COVER STORY | Sufjan Stevens Communicates With Ghosts
With his two greatest works, Illinois and Carrie & Lowell, turning 20 and 10 years old, Stevens spoke with Paste about about the transformations of grief, his pivot away from scholarship in songwriting, the consciousness of art, and Americana as mythology.
“Death’s way, awkward in sunlight,” June Jordan’s words beckon, “single in a double bed at night and hurtling out of mind and out of sight.” What’s finite forever lingers, around every corner yet always within. We may not know death, but we’ve likely encountered it, in both our grief and our connection to dark energy and dark matter around us—to the illegible cursive that illustrates a universe we claim to know. Sufjan Stevens argues that our life is a testament to our mortality. It’s the great refinement—the final punctuation at the end of the sentence for all of us. “Death creates an absence that becomes an overwhelming presence,” he says, sitting in his studio in the Catskills. “I believe we must live in the presence of death at every moment. It imbues us with the negative energy that allows us to live in celebration of life.”
Grief is not just cumulative and unresolvable. It doesn’t follow any logical patterns, but resides “in your nervous system, in your memory, in your muscle memory, in your body,” Stevens says. “You carry it around with you forever.” Every new loss stacks on the last. The stages of grief are a misnomer, first built to identify with those nearing their own deaths, not those recovering from someone else’s. “The experience then allows us to have a particular kind of practice for survival so that we can withstand the loss and yet continue to move on and live our lives in fullness,” he says. Perhaps we are born with purpose already in our reach, to build a life that blurs the line between make-believe and realism. “I forgive you, mother, I can hear you,” Sufjan sings. “And I long to be near you, but every road leads to an end.”
In December 2012, Stevens’ mother Carrie passed away from stomach cancer. Two-and-a-half years later, he released Carrie & Lowell not in her honor, but in her vacancy. “I was trying to write these songs in the aftermath of her death,” he remembers. “I was not objective, I was not thinking clearly. I was delusional, I was self-loathing and confused and lost in a lot of ways.” Carrie, whom Stevens calls his “star, queen, mystery, nemesis, and muse,” was bipolar and schizophrenic. She drank heavily, and Sufjan’s relationship with her was often scored by abandonment. She left them when he was only one. “When I was three, three maybe four, she left us at that video store,” he sings on “Should Have Known Better.” “Be my rest, be my fantasy.” Named after Carrie and Stevens’ stepfather Lowell Brams (who co-founded Stevens’ label, Asthmatic Kitty), who were married for five years in the early ‘80s, the album is woven into a non-linear “season of hope” stretching from adolescence through adulthood. From the first chords of “Death with Dignity,” the songs capture a failure culled from lost innocence.
Carrie & Lowell was written, demoed, and recorded across the United States, in Portland, Norman, Eau Claire, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Klamath Falls, in hotel rooms, office floors, and studios owned by Justin Vernon, Tucker Martine, Pat Dillett, and Chad Copelin. Stevens was doing a lot of traveling then, spending a month driving out west by himself without any intentions of writing an album about it. “I had my stuff with me and my memories of beauty and the glory of nature and the openness and the exuberance of America out west,” he recalls. He went on bike rides and took more photos than he wrote songs. “I was really depressed and unhappy and ruminating on death all the time—and yet, the world around me out there was so beautiful and bountiful.”
CARRIE’S BIG-RIMMED GLASSES ADORN the front and back sides of the album, with Lowell in focus on one side and visible only by reflection on the other. The music is full of blood, guts, and explosive, detrimental truths carried to us in Stevens’ dull roar—a breathy, tender lullaby set to flickering synths, gentle piano, and hurried plucks. His tableau was once filled with Superman, Abraham Lincoln, Sac and Fox tribes, and John Wayne Gacy. Suddenly, it housed only family, flames, and fortunes—strangers’ arms sprawled like rustled bedsheets, blind faith and binge-drinking, history speaking and fossils falling from the Icarus-colored sun. We tumble out of our mothers crying and spend the rest of our lives reaching for them. Alis volat propriis, the Oregon state motto goes: “She flies with her own wings.” The love, I’d argue, does not get any less incomprehensible. Carrie & Lowell’s songs don’t cherish the past; sentimentality isn’t the skeleton key but a “bridge to nowhere” consumed by suffering.
The line “I love you more than the world can contain in its lonely and ramshackle head” refracts in the prism of Sufjan’s niece: “The beauty that she brings, illumination.” His grief is polluted with ignored prayers, with “We’re all gonna die” choruses. He considers cutting his wrists in a Holiday Inn bathtub. “Do I care if I survive this?” he cries out to no one but himself. “Should I tear my eyes out now, before I see too much? Should I tear my arms out now? I wanna feel your touch.” Twelve years later, Stevens isn’t grieving any more or less than he was while at Carrie’s bedside in a Houston ICU, on stops between tour dates. “It’s just changing,” he says. “It’s transforming, it’s moving throughout my body. But, it’s always still there.” He’s the youngest of six children, all of whom have a different vantage point to having an absent mother. “Each person’s story is different, and each narrative is slightly altered. I was the youngest, I feel like my perspective is the least reliable.” Yet you’re the writer, I tell him. “It’s funny,” he answers. “I have the most to say about my mother but I’m the least reliable, in terms of the facts.”
But Stevens slowly found his footing and the confidence to be a steward to the world around him without dismissing his own misery. He wrote about the flora and fauna of Carrie’s Oregon—about the “hysterical light” in Eugene an hour east of the Pacific Ocean, and the cantilever bridge connecting Astoria to Point Ellice near Washington. He sang about meadowlarks, valentines, and mayflies, mourning burnt acres of the Tillamook by pronouncing the likeness of a wind-fallen snag’s dried bark rubbing against a cratered Douglas fir. All of it helped him metabolize what drifted impossibly within. “Nature is a particular kind of religion for me,” Stevens says. “Nature has a presence without objectives, and nature is much more subordinate on the East Coast, because there’s more people. As you move out west, it starts to open up and you start to feel a wild transcendence to nature. It really helps me survive the day.”
Religion holds many shapes in Sufjan Stevens’ work. In “Casimir Pulaski Day,” it’s a God who “takes, and He takes, and He takes.” “The Transfiguration” is an almost verbatim retelling of Jesus radiating in glory atop a mountain. Stevens quotes Psalm 28:7 in “John My Beloved,” letting the Lord’s shielding grace wash over him. “So what should be said of a life that leaves its mess?” he asks in “The Ascension,” after his own exaltation, and Javelin was dedicated to his late partner Evans Richardson with Psalm 118:24—“This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it”—three years later. I ask him what his relationship to faith is now. He pauses. “God is my only hope,” he says. “I still rely on God in everything I do. Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. I feel like, the more that I see and feel and experience in this physical world, the more reliant I am on things that are sublime and unseen.” He prays every day—for, as he puts it, “peace in myself, and in you, and in the world around me.”
The word “empathetic” tarries in Stevens’ trail of influence. He tells me that being a good steward of not just the world but of his work requires bringing care and comfort to the things around him. “I think that also requires attentive listening and a relinquishing of the self and the ego—obliterating my own objectives and goals to be more empathetic to the world around me,” he says. “You cannot create change by force. You have to receive the power of transformation from within you and die to yourself every day in order to be rewarded and live in fullness and wellness.” Most of the music he makes never gets released, he admits, before clarifying that he writes for the world, not himself. He writes for me. For you, the listener. These songs, they have their own personalities, characteristics, and consciousness. They are instruments for communication, between beings and between concepts and energies.
Carrie & Lowell was painful to write and record, and Stevens found no solace in the music until he began touring it, culminating in one final gig at the Hollywood Bowl in 2016. The performance, he contends, allowed for the demons of his art to be exorcised. “It’s also a way to relinquish ownership of the material,” he continues. “It allows me to give it away to the listener. I found it really freeing and satisfying to expel them.” That expelling—rid of magic or mystery—became his real salve, a moment for healing to feel truly present. But the processing, he says, is always going on. “We’re just living and moving through the earth and through the world and through our experience. That’s just what it means to be alive. You just have to sit down and do the work. There are those who do and there are those who don’t, and I think it’s actually really practical.” The last words Sufjan sings on Carrie & Lowell are “just when I want you in my life.” There is no resolution, but proof of effort. Maybe it’s evidence of a moment in time, or maybe it’s just somebody framing the condition or state they’re in during a moment of seeking and discovery.
Before he wrote Carrie & Lowell, Stevens had been building an altar to the memory of his mother even while she was alive, when he was still afforded a chance to reckon with their relationship, or lack thereof, in the present tense. He’s been wrestling with that relationship since the moment he was born, he says—a Freudian truth easily recognized. “And that nature of the relationship was one of imagination because I didn’t really get to grow up with her, or live with her, or experience that much time with her,” he continues. “The relationship was, in a lot of ways, fabricated—it was fictional, even though it was also very primal and genetic. I came to this world through her, but I still had no relationship with her.” Her absence was a presence, and that presence was an assassin, a dragon chased too far, and a ghost. He sang “Once when our mother called, she had a voice of last year’s cough” on Michigan, only to document her betrayal two years later in “The Seer’s Tower”: “But my father loved and bathed us.” “The ghost was haunting and is haunting my consciousness in my interior world all the time,” he admits. “Whenever I had my wits about me to speak of it or sing of it, I found myself communicating with ghosts.”
SUFJAN STEVENS WROTE AND RECORDED ILLINOIS in his late twenties, when he was still a student of the world. He’d been studying fiction, his curiosity married to the realm of writing prose. The album’s 74 minutes reflect that habit in practice, its creator living and moving through the world like a researcher, stopping to observe and reflect. It’s not a personal record, Stevens admits. “It’s more editorial and observational. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become less interested in scholarship and more interested in impression and impulse and instinct.” You can see that trajectory in his catalogue, how it becomes less generalized over time and more personalized with every title, as Illinois becomes The Age of Adz, and The Age of Adz becomes Carrie & Lowell, The Ascension, and Javelin. Somewhere in there, in the adoption of 25-minute suites and hour-long EPs, his interest in character work waned into near-extinction. “Maybe that has something to do with just trusting your gut and being less reliant on the fabric of the world around you and [being] more confident in your own emotions,” he wonders.
Illinois begins with a “supernatural visitation”—a UFO sighting by a mini golf course owner in Highland. How beautiful, to greet the Midwestern world first from above? Our alienness and constant state of displacement, Stevens says, is a “reflection of the void that we feel inside, and the deep loneliness that we often feel in spite of being connected to the world and society and nature.” As big and bountiful as Earth is, and despite us being conditioned to prove our worth and our place in the United States, despite our own alienness, we have a great obsession with outer space—with going to Mars, or returning to the Moon. “I think there’s been a heightened consciousness universally about the Earth as a foreign entity—a speck of dust in the vast universe—and there’s a heightened consciousness about our uniqueness, but also our aloneness,” Stevens continues. “It’s funny, to think that the majority of the universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy that really can’t be explained or fully measured. It’s a void that makes up a majority of the existence of the universe. When it comes down to it, we’re all aliens living in a foreign country, in spite of what we’re told.”
20 years ago, when asked about the then-trend of “literary songwriting,” Stevens responded, “Wait 50 years and see what remains, what continues to resonate, what unearths itself.” I tell him I’m curious about what kind of grace an album like Illinois has been afforded recently, as opposed to in, say, 2010, when many folks hoped The Age of Adz would be a similar, if not faithful successor to his magnum opus. “I always think about my work having durability and sustainability beyond myself—beyond my life—because I really believe that music, and the imagination that it relies on, is eternal,” he says. “I like to think that the work that I do can live far beyond the life that I live on this earth. And I think now, as I’m approaching 50, it’s okay to think even beyond that, beyond my life. 50 years isn’t enough to think about. Maybe we have to think about the next 100 years or 1,000 years. We’re only here for a flash moment, but I think that art is a reflection of the eternal mysteries of the universe.”
To reach a conclusion like that, an acknowledgement that the lifespan of what you create is limitless, he reckons, you have to disassociate from self-importance. “My work isn’t myself,” Stevens says. “I like to believe that art has its own consciousness. It’s almost a record of organized chaos. Music is sublime, it doesn’t really exist. It’s just sound and patterns moving through space. It really has nothing to do with me.” But what about ego? “I think ego is the enemy, ultimately. I don’t really have that much confidence in myself as a person, but I have a lot of confidence in the work that I do as having its own consciousness and life beyond me. It’s a matter of service to the work and service to the world around you that’s more important than your own physical self.”
I invent ideas about places I’ve never been to, or haven’t returned to in ages. Even someplace like New York, which I’ve only visited a half-dozen times. I project onto that city what I imagine it is, and it’s probably wrong. But it might also be true. Upon reaching Manhattan for the first time at age 17, it was as beautiful as my 10-year-old self had previously imagined—the snug buildings, the feet tapping against asphalt louder than cars, the robotic billboards, the thorny clusters of singing tourists. Stevens was born in Detroit and went to school in Holland, a town on Michigan’s western coast, and the closest metropolis was Chicago. His relationship to the Great White City was less pronounced—a cop encounter near Peoria on a cross-country trip, a concert downtown on a college weekend.
But Sufjan didn’t start writing about the Midwest until he moved to New York and enrolled at The New School for Social Research, after making his debut album A Sun Came at Hope College in Holland. “At that point, it stopped being a real, factual place, and it began to entrench in my mind as an imagined place. I think your perception of geography as imagined is just as real as an actual lived experience in a place. In some ways, it’s easier to write about something once you’ve left it, once it’s no longer in your present state of mind.” Michigan and Illinois are reflections, he says, of his imagination, memory, and scholarship. “It’s formulated into a place that doesn’t actually exist. It just exists as fiction. I really took Michigan for granted while I was living there. It felt like a prison, in a lot of ways. It wasn’t until I left that I began to really appreciate it and memorialize it and celebrate it as a place of magic and mystery and miracles and beauty. It does serve us, sometimes, to remove ourselves from a place in order to appreciate it more fully.”
In his chronicling of the Prairie State, Stevens dramatizes the multi-generational, causal nexus of Golden Age industrial capitalists and socialites, like George Pullman or the Palmer family, and the reintegration of feudalism into 20th-century Chicago. Those indictments become portent sagas in the company of reference—of findable landmarks and personal tribute. Illinois, like a great travelogue, shows us an entire world contained in just a glimpse, combed across decades, if not centuries of presence. This country’s Midwestern anathema softens in the fantasy and academia of a man born on the other side of Lake Michigan.
The infinitesimal of Illinois crests into a syllabus of particulars: a lover dies from bone cancer on Casimir Pulaski Day; gentle kisses become the sting of love at a Methodist summer camp; the Great Godfrey Maze spawns an existential crisis; a character wanders to a graveyard overrun with Civil War dead after reckoning with what masks of his own might resemble those of serial killer John Wayne Gacy. In the two-part, Slade-punning “Come on! Feel the Illinoise!,” Sufjan sings of the World’s Columbian Exposition promotion in 1893—the “optimistic pleasures” of Chicago’s architectural New Age: an original Ferris Wheel, the invention of Cream of Wheat, frontierism—and ponders what Frank Lloyd Wright would have made of it. When the tempo switches, he laughs at the “beatitudes of a thousand lines” and improvises “the regret of a thousand centuries of death” with the ghost of poet Carl Sandburg: “Everything is antiquated.”
WHEN I WAS 18 AND NEW to college, a few of us freshmen piled into a friend’s car for a two-hour ride west to Mansfield, Ohio, to see a band we didn’t know play a coffee shop none of us had been to. Our driver was peculiar, the kind of person who rented CDs from her local library and burned them onto her own discs at home. I can still smell the upholstery, but most especially, I can still hear cheerleader hand claps and a “woo-hoo!” escalate into a spangle of horns, strings, and drums—the inexhaustible fountain of music lasting only a second or two, 10 at most. She pulled the CD out of the changer and I caught a glimpse of the handwriting—SUFJAN STEVENS ILLINOIS, written in black Sharpie—before she quickly tucked it into the glove box.
I heard Illinois then but forgot about it quickly, only to return to its expanse while studying Lincoln in 2018, filling my ears with the epicness of “Chicago” and reciting its highway escapism; I rhymed “Decatur” with “alligator” and “emancipator” as we traveled by charter bus to the places Abe lived: a log cabin in Larue County, Kentucky; a boyhood shack in Spencer County, Indiana; the village of New Salem, where he was a boatman, Black Hawk War soldier, postmaster, wrestler, rail splitter, and member of the Illinois General Assembly; a Greek-Revival home preserved in Springfield. In all four towns, the tour guides cited a quote of his: “There I grew up.” Those four words didn’t carry much truth, it seemed, until I heard them in Illinois. Stevens himself wrote four eulogies about Lincoln, but shelved them along with a tune about the supercomputer in Champaign and some kind of ode to Pulitzer Prize winner Saul Bellow.
But Stevens once called Abraham Lincoln a “mythological figure,” and I quite like that characterization. History is how we remember and recount, much like a folktale. Illinois is colored by that—by him presenting memory through his own interactions with culture. It allows us to speak of the suffragette Jane Addams in the same breath as “the house we got at Sears,” or “the wind that wakes the ocean.” “It’s a way of finding place and context and meaning in events, because an objective observer—perhaps an alien observer of our world—could easily summarize the activities of the Earth as chaotic,” Stevens says. “And I think, when we create art, that interjects ourselves and our consciousness into the chaos around us. It’s a practice of finding meaning and finding purpose in the chaos around us. It’s like organizing entropy in a lot of ways.” He tells me that he often feels greatly disenfranchised from the idea of America—that, in the history of this country, he doesn’t believe he belongs in it. “I think my work is a reflection of that—of that struggle, that internal conflict of homelessness. And I wonder if that’s a characteristic of a lot of us as Americans, because we are all foreigners who have, through limited time, been forced to integrate into a place that has such a shallow history.”
I look up at my walls and shelves, all of which are decorated with American iconography and listless gizmos and overproduced tchotchkes—relics of a past that may have loved me though probably would have ignored me. It seems like a perfect fascination for anyone consumed by an urge to exist without abandon but, as the country is mere days away from passing a bill in the House of Representatives that will slash Medicaid coverage for transitional medication and procedures, I tell Sufjan that it seems especially silly now, to be romantic about a place rhythmically trying to destroy me—us. “Americana is a form of mythology, and mythology is a form of storytelling, and storytelling is a way to find meaning and purpose,” he says, gently. “I think it’s okay to reside in a place of self-importance and self-loathing simultaneously. That’s necessary to really get at the center of yourself and your form and function in society.” Motif, like grief and like history, is for the living.
The language of Illinois is editorial, research-based. Stevens calls it “intentional scholarship” and “very writerly.” Carrie & Lowell, however, is more primal and far less censored—a reflection of the content itself. “When you’re writing about death, you’re writing about impulse and instinct,” he says. “Its language is almost useless and helpless.” Illinois is successful from a writer’s vantage point, because there’s a thesis and narrative arc to the music. It’s objectives-based. “Carrie & Lowell is just a hot mess,” Stevens elaborates. “It’s sounding my barbaric yawp above the rooftop. The poetry is speaking to the primordial in a lot of ways. It’s usually less organized, less explicit. Words fail us, really. There’s no way of really summarizing most experiences in life. They just have to be felt and digested…” He pauses. “And then exorcised.”
Some of us get to survive long enough to recognize the unlikelihood of presence. I do not know the depths to which my sympathies go, but Sufjan Stevens’ music suggests that many lifespans and many empathies are ongoing within us. His vocabulary hints at repair and, as I grow older, it continues to be many things for me: a translation of grief, a model for queerness, a totem of a faith I am ambivalent towards yet remain hopeful of. Lauren Berlant once wrote “Once you let in the deaths, all that follows is life,” and I am thinking of what Sufjan’s prose can do—how it gives us permission to love someone we’re ashamed of, or to love the ones who always leave. In his flawed light, we are less consumed by answers. Maybe Carrie & Lowell reflects not just my misunderstanding of death in others, but the grave anticipation of my own. Maybe I return to Illinois for the way identity fraternizes with fable, to exaggerate the perils of humanness with Googleable allusion. Sufjan, whose eyes have been affixed just beyond me throughout our conversation, aligns his gaze with mine just once. He exhales. “Maybe we tell stories to justify our existence.”
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
