In March, Sufjan Stevens announced a 10-year anniversary edition of his beloved album Carrie & Lowell featuring bonus tracks and demos. That's out this Friday (May 30), and the singer-songwriter did a heavy interview with NPR to reflect on the record.
The story behind Carrie & Lowell is entangled in family tragedy, including the death of Stevens' estranged mother. The deluxe edition comes with an essay penned by Stevens, in which he describes the making of the LP as a "painful, humiliating, and an utter miscarriage of bad intentions. My grief manifested as self-loathing and misery. Every song I tried to write became a weapon aimed against me, an indictment of ignorance, blame, resentment and misappropriation." Expanding to NPR, he said:
I think this album is evidence of creative and artistic failure from my vantage point. I was trying to make sense of something that is senseless. I felt that I was being manipulative and self-centered and solipsistic and self-loathing, and that the approach that I had taken to my work, which is to kind of create beauty from chaos, was failing me. It was very frustrating. And for the first time I realized that not everything can be sublimated into art, that some things just remain unsolvable, or insoluble. I think I was really just frustrated by even trying to make sense of the experience of grief through the songs.
"I'm kind of embarrassed by this album, to be honest with you," he added. "Because I sort of feel like I don't have any authority over my mother and her life or experience or her death. All I have is speculation and my imagination and my own misery, and in trying to make sense of it all, I kind of felt like it didn't really resolve anything."
He does acknowledge that the music "has a consciousness beyond me, and so I'm grateful that the songs can exist regardless of my failed intentions or my bad intentions," he said. "But I still don't feel good about myself for making these songs."
When asked if he regrets making the album, he answered that he does: "It's just a bummer that my mother's not alive and can't speak for herself. What would she say about all this? Maybe she would be proud. I'll never know."
Read the full interview here.
The Carrie & Lowell 10th Anniversary Edition is out 5/30 via Asthmatic Kitty.
