Not long after Sufjan Stevens lost his mother, Carrie, to cancer in 2012, he started writing music about her and the profound sorrow he was feeling. He didn't have an exact "why" in mind, or a sense of what he'd do with the songs he was accumulating. But writing had always been a source of comfort for Stevens, and he figured it might help him find clarity and purge his grief.
It may have been a tall order. Stevens had a complicated relationship with his mother: From what he was told later in life, his mom left him and his siblings when he was a year old. She suffered from schizophrenia, and battled drug and alcohol addiction. Stevens lived halfway across the country with his father and stepmother, and he rarely ever saw Carrie, reconnecting only briefly near the end of her life.
And so, with few real memories to draw on, much of what he poured into the 2015 album Carrie & Lowell — named for his mother and stepfather, Lowell Brams — is pure fiction. An imagined life, conversations and events conjured from daydreams and the kind of longing you're left with after years of regret.
To his fans, as well as many critics, Carrie & Lowell was an unqualified success. The songs are startlingly intimate, at times spiritually euphoric, and consistently ranked among Stevens' best and most affecting work. And yet, 10 years later, the artist's own thoughts are much more conflicted.
In an essay included with a special anniversary edition of Carrie & Lowell, Stevens characterizes the album as a failure, calling his songwriting a "miscarriage of bad intentions." It isn't that he believes the songs are poorly made — rather, that they failed to locate the clarity he was searching for, while attempting to speak for someone he just wishes were still around to speak for herself.
In the years since Carrie & Lowell, Stevens has been through a lot. In a dedication for his 2023 album, Javelin, he revealed that his partner, Evans Richardson, had died that spring. The same year, Stevens was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune disorder that left him partially paralyzed and facing a long recovery. He's continued to make music, but these days he's mostly focused on instrumental compositions.
Stevens doesn't give many interviews, so I wasn't sure what to expect. But in our hour-plus conversation, he was open, warm and reflective. And as we talked about the album, we found its themes naturally led us toward bigger-picture thoughts: cosmic wonders like dark matter, the nature of truth and how acknowledging one's insignificance in the universe can offer its own strange comfort.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Robin Hilton: You were coming up on 40 when Carrie & Lowell came out. You're coming up on 50 now. What's your relationship with time like these days?
Sufjan Stevens: Well, time is undefinable. We haven't really figured out how to explain it or summarize it or make sense of it in terms of science and physics. So I think my relationship to time is now about presence — you know, present tense — especially in the recovery of the Guillain-Barré. I really had to slow down and just focus on small, menial tasks, like trying to lift my foot up off the floor, trying to reinvigorate the nerves and muscles. It slowed me down a lot. So now I think of time as being irrelevant in a lot of ways.
Where are you with your recovery?
I'm doing pretty good. It took me about six months to get back to walking again. And now I'm off all the adaptive equipment — you know, I was in a wheelchair for maybe two months, and then a walker, a rollator, a cane. But now I can walk and run and jump, and that's great.
When you think about time, and how much time has passed since you first released Carrie & Lowell, I'm wondering what's changed for you — like your relationship to these songs, and to your mother. You're in a totally different place now.
When I was writing these songs, I was in the thick of it and I wasn't thinking clearly, so there's a lack of objectivity to the music that now feels very foreign and unfamiliar. Time is a salve, but it offers no solution really, especially in dealing with pain and suffering and death. And I think what I realized is that grieving is eternal and you never really get over it. It just moves around within you and transforms you, but it never goes away.
I lost my mom in recent years, and I was telling my wife that it's like it creates this little empty space in you that never gets filled again. You kind of carry it around with you, and you just have to learn to be OK with it.
Right. I think that our responsibility is to duty and endurance and survival, and to also learn how to live with the grief. I started to really feel like the absence of a loved one is the presence; it becomes a ghost that you have to learn to live with. It's haunting, and it's overwhelming at times. And I think it's best to acknowledge it and receive it and welcome it, and give it the time and space that it needs. But it's also important to keep living and to keep moving, and to learn how to navigate your life in tandem with death.
At the time you released the album, you said that you were looking for meaning and a better understanding of everything that you'd been through. Where are you in that journey? Have you found any clarity?
No, unfortunately. I find as I get older, experience makes fools of us all — I feel kind of stupider and less prepared for what life brings me in a lot of ways. So I think what's becoming of me is, I'm just becoming more zen: more present, more accepting.
Of yourself?
Yeah, and also welcoming pain and suffering, and knowing that it's possible to survive it and that it's OK. Endurance is really my mantra right now.
It sounds like you've learned in the last 10 years that you're stronger than you think.
Maybe. You know, strength is funny because it suggests a kind of power and authority and vigor. But I also think there's greater power in survival. And sometimes survival requires sensitivity and openness, and even subservience. I think I've just become a lot more subordinate to the chaos of the world around me and less inclined to fight it, because I'm starting to learn that you cannot create change by force: You just have to move through it, and be open to transformation.
One of the reasons I ask is because, while the songs on this anniversary edition haven't changed, your presentation of them has. I think the original release felt very much like an elegy — heartbreaking, if necessary — and this feels more like a celebration of Carrie's life.
Yeah, I think that's a good way to look at it. I don't know if you've seen the packaging, but it has a booklet of photos: I went back through the archives and put a lot of photos of myself and my siblings and my parents in it. I think it stands more as a memorial to Carrie and to her life, what little I knew of it. And I think it's a good idea to use the word celebration as well, because when I made this record, it was just a hot mess. It wasn't really celebrating anything.
Can you take me through what it was like for you going through all these photos — where you found them and how you arrived at the ones you did?
Going back over all of that was huge. For the first time, I was able to look at it without sobbing and without feeling overwhelmed, and I was able to really see the beauty and elegy in all of it. You know, they're just little snapshots; they're kind of trifles in a lot of ways. But they represent a larger life that's lived, most of it unseen and unrecorded. ... There's a wholeness to it that probably doesn't accurately reflect the way that life is lived — you know, it's all disjointed and chaotic — but when you look at the remnants of archival material, you start to perceive the beauty and truth in all of it. I think that's really important to see, because otherwise, when you live moment to moment, you just feel lost in space. And when my mother died, she really didn't have anything; she was like a ward of the state, I think. She had a backpack with some stuff, but she didn't really own anything or have anything. So I feel like this music and these photos and the memories that we have, they all reflect the greatness of her life, in spite of what little she had when she died.
You talked about being a mess at the time you were writing these songs and recording them. You also include this really deeply moving essay in this deluxe edition, which reveals a lot of things that I don't think many people knew you were going through when you first released the album. For starters, you share what I took as a pretty harsh assessment of these songs and the whole process of working through them.
Yeah. I think this album is evidence of creative and artistic failure from my vantage point. I was trying to make sense of something that is senseless. I felt that I was being manipulative and self-centered and solipsistic and self-loathing, and that the approach that I had taken to my work, which is to kind of create beauty from chaos, was failing me. It was very frustrating. And for the first time I realized that not everything can be sublimated into art, that some things just remain unsolvable, or insoluble. I think I was really just frustrated by even trying to make sense of the experience of grief through the songs.
You say the process was "painful, humiliating, and an utter miscarriage of bad intentions. My grief manifested as self-loathing and misery. Every song I tried to write became a weapon aimed against me, an indictment of ignorance, blame, resentment and misappropriation." A little later, you say, "The songs I sing were of ineptitude and disrepair. I could never make sense of the nothingness that consumed me, and it was foolhardy to believe anything good could come of superimposing my mother's memory onto my music in the first place. But I did it just the same." I kept waiting for you to say how you don't feel this way anymore, that you now realize you actually did make a great and meaningful work of art that means a lot to a lot of people. But you never say that at all.
No. I'm kind of embarrassed by this album, to be honest with you.
Really.
Because I sort of feel like I don't have any authority over my mother and her life or experience or her death. All I have is speculation and my imagination and my own misery, and in trying to make sense of it all, I kind of felt like it didn't really resolve anything.
But what is art and making music for you then? Is it a failure just because it didn't get at what you set out to do? Or is it still a success, for lack of a better word, because you created great, meaningful songs that reached people?
Well, that's the effect of the music, not of myself or my intentions. I believe the music has a consciousness beyond me, and so I'm grateful that the songs can exist regardless of my failed intentions or my bad intentions. But I still don't feel good about myself for making these songs.
Do you regret making the album? You certainly sound like you feel bad.
Yeah, I do. I feel bad. It's just a bummer that my mother's not alive and can't speak for herself. What would she say about all this? Maybe she would be proud. I'll never know.
Well, let me ask you this, and maybe this is impossible to do — but if you divorce yourself from the context of the album and just look at it as standalone songs, do you not hear accomplished music?
Yeah, there's logic to it, a musical logic. You know, it all makes sense. It sounds pretty.
It's a powerful gift, I think, to her memory. Knowing that her story and, now, all the photos in this edition are reaching so many people, it's hard for me to see that as anything other than a profound act of love.
She was a very beautiful, loving, caring person. She was really funny. She was really curious. She was a poet and an artist. She was a musician, too — she played the piano. The little bits and pieces that I remember about her were all pretty amazing. It's a shame that most of it goes into this music that is kind of a fabrication. But what I do remember about her is pretty great.
Carrie passed away in 2012. Do you remember when you decided to start writing about it, and what you were thinking and feeling at the time?
I write every day. I'm always in a practice of writing, songwriting. So it wasn't as if I sat down to write an album about my mother; it just sort of happened. At the time I was writing dozens of songs, and a lot of them, of course, were preoccupied with her because she had just died. But I don't really remember, because ... maybe I was in a fugue state? I don't remember what it was like.
Do you remember the first song you wrote?
God, I don't remember. It's all a blur. I really don't. And some of them I recorded, like, multiple times.
Do you think that's ...
I must have repressed it all.
Well, I was going to ask if you think that's some sort of defense mechanism. There are difficult things I've gone through, and people will ask me about something very specific that they remember from it — and it's just completely gone for me.
Yeah. That might be a result of trauma and PTSD. I do remember the moment that I was told that she had passed away. I was on tour — I was doing the Christmas tour at the time — and her sister, my aunt, had called and said, "She's not well. She's in the hospital. They just operated on her. It's not looking good. You should come visit." So in between shows, I would fly to Houston, where she was, and visit her in the hospital, and then fly back to the next city and set up the Wheel of Christmas and do Christmas shows.
We'd just woken up — we were in San Francisco — and my aunt called me and said she had passed away: "There's nothing you can do now. You should probably just finish the tour. She's going to be cremated. And then we can talk about a memorial service later." And so I had to, like, do the show that day — you know, the show must go on. And I just set up that stupid wheel. Did you ever see that tour?
I never saw the holiday show.
It was horrible.
You're being very hard on yourself.
Well, I think there's just this disconnect between the work that I'm doing and my interior life. And at that time, the contradiction was so profound. It's incredible that I survived it at all.
I thought I had read at the time that you were with your mom when she passed away.
No. But I was grateful that I was able to fly out and see her multiple times in the hospital and spend time with her, with my siblings. We sat by her bed and talked to her and made our peace.
The song on the album that is my favorite, and certainly wrecks me the most, is "Fourth of July." And it's not the line "We're all gonna die" — I mean, that's just a universal truth that we all have to accept. It's all the little nicknames that you share: "my little hawk," "my little Versailles," "my dragonfly." I took it as a conversation between you and Carrie, where she seems to be wishing you nothing but the best. Was this an entirely imagined conversation?
Yeah, of course. That whole song, and the interactions and the affections, are all made up, because I didn't have that kind of relationship with my mother. She was very loving and caring and affectionate, but we didn't have pet names, and we weren't intimate. Our relationship was distant because she mostly wasn't there. I was raised by my dad, my stepmom — and we called our parents by their first names. So there was a kind of staid, at-arm's-length, impersonal dynamic to our relationship. And I think that song is kind of an imagined parallel universe, in which we were more intimate and had pet names and could share things intimately with each other. But that wasn't possible.
You included a handful of demos in this new release, including one for "Fourth of July" that's nearly 14 minutes long, and is pretty different. Do you remember how you got from this to the final version?
I recorded a lot of these songs multiple times, in different scenarios and different studios. That song, I probably recorded four or five times; I remember really, really trying to figure it out. And it's interesting because the ending is unresolved, but it sort of transcends lyrical content and just becomes a kind of a new-age journey. And I think that's probably ultimately where I really wanted to reside, this sonic landscape that didn't have words and didn't have narrative and didn't have any meaning. Since I recorded Carrie & Lowell, I've been doing a lot more kind of new-age, ambient music. I think I'm starting to realize that that's my happy place: a world in which there is no content, there's no language, there's nothing being really explicitly said. There's just sound.
So do you not see yourself doing another vocal album for a while?
Yeah, I haven't really been writing songs — I've been just doing a lot more instrumental stuff, and producing other people's work. I'm kind of allowing myself to live in that world where I don't have to say anything.
This album is, of course, very spare. You talk about wanting to keep it intimate, but I think you do so much with very little, and there are some devices and motifs that you deploy in really effective ways. One that I love is on the song "John My Beloved": It's that pivot note that never stops, that goes through the whole song.
Oh, yeah. It's a meditation.
Meditation is a good word. I was also actually thinking that it's like an alarm — a very gentle alarm, but an alarm. It kind of implies that nothing is changing here.
Maybe that single repeated note is a beacon — it gives us a center of gravity while we move about the chaos of the world. It's something that I do sometimes: As I'm writing or recording or composing, and I find myself venturing onward and upward through all the chords and notes and melodies and trying to create new sonic relationships, I always have to have this one note that kind of holds me down. A lot of times that's how I compose, too — I find one note, and then I find all the various chords that share that one note. And even though you're kind of meandering and reharmonizing and changing keys, you still share that one common link.
I've often wondered what your creative process is like — how you start and move through a song. How intentional is it? Or are you just kind of letting it take you somewhere?
I think a lot of it is impulse. I don't really I don't really arrive with an idea. I just try to physically be present, and allow my body to kind of enter into a musical space. Sometimes on the piano, it's just shapes. Physically engaging with an instrument, I think, is really important.
You close the album with "Blue Bucket of Gold." There are a couple of moments on this track where you reference the myths and fables that we tell ourselves — similar to how you say in your essay that most of what you remember about Carrie is fabricated. I wonder if you've moved any closer to something you can hold onto as the truth in all of this? Or what truth even looks like for you.
Maybe truth is endurance, the substance of things that are eternal. And what is that? I don't know what that is.
Maybe different for everyone. But there are some things that are universal.
Hmm ... there's truth in beauty. There's truth in justice. There's truth in grace. There's truth in love.
It's a big, difficult question, I know. I ask only because truth is something that it seems like you've been reaching for, or at least trying to understand.
Yeah. Maybe truth is emptiness, is vacancy. I was thinking this morning about "black energy" — or whatever they call that, in the universe.
Dark matter?
Dark matter, dark energy. You know, the majority of the universe is this substance that we can't quite figure out or measure or understand. Maybe that's kind of a reflection of what we are, mostly nonexistent or immeasurable. There's a kind of vacuum to existence: The things that we don't see, that we can't feel, that we can't measure, are most important, and the physical world is just a distraction.
For me, having lived in the Catskills now for about six years, where I'm really entrenched in the natural cycles of the world around me, I feel very irrelevant to it, you know? It doesn't seem concerned about me at all. And I think in some ways there's a greater truth to that — that I'm in the world, but not of the world. That otherness, that not belonging, to me feels really comforting.
We're getting really heavy here, but I do think about all this stuff all the time, and I also find great comfort in everything you just described. Some people don't — it terrifies some people — but I'm the exact opposite. It comforts me and it grounds me in a way, and it makes me appreciate being here at all.
I mean, we live in a beautiful, bountiful, boundless world that is offering so much to us. Maybe that's what's so frustrating about this record for me, is that I could see and feel and hear the evidence of my effort, and trying to make sense of it musically and structurally and narratively. But I knew deep down inside that I was dealing with something that was unresolvable, and that the final tapestry of the album was never really going to be a stand-in for my relationship with my mom. And that's OK. You kind of have to just live with the chaos of it. I don't want to disparage; I don't want to sound like I don't like this album. I think I want to disassociate from it. It ultimately has nothing to do with me anymore. The music is yours.
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