Photo by Colin Kerrigan
Some music is meant to be listened to with a lover. Some music is meant to be listened to with a bunch of buddies and beers. And some music is meant to be listened to when you are on your own, either because it's so uncool—meaning disapproved of by people you usually share interests with—that it's liable to provoke unwanted comment, or because it makes you think about things you don't talk about, things that scare you. For me, Sufjan Stevens’ music is both these things.
It’s tough to pick a moment when Stevens jumped the cool shark; it might be 2012, when he recorded a quintuple album of Christmas songs, Silver & Gold. Or does his fall from favor date back to 2006, when he recorded, uh, another quintuple album of Christmas songs, Songs for Christmas? Banjo-driven folk has passed its peak, as has maximalist, orchestrated folk-pop, and Stevens is a resolute devotee of both (there's banjo, to predictably lovely effect, on his latest record, Carrie & Lowell.)
Let’s be real, though: the first creep of uncool probably occurred post-the release of 2004’s Seven Swans, a fingerpicked paean to melancholy. Stevens’ music really does have a Christian feel: a bounty of swelling strings that recall the triumphalism and apocalyptic tidings of scripture, lyrics that plaintively invoke Jesus and his dad. Nowhere is this more apparent than on Swans. Take "In the Devil’s Territory", a major-key composition that describes a Christian’s wish to be reunited with the Lord: "I’m not afraid to die/ To see you/ To meet you." Or there’s Seven Swans’ title track, which ends with a traditional profession of faith—"He is the Lord"—and concordant instrumentation as reverent as a Magnificat. Simple musical choices create this atmosphere; an octave jump, a long-held final note, minor plagal chords finally resolving into righteous major ones = that "Christian-sounding" thing,
Seven Swans popped up—almost as if it couldn’t be suppressed—between Stevens’ "Fifty States" albums: Michigan (2003) and Illinois (2005), lushly orchestrated masterpieces on which Stevens acted as the midwest’s ventriloquist. Before that, his music tended toward the experimental, with the inscrutable Enjoy Your Rabbit comprising instrumental bits named after Chinese horoscope signs. Still, Stevens’ beliefs were always on display; one song on Enjoy Your Rabbit was called "Year of Our Lord", as if the zodiac had to be taught its place. "Joy! Joy! Joy!", on his debut A Sun Came, is an oasis of holy sentiment—"I would serve the Kingdom’s will," he sings—among the album’s cacophony of squiddly jazz riffs and rough cuts.
Almost as if his musical weirdnesses and melodic genius insulated the listening public from his deeply personal explorations of faith, Stevens maintained indie OK!-ness until Illinois. That record was highly researched, sumptuous, and wide-ranging, empathising humanely with a serial killer ("John Wayne Gacy, Jr.") and cheekily paying tribute to childhood callousness ("Decatur, or Round of Applause for Your Step-Mother!"). Then came all those Christmas carols, an outtake album (The Avalanche, 2006), and a live recording of a soundtrack called The BQE (2009), a Stevens project about a highway. Amid these there were few, if any, reasonable entry points for new listeners.
Combine flagrant piousness with uneven output, and you’ve got persona non grata (at least among my acquaintance). Seven Swans was critically, widely acclaimed, but you only need to look at Pitchfork’s review of the album for subtler responses to its godly bent. Nick Sylvester wrote, "Sufjan does well to collapse the distinction between divine- and human-directed affections—his "You" could apply to God and loved one alike." Phew, you guys! Let’s pretend this isn’t about the guy upstairs. Now, Sufjan stands in the cultural eye for everything "too": too melodic, too weird, too indulgent, too earnest, too spiritual, too personal—and a reminder of when we were those things, too.
This crowd-repellent matrix of characteristics reminds me of another singularly uncool artist: Tori Amos. Once herself a bard singing of a difficult relationship with God, Amos also has a background—she’s the daughter of a minister—that has inextricably colored her music. She’s also done a Christmas album, and an American ventriloquism project, 2002’s Scarlet’s Walk. Both Amos and Stevens have arced in a highly specific musical trajectory with later phases inimical to newbies; late-era Tori also appeals to literally no one except those who already love her. (Don’t get me wrong; I would be happy to be disabused of this. But not even I, literally saved by Boys for Pele when I was a teen, have been able to last until the end of the Tori line.) Her pianocentric, high-concept albums and songcraft have grown simultaneously more conventionally MOR and more aimlessly Celtic over the years. And just as they’ve driven old fans away, her last three original albums, sterile and meandering, aren’t friendly to late adopters. Talking Tori to strangers is the easiest way to politely glazed-over eyes I can think of; she’s fan code for "You’re in or you’re out," and most people just aren’t in.
Stevens and Amos also resemble each other in the questing "I" of their music, a product of unabashed emotional searching. It doesn’t follow that the "I" is either artist personally, nor that they’re the only ones who ever do it, of course; but they’re not afraid to represent the painful enterprise lyrically. Amos’ lyric "I" gave her debut, Little Earthquakes, so much of its impact; she used it to interrogate a girl’s place in society from a provocatively individual perspective, and to represent what it’s like to be a rape survivor. Stevens is great at this, too. The Age of Adz (2010) features a standout pop song laced with existential pique—"I Want to Be Well", a 6 minute and 29 second disquisition on suffering. This is a song that belies its frustration with its initial jollity, much like Roxy Music’s "If There Is Something" disguises itself as a weird kind of pub twanger in its first half before hacking your heart in two. "I Want to Be Well" starts out so peppily, its conscious but flip opening lines the sonic equivalent of a shrug: "To think that I would die/ This time." At 2:34, though, Stevens starts singing, in a trickle that becomes a waterfall, "I want to be well/ I want to be well/ I want to be well." At the end of the song, he’s really not having it: "I’m not fucking around," he spits repeatedly.
When Stevens’ outpouring meets spiritual delving, it can be devastating. Seven Swans’ "To Be Alone with You" is a wistful folk ballad that reads like a romantic love song until the second verse:
You gave your body to the lonely
They took your clothes
You gave up a wife and a family
You gave your ghost
The song’s final line rings with Christian hyperbole: "I've never known a man who loved me." A confession of loneliness and faith, crushingly absolute.
Deeply personal spiritual searching makes for intimate and uncomfortable listening: first, in the same way as hearing any patently troubled I-narrative in a beautifully written song; and second, because pop, rock, and indie music have long felt like a safe space from the egregious tentacles of religion. Some critics have never known what to do with Stevens’ more reverential offerings (see this blurb on 2010’s The Age of Adz, which seems to pretend none but the States albums exist). Maybe this goes to the heart of why neither Stevens or Amos are considered "cool": they’re just not that chill, about God, or about anything. But Stevens’ fixations have made him into the musician he is. Like any artist with a wheelhouse, he attracts those in a similar frame of mind, astride the weft of the same existential fabric.
When Stevens’ music is plainly worshipful, that draws a very particular audience, and it also can exclude. As someone with a troubled attitude towards my own religious beliefs, I heard Swans as a kind of betrayal. I just wasn’t on the same page of the hymnal as Stevens, and probably never would be. It took him off my board of advisers, and my listening list; that album acted as a kind of circuitbreaker, a signal that some of his music was going to be specifically holy in tone. But when he is throwing every fibre of himself, including his faith, at something he’s trying to understand, that’s something anyone can believe in. In that context, religion isn’t cynosure or addendum—it’s more like a filter. With Stevens, sometimes the object through the viewfinder has been God alone, the muse of his supplicant self.
On Carrie & Lowell, though, he is seeing other things as well. Musically, the album is simultaneously sweet and bitter, fitting for a meditation on life, love, and death. In "Drawn to the Blood", Stevens wonders, about some tragedy, "How did this happen?" Then he begs for understanding, recalling Jesus in Gethsemane: "God of Elijah … Tell me what I have done." It’s such a human utterance, both in its Biblical and musical contexts, relatable across religious lines: Why me? Stevens’ signature rousing instrumentation is pared back here, both in breadth and volume, signifying an examination that has reconciled the earthly and heavenly arenas of its inquiry. The record feels more like a convergence of the two strongest parts of his musical persona, pilgrim and player, than any previous. Attitudinally, it also feels like opened arms.
I’m too far past the grand narrative of cool to really give a shit whether it applies in this instance. Which is not to say that I don’t care what other people think, or that I’m above cool—but some music is just for me. It’s not for people to have an opinion about, which they can foist upon me to my embarrassment. Stevens is for when I want to be at the cliff face of a grappling ego that echoes mine—not for when I’m in the club, or drinking beers, or with other humans. When I listen to Stevens, I’m alone with him, and it’s extraordinary and soothing: he’s a man who knows me.