Solely three sense reminiscences stay from the night time my spouse and I got here house from the hospital after our daughter died, 10 years in the past this Might. My brother, sleeping like a canine on the sofa behind us, a depressing sentinel. The heat of my spouse’s sizzling tears and breath on my face, inches from my very own. And one thing else, within the background, enjoying over and over: Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell.
Why would we try this to ourselves? The album that opens with “Dying With Dignity,” the one whose most memorable refrain is a whispered “we’re all gonna die.” And but I stored returning to the report participant, flipping the album time and again. The album functioned because the bleakest sort of prayer, the one which doesn’t even ask for issues, simply provides a beseeching look skyward: Discover me. Really feel me.
Within the myopia of my shock and early grief, I barely registered the difficult and brutal autobiographical reality of the report. Sure, it’s an album with a Polaroid on the duvet, clearly from a private assortment, paired with two first names. Sure, the lyrics are so particular to at least one man’s expertise as to strategy the forensic: “Once I was three, three perhaps 4….” And but the thumbprint of tragedy, the define and silhouette of grief, was all I wanted from Carrie & Lowell. I gulped at it, greedily, time and again. My relationship to an album has hardly ever been extra intense. Till this month, I couldn’t bear to place it again on. To me, it had change into like a loss of life march, or a funeral mass: music to be used.
However Carrie & Lowell, newly reissued by Asthmatic Kitty with a modest addendum of bonus tracks and a stunning 40-page picture album, survives my bloodshot fixation as a result of it’s so formally good. The preparations really feel inevitable in the way in which the harmonic movement of a Bach suite feels inevitable. There isn’t a single breath on the album that doesn’t really feel drawn with specificity. Play the opening of “Dying With Dignity” whereas gazing a creek, and the rhythms of the opening guitar determine will naturally match up with the movement of the water.
There aren’t many artists who can seize and protect this intimacy and depth. There’s an apparent comparability to Elliott Smith, who equally matched up a shaky and tender vocal with preparations that felt like you might stare straight via them. However not even Smith bared his soul as immediately, merely, and plainly as Stevens does right here. Smith was usually obfuscating or misdirecting in his lyrics even when it appeared he was confessing, however Stevens lays all of it out: occasions, locations, dates, automobile fashions. The familiarity that I get from these songs is identical I get from a brief story assortment rooted in a particular setting—the Nevada of Claire Vaye Watkins’ Battleborn, the Wyoming of Annie Proulx’s Shut Vary. Stevens’ reminiscences change into sacred the extra granular they change into.
