Sufjan Stevens opens Carrie & Lowell with the beautiful “Death With Dignity” which acts as a thesis statement of sorts for the rest of the album. This album is Sufjan’s attempt to work through the emotional backlash caused by the death of his mostly absent mother. (He talks about it himself in an interview with Pitchfork here: http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/9595-true-myth-a-conversation-with-sufjan-stevens/) “I forgive you mother, I can hear you, and I long to be near you.” Sparkling acoustic guitars contrast with the fear and self doubt as he attempts to air the wounds of childhood trauma. Haunted by his mother’s “apparition” Sufjan doesn’t know “where to begin.” While most of the production on this track remains uniform, there is great little piano interlude which acts as a bridge before the last verse, which is adds echoed vocals before accepting that Carrie will “never see us again.” Immediately following this realization is the first of several beautiful hymn-like codas which act as transitions between songs. They seem to act as wordless prayers, emotional outpourings which cannot be expressed even with Sufjan’s impressive songwriting skills. This first coda is unique in that it has a lap-steel solo which adds a melodic aspect to the swelling guitars.
“Should Have Know Better,” one of my favourite tracks on this album, is beautifully structured from a poetic stand point. The verses are made of five line stanzas, each with the line “my black shroud” in its centre. The second stanza is one of my favourites on the album:
I should have wrote a letter
And grieve what I happen to grieve
My black shroud
I never trust my feelings
I waited for the remedy
Repression, self doubt, and procrastination have led to regret and lost opportunities for healing, as they have in my life and I’m sure in many others. Avoiding grief deepens grief later. The first chorus reveals just how traumatic having Carrie as a mother could be: “When I was three, three maybe four, she left us at that video store.” While the song opens in a very somber mood - acoustic guitars, floating background vocals - after the second chorus there is a wonderful tonal shift brought about by a chirping casio-keyboard solo (the kind which were very popular in indie music from the early 2000s). After this solo Sufjan confronts the fact that while yes, he should have wrote that letter, “the past is still the past, the bridge to nowhere.” And so, discarding his black shroud of first half of the song, Sufjan reflects on the “beauty” and “illumination” brought into his family’s life by the birth of his niece. This is one of the few moments which really opens up, which soars in hope, which approaches any of the exuberance of 2005’s Illinois. The coda breaks the spell with swelling chords descending back into the gloom of depression.
“All of Me Wants All of You” opens with one of the most devastating verses I have heard in a very long time. Nothing could convey Sufjan’s sense of disconnection or his failed search for love and meaning in relationships than the line, “You checked your texts while I masturbated.” While in the first track he felt his mother’s apparition pass right through him, now he sings “I’m just a ghost you walk right through.” The emptiness caused by his mother’s death, now reinforced in his lover’s indifference, begins to encroach on the realm of faith as he sings, “Revelation may come true.” There is both hope and doubt in that line, a dichotomy which persists throughout the rest of the album.
Dismembered beasts, the the ingredients of a failed spell, fill “Drawn to the Blood.” While praying for love, Sufjan wallows in self pity, “How did this happen?” Strangely he calls on Delilah, a figure of betrayal in the Old Testament, to avenge his grief. And yet, despite the questioning self pity, the coda is one of the most extended and beautiful, swelling upwards and seeming to resolve more than many of the other codas, as if maybe there is an answer to his questioning.
“Eugene”, one of many references to Oregon on Carrie & Lowell, is the city where Carrie met Lowell, and the place where Sufjan and his siblings spent their three best summers with their mother as children. The refrain at the end of each verse intones a deep desire to be near his mother. Images of baptism (“Like a Father he led community water on my head,” and “In the sprinkle I mark the evidence known from the start.”) and death (“From the bed near your death, and all the machines that made a mess”) contrast each other while he continues desperately to “pray to what I cannot see.” But in the end hopelessness sets in:
For the rest of my life
Admitting the best is behind me
Now I’m drunk and afraid
Wishing the world would go away
What’s the point of singing songs
If they’ll never even hear you?
“Eugene” ends very abruptly on that last “You?” This is the first song without a coda, and they don’t return for a while, as if the “What’s the point” extends past singing songs to “What’s the point of prayer, or hope, or life?"
The imagery rich “Fourth of July” seems to be a conversation with his mother, who he refers to as “my fading supply.” It’s almost as if she’s a drug he’s addicted to and he knows that withdrawal is going to kick in soon. Despite being implored to “make the most of your life, while it is rife” and wondering “What could I have said to raise you from the dead?” the song ends with a long litany meditating on the line “We’re all gonna die.” Musically there is a sense of hospital room beeps and the pulse of life support machines, along with a shimmering, dream-like effervescence, but again, no coda.
“The Only Thing” is hands down my favourite track on this album. The guitar line dances, the melody flows gorgeously, and Biblical and Mythological allusions abound. Despite the uplifting mood of the music, the lyrics are the darkest yet, with Sufjan discussing possible ways of committing suicide: "The only thing that keeps me from cutting my arm/ Cross hatch, warm bath, Holiday Inn after dark” (like The Death of Seneca by Manuel Dominguez.) So what is the only thing which prevents this self destructive behaviour? Is it faith? Signs and wonders? God’s grace? It seems that these things, while contributing to a sense of hope, are less sure for Sufjan than they may have been in the past. They’re there, but perhaps not giving him the security he hoped. Sufjan’s sweet falsetto croons “Everything I feel returns to you some how.” Is that a prayer to God? To his mother? I think both. So, again the question is, what’s the only thing? There’s one line in the song which doesn’t fit into the established verse structure: “I want to save you from your sorrow.” From this line erupts the second truly transcendent moment on the album with electric guitars adding more energy with a high counter point. In the next verse, possibly my favourite on the album, Sufjan, saved from despair by wanting to spare others seems to elevate to yet another reason to continue striving:
The only reason why I continue at all
Faith in reason, I wasted my life playing dumb
Signs and wonders, sea lion caves in the dark
Blind faith, God’s grace, nothing else left to impart
And yet, even this is not conclusive. The question of the reason for existence hangs in the air, like the last fading chord at the end of the song.
"Carrie and Lowell” is probably the track which reminds me most of Illinois with it’s percussive layering of sounds. It is a simple, impressionistic tune in which Sufjan shares a story about Carrie breaking his arm, possibly while under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Dido’s Lament by Henry Purcell, a gorgeous song about death and love (seriously look it up), is also referenced. Strangely, the arm breaking incident comes after energetic shift upwards at the end of the song which is then followed immediately by the coda’s return after a number of songs.
NOTE: This is an incomplete review posted about 7 months after it was written, because I won’t ever finish it at this point.
No comments:
Post a Comment