his generation’s most crucial artists. His style unmistakable, his lyrics piercingly intimate, Stevens was able to harness the powers of confusion and devastation into a humble poetic masterpiece, which stands the test of time 10 years on. This album possesses a unique power, remaining ever relevant in a uniquely human sense. Though one sincerely hopes that Stevens has since managed to recover, Carrie & Lowell may well be the work that defines the entirety of his illustrious, inimitable career.

[Note: Asthmatic Kitty is releasing a 10th anniversary edition of Carrie & Lowell on May 30. Preorder it here.]

www.sufjan.com

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