Sufjan Stevens' gorgeous new album is what grown-up emotional music should sound like — theverge.com

Sufjan Stevens will turn 40 years old this year. A generation of life-worn musicians is growing up, but the existential fear and loneliness that paralyzed their youth is still there, twisting up their guts. The problem is, all-consuming angst is a lot tougher to reconcile once you're flirting with middle age. Carrie & Lowell — named after Stevens’ mother and step-father — features characters that are not easy to save. Stevens' mother left his family when he was only a year old; she died of stomach cancer in 2012 after battling alcoholism and depression for most of her life. In a recent interview with Pitchfork, Stevens said, "Her death was so devastating to me because of the vacancy within me. I was trying to gather as much as I could of her, in my mind, my memory, my recollections, but I have nothing. It felt unsolvable." Stevens has trouble finding humanity in Carrie and Lowell as they exist on the album, and when he does, he realizes it’s exactly their humanity that makes them flawed. Unlike the material on Stevens' past albums, humanity in Carrie & Lowell isn’t an equaling force, it’s a destructive one. So Stevens, instead of mythologizing people, mythologizes pain.

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