The difference between Rufus Wainwright’s full length lament for his late mother, All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu, and Sufjan Stevens, Carrie And Lowell, is the difference in reaction between a full blown diva and a little boy lost. On Lulu the dread never ends, the sorrow an Oedipal flow of tears and transgressions. Everything Freud ever told you about boils over in Rufus’s operatic piano playing and pained sad singing, brash in its horror, horrified by its loss.
That’s not how Sufjan Stevens deals with grief. The gifted Detroit native who came to indie pop’s attention in 2000 and has never left it, is one of the supremely talented singer songwriters of his generation, a wisp willow, who reinvented himself as an electronic popster before releasing Carrie And Lowell last week (9.3 out of 10.00 on Pitchfork, and they got it right, the review was masterful here) and at the Beacon Theatre on Saturday night, performing the entire 11 songs off the album and also 9 others from parts south, he gave his greatest performance yet.
My problem had always been that ethereal performances require sturdier melodies than Sufjan has been willing to give us; while admiring his musicianship, his command of mood, his graceful emotional dishevelment, his songs never clicked into view for me. On March 31st everything changed. Carrie And Lowell arrived as the most subtle emotional devastation imaginable. While personal to the point of embarrassment,Sufjan sang about the beloved mother, a bipolar schizophrenic, who abandoned him and his brother, remarried his friend and step-father Lowell, returned, disappeared, and died of stomach cancer in 2012. Sufjan’s work has been haunted by his mother in the past. Certainly, if a central question in life is: why can’t any one love me enough, than an absent mother is an embodiment of the question. In Carrie And Lowell, we don’t come to terms with any of these questions, rather, the suite of songs are a reverie, it is like being very very tired and letting your mind wander over images of your past (for Sufjan, his summer vacations with his Mom in Eugene, Oregon), they lie in some sense, some moment and they inform other things, even the person lying down next to you.
On Saturday night, home movies and pictures illuminated Sufjan’s songs of loss and mourning and, so often, just bemusement, and an upsetness that in the end one of his most important relationships was a disaster. Sufjan tries to soften the edge of his pain with drugs, sex, but really, there is no way through it but through it and the songs go through it. In theory, the songs are too personal to be shared, but the music, folk but folk through a prism of other sounds, horns, synths, beeps, back up singers, anything to draw you into a place where you can share his mourning and share his sense of the reward for nihilism, is empathy. It transmogrified his sense of doubt.
Except, of course, Sufjan is a committed Christian, something I certainly would not have known if I hadn’t read it. Faith is not his way through this and for one excellent reason, if Carrie was a ghost for him when she was alive what else could she be now she is dead? Here is some of Sufjan’s Christian writings. On stage , Sufjan’s faith doesn’t help him one iota, it doesn’t matter to the story because he has lost his mother long before she died.
Opening was Cold Speck, a beautifully voice woman who added a Gospel tinged voice to indie electronica and a well formed sense of herself as a black woman and a black singer. She sang a capella on two separate occasions and back by an indie looking band gave intense gravity to powerful and beautiful faux-love songs.
Sufjan played for 105 minutes, opening and closing the set with instrumental and highlighting the album’s best moments with subtle touches and re-arrangements, an extended coda to “July The 4th” is startling in its beauty, quiet, intense, the four band members who join him on stage somewhat anonymous sightings, adding shades and not color. The last song of the encore, “Chicago” is relatively loud and for a moment shakes us from our reverie, but soon leads its down the byways of our minds.
Like DH Lawrence’s “Sons And Lovers”, death leads the way, but unlike Lawrence, and unlike Wainwright, it doesn’t lead to an emotional breakthrough. When I saw Rufus perform Songs For Lulu at Carnegie Hall, it was obvious by the encore, his mourning period was completed. There was no such sense at the Beacon. Sufjan obsesses over a closeness he can’t have, I am not even discussing incest here, just the normal attachment and warmth of love. He doesn’t get it. And if he doesn’t blame Carrie he can’t get past it, past her. The alcoholic, deeply troubled mother who couldn’t love him. There is no emotional synthesis, no beautiful reward, just quiet, contemplative deeply moving sounds that take you where he is. The set is haunting, seriously love, and while the songs as songs need something (this is why as a rule of thumb I don’t love Stevens writing, he has a novelist eye for detail but he doesn’t keen on melody, they need to sink deeper but he expects you to join him, to reach him: it is why he is great without being a great), for sure they will suffice as is. “Fourth Of July”, given a rousing arrangement. Near the beginning “Death With Dignity” followed by “Should Have Known Better” would be could be showstoppers. “When I was three, three maybe four, she left us at that video store” is the lyric everybody takes from the album, though a little later on “When I was three, and free to explore, I saw her face on the back of the door.” might be a little closer to a truth.
The last song before the encore was the haunted, I felt like ghosts in the machine “Blue Buckets Of Gold”, spinning like the disco ball emotional fulcrum, words silenced and the dwelling simply on a place, a voice in the minds eye. The encore has Sufjan offering one of his best songs, “John Wayne Gacy Jr.” and his understanding of the serial killer is obvious, makes sense, indeed the entire evening makes sense of Sufjan’s career. It is like the ending of “The Sixth Sense”. Because what Stevens realizes, what he wants us to share is, he is his mother’s son, the things she hurt him with and that hurt her he has in him, the same lostness that moved her neglect moves his inability to break the distance. On stage at the Beacon Theatre, Stevens didn’t breakthrough, didn’t save her, himself, or us. It was just a concert, after all.
Grade: A
