Yes, Carrie And Lowell is a great album, beautiful, quiet, extremely intense, very very sad and very well received. Pitchfork gave it a 9.3, Consequence Of Sound an “A”, I myself gave it an “A-” which I will probably change to an “A” at some time or the other. How can this quiet, melodic album, something which digs as deep as Elliott Smith, or Kanye West, the bride stripped bare, become this big a fave? It digs into you and lays you out.
I’ll explain, the album is about Stevens relationship with his neglectful mother Carrie, who left the family when he was a child, returned with husband Lowell, spent five years in and out of his life, disappeared into mental illness and died in 2012. SO, to put it blandly, the familial relationship writ large.
The thing about childhood is everything that happens to you makes a huge impression on the craters of your brain, while the urge is to say, “so your mommy didn’t love you, get over it” or “so your mother smothered you…” or some variation, the truth is you can’t get over it. We are all slaves to those earliest of impressions. 50% of all serial killers were abused as children 70% of all serial killers suffered brain injuries as children. I always thought that when I myself grew to a certain age my childhood would stop bothering but it never happened.
The young critics of the day are also sorting out their childhood (all childhoods are somewhat traumatic), sorting out the difference between Oedipus and Electra, coming to harsh terms with who they are. Carrie And Lowell is a manual to childhood insecurities: suicidal, sadness completely unresolved, it mirrors childhood onto the adult and leaves him, more than simply being a very beautiful sound, it is a document on the difficulties of childhood. Sufjan looks back in bewilderment and wonders over and over again “how can I not be loved?”.
That is a question that goes to the heart of our insecurities, it is the unanswerable, unequivicable question between adults and children. Do you love me? Really? Do you love me enough? How much? How often? Why? Why not? Carrie And Lowell has no answers for Sufjan or us, but it has the right questions, and the right concerns and that is so rare, so important. It illuminates who we are.