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Signs and Wonders

Throughout Carrie & Lowell, Sufjan Stevens, estranged from his mother, instead finds solace through the natural world and his religious beliefs.

This begins with the opening track of the album, “Death with Dignity.” As first tracks go, this one is excellent; Stevens summons the natural world around him in poetic preparation of the album to come.

Spirit of my silence, I can hear you
But I’m afraid to be near you
And I don’t know where to begin…
Somewhere in the desert there’s a forest
And an acre before us.
But I don’t know where to begin.

The forest Stevens creates reappears throughout the remainder of the album. There are silhouettes of cedar trees; later, Stevens sits beneath the shade of a pear tree, “shadows and light conspiring.” The ghost of Stevens’ mother appears in a willow tree. Stevens also uses birds throughout Carrie & Lowell.   Stevens and his mother call each other by bird names in “Fourth of July”; a falcon flies far away when Carrie dies in “Eugene.” “I’m light as a feather,” Stevens sings in one song. It’s no coincidence that birds are nature’s great singers. In the opening track of the album, Stevens asks a chimney swift, “What is that song you sing for the dead?” This album is Stevens learning that song, learning to view death with nature’s understanding.

By using the natural world as a place of solace in the face of death, he joins himself with centuries of poets who have turned to the natural world for comfort in the face of death. In Carrie & Lowell, this moment comes in “Fourth of July”: “Tell me what did you learn from the Tillamook burn… we’re all gonna die.” The Tillamook Burn is the location of a series of forest fires that took place in Oregon. Forest fires are a necessary and natural cleansing, a forest is burned and dies only to be reborn, replenished and anew. Death comes to each and all; Stevens chooses to take comfort in the fact that death is natural and ubiquitous and necessary.

Then there are the religious references throughout the album. I’ve always admired the way in which Stevens writes about religion; it’s never straightforward, always presented through layers of doubt and questioning.  This comes in the song “Casimir Pulaski Day” off Stevens’ earlier Illinois album, after the death of a teenage girl:

All the glory that the Lord has made
And the complications when I see his face
In the morning in the window.
All the glory when he took our place
But he took my shoulders and he shook my face
And he takes and he takes and he takes.

The God that Stevens’ presents here and elsewhere in his discography is not purely benign. There are echoes of this in Carrie & Lowell.  In “Drawn to the Blood,” Stevens questions, “How did this happen?” He seems in disbelief that he has experienced such sorrow, “for [his] prayer has always been love.” “What did I do to deserve this?” he asks. Stevens’ religious beliefs lead him towards forgiveness, lead him towards an acceptance of death, but they don’t prevent him from feeling sorrow.

“Still I pray to what I cannot see,” Stevens sings in “Eugene.” Even when contemplating the sorrows of his past and facing the regrets that come with His mother’s death, Stevens remains faithfully religious. In “The Only Thing,” Stevens lists “Blind faith” and “God’s grace” as two of the wonders that make life still worth living.

Stevens doesn’t lapse into bitterness throughout Carrie & Lowell. Admittedly, Carrie was not a perfect mother, but Stevens demonstrates only a loving attitude towards her memory. “I want to save you from your sorrow,” he sings in one song. “Such a waste, your beautiful face,” he sings in another. He is sorry for her, sorry that they both failed to grow closer in life, but he never seems angry, at her or at death. There’s a Christian forgiveness at work here, and it is helping Stevens to accept her passing.

Through Stevens’ reliance on Nature and God in the absence of a comforting mother, he is acting on his own, deliberately seeking out his own sources of peace. We can’t control where we come from or who our parents are; we generally have very little choice about the kind of upbringing we are given. That’s not to say there aren’t moments of despair on the album. In “The Only Thing,” Stevens imagines in detail a number of ways to kill himself.  But when Stevens lapses into mourning, it is brief, and soon followed by a redirection of his attention. “Wonders never cease,” he sings. It’s a choice to look for what is wondrous in life, to seek what is hopeful.

Friend, The Fables Delight Me

Amethyst and flowers on the table,
Is it real or a fable?
Well, I suppose, a friend is a friend.

I think most artists would agree that at times Truth is more important than truth, that certain fiction can prove more honest than fact. I think that understanding is important when listening to an album as autobiographical as Carrie & Lowell; Stevens is giving his audience a vulnerable and raw look at his past, but there’s still a fable here, a lesson he’s extracting from life.

For me, it goes back to that conversation between Sufjan Stevens and his mother in “Fourth of July.” They’re both full of regret, full of questions and doubts. And death is that inescapable end to their relationship. We’re all gonna die, says the son, over and over again. So live well, says the mother.