The tenth-anniversary edition of Carrie & Lowell is out May 30 via Asthmatic Kitty.
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In 2023, Sufjan Stevens shared on Tumblr that he’d been diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a quick-working autoimmune disorder with a vast symptom set that includes persistent pain and muscle weakness. Unable to walk on his own for a while, the prolific singer-songwriter began documenting his physical-therapy journey on his blog. Then, that October, in a shattering dedication note for his tenth album, Javelin, he revealed that his partner, Evans Richardson IV, formerly chief of staff at the Studio Museum in Harlem, had died that April.
Stevens is a jarringly autobiographical storyteller but also a famously private person. Suddenly, someone who had never felt compelled to publicly reveal his romantic history, even as he wrote beautiful songs of love and faith, had done so in the most heartbreaking fashion. He has not really been in the public eye since.
But he’s slowly reappearing. On May 30, Stevens will release the tenth-anniversary edition of Carrie & Lowell. The 2015 album focuses on a few years in Stevens’s youth when he lived with his mother, Carrie, and stepfather, Lowell — who would go on to co-found Stevens’s label, Asthmatic Kitty — in Oregon. It tackles the fallout from her death and her history of mental illness and substance abuse. Songs like the viscerally bleak “Fourth of July,” with its haunting chorus, “We’re all gonna die,” are beloved as depression anthems. The new edition features a 40-page booklet of family photos, some previously unreleased demos, and a gutting essay from Stevens about his mother. On Good Friday, I hopped on a video call with Stevens, who appeared clean-shaven and cherubic, wearing a hat and hoodie in the Catskills studio where he has worked since 2019.
What nudged you back into Carrie & Lowell?
The people at Asthmatic Kitty were going to do something with or without my involvement. I started digging through archives and found demos, so we thought we’d add that. I usually do the design and layout of my albums, and the packaging of the original LP was pretty simple. I thought I should put some more time and energy into this. I dug up photos of my mom and Lowell and my family, so the LP has a booklet with photos. That felt nice.
There are incredible shots in the book. How did it feel to sift through the old photos?
It’s a reminder that we all were children, and in some ways we’re still children. We live and grow and life devastates us and then we die. This album seems to be a celebration of that process. What’s really remarkable about digging through the archive photos is there is so much life to celebrate in spite of this material being all about death. It’s nice to look back and see everyone in a state of vibrancy and vitality.
I feel like when we get archival outtakes and extras from you, you’re doing it semi-reluctantly.
I’m turning 50 this year and in an existence that’s somewhat mindful of the past and my legacy. There’s such an enormous amount of material that I’ve released that I have to be a steward of. So there’s always a sense of taking care of the archive; running Asthmatic Kitty is taking care of the catalogue. That’s the work part of the practice. I really don’t like looking back.
Talk about the struggle to pull Carrie & Lowell together.
I was flailing, to be honest, with this material. I had no idea what I was doing because I was suffering so much. There were dozens of songs, and they were all over the place. There’s kind of a resignation to that album that doesn’t really exist in anything else I’ve done. With everything else, there’s so much force of will and intentionality: I’m on a journey, and I’m seeking to fulfill some kind of musical destiny, and the album represents that journey. But Carrie & Lowell is a record of failure and the relinquishing of my will.
“She was beautifully and wonderfully made — my mother, my star, my queen, my mystery, my nemesis, and my muse,” you write in your introductory essay for the rerelease. My father was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and our relationship was strained. I pictured what would go through my mind at his funeral in advance. But when I got there in the aughts, I found I had a wave of unexpressed feelings and nowhere to direct them. It made me brasher in the way I speak. How did the experience hit you?
That’s a mature response to grief. I can say the same for myself. I felt like I had fewer fucks to give about anything or anyone after that. Life is short. You got to just be true and honest and real. That’s what death does to you.
How do you feel about the work released in between losing your mother in 2012 and writing about it in 2014? The Sisyphus album falls into that period.
You were talking about how your response to the death of your father was surprising because you go through all these different emotional responses. That was true for me. I felt a lot of anger and resentment. I also felt impulsive and rebellious. I felt like I didn’t give a shit about anything anymore. Some of the Sisyphus stuff is a reflection of that. There’s a lot of aggression in it. I hate being self-conscious and making any kind of assessment of my work before and after Carrie & Lowell, but I do hope that, if anything, the work has been more honest and also been less self-conscious.
Was there ever a point when your relationship to the material changed? I’m curious why someone who had a difficult time writing those songs would put themselves on the road playing the album in full in front of people all over the country.
I had to pretend I was someone else. When I was onstage, I was playing a role. In order to get through the set and sing those songs over and over again, I had to disassociate from all of it. I think that’s a normal reaction to grief, a way of surviving. Even now, I can’t listen to the material. I find it to be too intense and real. I think it’s okay to acknowledge that music is art and art is artifice, and even though there’s a realness and truth in all songs, it’s still fundamentally artificial.
Something else that jumped out in revisiting Carrie is how location-based it is. We’d stopped conceptualizing your work in terms of landmarks mentioned, but the album is so Oregon.
The most time that I spent with my mother was in Eugene, Oregon, when she was married to Lowell for five years. That was the time when she was most stable, and we were able to spend summers with her in the ’80s. We didn’t grow up with her. I grew up with my dad and my stepmom, and she was mostly out of the picture. So these were the times when we had very intimate, invested time with her. Carrie & Lowell is like a secret Oregon record. That location is really imprinted in my mind, and it definitely informs the settings of these songs. You see me try to do all the things I did before: I need to come up with a metaphor; I need to come up with a place name; I need to come up with a setting; I need to describe what I’m seeing. The remnants of all that are there. [Sometime collaborator] Thomas Bartlett was the one who convinced me to do less of that: “This record is about your mother. It’s not about anything else. It’s just about this terrible loss.”
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“Fourth of July” is sitting at half a billion plays on Spotify. That suggests millions of people are listening to you grieve your mother each month. What does this feel like?
To live is to be preoccupied with death. Maybe that’s why this material speaks to a lot of people. I’ve become the poster child of death in a lot of ways in the music world. It wasn’t intentional. It crept up, but it’s always been there. Even the happy-go-lucky chamber-pop music from Illinois and Michigan. It sounds really optimistic, but if you start to parse the lyrics and content, there’s a lot of death and mortality.
That “We’re all gonna die” in “Fourth of July” is really hitting in 2025, so I get why people would gravitate to it on a certain level.
We gotta stay positive, though. I don’t want anyone to believe that this obsession with mortality is the end-all. As I get older, I become more jaded. Experience makes fools of us all. It devastates you. I am making it a practice to stay optimistic. What’s even more important than optimism is duty: duty to work and stewardship of work and of the world. I take a long view. In the moment, I’m also thinking, How is this gonna resonate ten, 20, 30 years from now? Long after I’m dead? I’m thinking of my work beyond myself.
Something that comes through in the reissue’s choice of demos is how losing a family member was softened by new life coming into the family. This is an underrated thread in the album.
When my mother died in 2012, my brother had just had a kid.
How close was this to the 2012 Christmas tour?
She died while I was on that tour. Oh man, it was a mess. I’d do a show, fly to Houston to see my mother in the hospital, fly back to San Francisco to do a show, then fly back. The show must go on, but behind the scenes, I was falling apart. But it was nice to have that show to occupy my mind. My brother’s kid really helped me through some tough moments. She’s a good one. She’s 15 now. She’s 15 going on 40.
Stevens in 2023. Photo: s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s/Tumblr
There’s a certain subset of song you write that, depending on a listener’s perspective, can scan as either deeply religious or potentially quite sensual. This is a thread in “John My Beloved” and “To Be Alone With You” and “Javelin (to Have and to Hold).” What inspires that train of thought?
The religious is very sexual. It’s erotic. Look at Catholic art through the ages, Baroque art. It’s all very fleshy and sensual and full of naked bodies. I’ve always embraced that. I’ve always felt that my relationship to God is a very intimate and sensual one. Sacraments are. It’s engaging with God in a physical way. You’re literally eating the flesh and drinking the blood of God during the Eucharist. It doesn’t get much more erotic than that. If you’re a vampire, that’s the ultimate erotic experience.
Most people who lurk the texts don’t luxuriate in the closeness of Jonathan and David.
The Bible’s very gay. Just all men. That’s what you get when there’s a patriarchy that’s endured for so long. Jesus was single, never married; Disciples were all dudes …
You worked on John Legend’s children’s album last year, and I’ve been thinking about how you two have very different “All of Me” songs.
His is paying the bills for sure. I wasn’t really looking to produce anyone’s work, but he reached out and he sent these voice-mails and they were so perfect and complete. I don’t know why he wanted to work with me, but I had time and I was inspired by the nature of the songs because they were so simple. They were for kids, and that was all I could really manage at the time.
I’m curious about the “at the time” there. Blog updates trailed off a year ago, and there has been a lot of curiosity about your health and aptitude for playing music these days.
I’m okay. Situation normal, all up, kind of a thing. I’ve had some pretty difficult things happen to me, so I’m in a state of repair and survival. I’m not really in any state of mind or any position to go on tour yet. But I’m starting to see the light. I’m starting to feel a sense of direction toward something meaningful and substantial. I’ve been focusing on the moment and on things that feel very silly and Zen: serenity and acceptance and duty and stewardship.
What routines bring you closer to serenity?
It’s a lot of gardening and dog-walking and running a small business. I’m the primary owner of Asthmatic Kitty now because Lowell is retired. I have a team of people, but I’m a lot more involved than I used to be. It feels good to have that to occupy my time right now. I’m doing a lot of ordinary, mundane adulting. The other day, I had to get a septic pump replaced. I have had to retile the kitchen and buy some new appliances, and I’ve got seedlings under grow lights in the garage. I’ve been working on other people’s music this past year, not my own. It feels like my life is in service to other things right now. It’s fine and required of me. I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay. It’s been two years of a shitshow, but I’m okay.
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