Sufjan Stevens

Sufjan Stevens, American Indie Pop prodigy, absent from the Rock scene since 2010 (except for an album of Christmas songs in 2012) returns and shakes up his audience with the very Electro and confusing The Age of ADZ.

The one whose previous opuses (Illinois and Michigan) had brought him public and critical recognition, and established his status of small genius of the Indie Folk, sails in the outraged experimentation and forgets (almost) his basics.
It is thus five years after The Age of ADZ that Stevens returns to caress the ears of his public, but this time with a strange project, a dark and melancholic record: An album of mourning.

In 2012, Carrie his mother died. Carrie was not very present in Sufjan's life. She is a shadow that crosses the childhood of the kid from Detroit, a ghost that he will approach only episodically. A few stays with her and Lowell (with whom he will found his label Asthmatic Kitty Records.) lost in the mountains of Oregon and then disappears.

Carrie dies of cancer after years of wandering, after terrible years of depression, alcoholism and a schizophrenia lurking in the shadows that she tried to forget between the white walls of various psychiatric hospitals and tons of chemical drugs. With Carrie & Lowell Sufjan Stevens invites us with him in search of this maternal ghost, makes us penetrate the intimacy of unhappiness.

He comes to offer his sadness, this sadness that he transforms into music. He comes to offer the gift of a possible cure, of a saving catharsis, of bitter tears flowing on his music paper writing the most beautiful melody. He tries to find the snatches of a runaway mother, evanescent in the bend of faded memories, yellowed like the photo of Carrie and Lowell on the cover of the album.

The voice becomes soft, caressing. Stevens whispers, implores, like a child praying at night, legs dangling, at the edge of his bed. The melodies are fragile, brittle as the crystal, played delicately with the guitar or the piano. Stevens loses himself, drowns, takes his breath, finds himself again, in the narrow frame of an album.
He disincarnates, disintegrates, becomes a ghost knowing full well that spirits only speak to spirits.
He makes of the simplicity, the most complicated and the most beautiful melody.

He sends it to the highest of the skies, he sends it to get lost high in the clouds as the last, the dearest and the most beautiful gift he can give to his mother: the farewell kiss.