NPR Music - 10 years later, Sufjan Stevens offers a startling reevaluation of 'Carrie & Lowell'

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

In a conversation with All Songs Considered's Robin Hilton, Stevens shares a complex and conflicted view of the album he wrote about his mother in the wake of her death from cancer.Enjoy the show? Share it with a friend and leave us a review on Apple or wherever you listen to podcasts. Questions, comments, suggestions or feedback of any kind always welcome: [e-mail] Hear new songs from past episodes in the All Songs Considered playlists in Apple Music and Spotify.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

All right, we've got a pretty special episode of all songs considered this week. It's a conversation with Sufjohn Stevens, all about his album, Carrie and Lowell. So Carrie and Lull is a pretty big album for me, and I think for a lot of people. It's my favorite that Sufion Stevens ever did. I think maybe it's the best thing he's done. Came out 10 years ago. There's a big 10th anniversary version of it now. It's got some unreleased tracks. There's a new essay from Sufion Stevens in the liner notes that's a pretty, incredible read. Also a whole bunch of photos, like there's this whole photo album's worth of stuff. You know, Sufion Stevens is a pretty interesting guy. He doesn't really do a lot of interviews.

And in fact, when Carrie and Lowell first came out, I really wanted to talk with him about it. But he only did a couple of interviews. And, you know, I read one of them. And honestly, it was all so heartbreaking. I got it. I thought I wouldn't want to talk about this any more than he already had. you know, Carrie and Lowell, the songs have a lot of pain in them, a lot of sadness and grief. It's all about his mom, and he didn't really know her very well. The story that's often told, the one that Sufion himself was told when he was older, is that she abandoned him and his siblings when Sufion was about a year old, and that his mom, Carrie, had schizophrenia and struggled with drug and alcohol addiction.

But after reading the essay that Sufion did for this anniversary edition and then talking with him, about it. He isn't really sure how much of that is true. At the very least, he thinks it's a lot more complicated than that. The only thing he knows for sure is that he did reconnect with Carrie briefly just before she died in 2012. And then we got this album. And you listen to it, and it's the sound of him attempting to make sense of his grief and his loss, of his limited memories, of him trying to find clarity and comfort. And what I was surprised to find out, and what I was surprised to find out when Sufion Stevens and I sat down to talk about all of this

is he doesn't really like the album very much, at least not like I imagined he would. In fact at one point in this conversation you're going to hear, he even calls the album an embarrassment. But it's not that he thinks the songs are bad, like this is

just a terrible album. It's more that he doesn't think the music did what he wanted it to do. He was looking for something. You know, he was looking for some clarity or maybe just a way to get over his grief. And when he was done, he found that he didn't feel any better. And so the music failed him.

Anyway, you can hear Sufjohn talk about all of this and a whole lot more in this conversation, including where he is with his recent battle with Guill and Beret syndrome. He came down with it in September 2023, and it's been a really long road to recovery for him. This is a pretty deep conversation. You know, all the themes in the record led us to talk about some pretty big things, some cosmic questions like dark matter and the universe. the nature of truth, and lots of questions about time. You know, when Sufion Stevens made Cary and Lowell, he was about to turn 40, he turns 50 in the summer.

So I wondered how his relationship to time has changed now that he's older. Well, time is undefinable, you know. We haven't really figured out how to explain it or summarize it or make sense of it in terms of science and physics. So I think my relationship to time is now about presence, you know, present tense, especially in the recovery of the Guillamborees. Like, I really had to slow down and just focus on small menial tasks, you know, like trying to lift my foot up off the floor, you know, trying to kind of reinvigorate the nerves and muscles. You know, it slowed me down a lot. So now I think of time as being irrelevant in a lot of ways. It's really just about the present tense, the moment we have here and now.

Where are you with your recovery? Have you mostly fully recovered? Yeah, I'm doing pretty good. It took me about six months to get back to walking again, and now I'm off all the adaptive equipment. I was in a wheelchair for maybe two months, and then a walker, a roll later, a cane, But now I can walk and run and jump and... That's great. Drive.

So, yeah, I'm pretty independent now. When you think about time and how much time has passed since you first released Carrie and Lowell, I'm wondering what's changed for you, like your relationship to these songs and to your mother. I mean, you're in a totally different place now. Yeah, when I was writing these songs, I was in the thick of it, and I wasn't thinking clearly.

So there's a lack of objectivity. to the music that now feels very foreign and unfamiliar. You know, time is a salve, but it offers no solution, really, especially in dealing with pain and suffering and death. And I think what I realize is that grieving is eternal, and you never really get over it. It just moves around and within you and transforms you, but it never goes away.

Yeah, I lost my mom in recent years, and I was telling my wife that it's like a creation, creates this little empty space in you that never gets filled again, and you kind of carry around with you, and you just have to learn to be okay with it. Right. I think that our responsibility is to duty and endurance and survival, and to also learn how to live with the grief. And I start to really feel like the absence of a loved one is the presence,

and it becomes a ghost that you have to learn to live with. It's haunting, and it's, overwhelming at times. And I think it's best to sort of acknowledge it and receive it and welcome it and give the time and space that it needs. But it's also important to keep living and to keep moving and to learn how to navigate your life in tandem with death. Yeah.

At the time you released the album, I know you said that you were kind of looking for meaning and a better understanding of everything that you'd been through and we're going through. Where are you in that journey? You mean, like, generally? Well, do you, I guess have you found any clarity? No. Unfortunately, no.

You know, I think that death is unresolvable, really, and I don't feel like I get any smarter or more intelligent as I get older. I find as I get older experience, makes fools of us all, and I feel kind of stupider and less prepared for what life brings me in a lot of ways. So I think what's becoming of me is like I'm just becoming more zen, more present, more accepting. Of yourself? Yeah, I think of accepting and also welcoming pain and suffering and knowing that it's possible to survive it and that it's okay and

endurance is really my mantra right now. It sounds like maybe something you've learned about yourself in the last 10 years is that you're stronger than you think. Maybe. You know, strength is funny because it suggests a kind of like power and authority and vigor. But I also think there's greater power in survival. And sometimes survival requires sensitivity. and openness and even subservience.

And I think I've just become a lot more kind of subordinate to the chaos of the world around me and less inclined to fight it. Because I'm starting to learn that you cannot create change by force. You just have to move through it and welcome it and be open to transformation. Well, one of the reasons why I ask what kind of transformations you think you've gone through

in the last 10 years is because while the songs on this anniversary edition haven't changed really. Your presentation of them has. You know, I think the original release felt very much like an elegy. You know, it was very heartbreaking

if a necessary elegy. And this feels more like a celebration of Kerry's life in a way. Yeah, I think that's a good way to look at it. Perhaps the anniversary issue is more like a memorial. I don't know if you've seen the packaging

but it has a booklet of photos. And I went back and looked through the archives and put a lot of photos of myself and my siblings and my parents in it. And I think it stands more as a memorial to carry and to her life, you know, and what little I knew of it. And I think it's probably a good idea

to use the word celebration as well. When I made this record, I was just a hot mess. I wasn't really celebrating anything. I have seen the box set, and I've gone through all the photos, and those photos are one of the reasons why I thought it felt very much like a celebration of her life. Can you take me through what it was like for you going through all these photos, maybe where you found them and how you arrived at the ones you did? Yeah, I asked my siblings and my stepdad if they had any photos lying around, and they all sent me what they had. And I think my grandpa of Maribius, Papu, was the one who took a lot of the home videos. He was Super 8 back in the day, in the 50s and 60s.

And I had had that all digit, or someone had it digitized at some point. So we had a lot of material to look at, and we used some of that on tour 10 years ago. So going back overall of that, for the first time I was able to kind of look at it without sobbing in without feeling overwhelmed. And I was able to really see the beauty and elegy and all of it. You know, they're just little snapshots. They're kind of trifles in a lot of ways. But they, you know, they're just,

they represent a kind of a larger life that's lived, most of it unseen and unrecorded. And I wanted to kind of fabricate it almost like a scrapbook, put it all together. And so it feels kind of, there's a wholeness to it. that probably doesn't accurately reflect the way that life is lived. You know, it's all disjointed and chaotic. But when you look at the remnants of archival material,

you start to perceive the kind of wholeness and beauty and truth and all of it. I think that's really, I think, important to see. Because otherwise, when you live moments to moment, you just kind of feel lost in space. And you know when my mother died, she really didn't have anything. She was like a ward of the state, I think, and she had a backpack with some stuff,

but she didn't really own anything or have anything. So I feel like this music and these photos and the memories that we have, they all reflect the greatness of her life, in spite of what little she had when she died. You talked about being a mess at the time you were writing these songs and recording them. You also include this really,

I think deeply moving essay in this deluxe edition. And the essay, I think it reveals a lot of things that I don't think anyone, well, or at least not many people actually knew about you and what you were going through when you first released the album. For starters, you share what I think is, I took as a pretty harsh assessment of these songs and the whole process of working through them. Yeah.

Yeah, 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. And I felt that I was being manipulative and self-centered and solipsistic and self-loathing. And that my work and the approach that I had taken to my work, which is to kind of like create beauty,

from chaos was failing me. It was very frustrating. And I think for the first time I realized that not everything can be sublimated into art. That some things just remain unsolvable or insoluble or whatever. I think I was really just frustrated by even trying to make sense of the experience of grief through the songs. Can I read you a little excerpt from the essay? Okay. You say the process was 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. And then a little later you say, the songs I sang were of ineptitude and disrepair. I could never make sense of the nothingness that consumed me, and it was foolhardy to believe anything good could come of superimposing my mother's memory onto my music in the first place, but I did it just the same. I kept waiting for you to say at some point in the essay, how you just don't feel this way anymore, that you now realize you actually did make a great and meaningful work of art that means a lot to a lot of people, but you never say that. No, no, I'm kind of embarrassed by this

album, to be honest with you. Really? Because I sort of feel like I don't have a lot of of any authority over my mother, her life, or experience, or her death. All I have is speculation and my imagination and my own misery, you know. And I feel like that, you know, in trying to make sense of it all is that I kind of felt like it didn't really resolve anything. But what is art and making music for you then?

I mean, is it a failure just because it didn't get at what you sort of set out to do, or is it still a success for lack of a better word, because you created great songs and meaningful songs that reached people? Well, yeah, that's the effect of the music, not of myself or my intentions. You know, I believe the music has the consciousness beyond me, and so I'm grateful that the songs can exist, regardless of my own intentions, my failed intentions. or my bad intentions. But I still don't feel good about myself for making these songs.

Do you regret making the album? Because you certainly sound like you feel bad. Yeah, I do. I feel bad. Well, 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. Well, let me ask you this, and maybe this is impossible to really do.

But if you divorce yourself from the context of the album and just as standalone songs, do you not hear accomplished music? Yeah, there's this logic to it, a musical logic, you know. It all makes sense. It sounds pretty. There are notes, they follow patterns. Yeah. Subject verb predicate. Yeah, but it's still following rules and routines.

and there's clearly tradition there. You can feel it in all the songs. A lot of these songs are very orthodox and their shape and all that stuff. It's a powerful gift, though, I think, to her memory. And knowing that her story and now, like all the photos in this edition, are reaching so many people, it's hard for me to see that as anything other than a profound act of love.

Yeah, she was a very very... beautiful, loving, caring person. She was really funny. She was really curious. She was a poet and an artist. She was a musician, too. She played the piano. There's a, you know, little bits and pieces that I remember about her.

We're all pretty amazing. You know, it's a shame that most of it goes into this music that is kind of a fabrication. But what I do remember about her is all pretty great. We haven't talked much about the actual music, and we obviously don't need to revisit every song, but there are a few cuts that I wanted to talk about and a little bit about how the album came together for you.

I'm wondering, you know, Carrie passed away in 2012. Do you remember when you decided to start writing about it and kind of what you were thinking and feeling at the time? I don't remember why I made these songs in the first place. I write every day. I'm always in the practice of writing, songwriting, and I was taught to write what you. you know. And at the time I was also writing fiction and fiction was informing my songwriting.

So it wasn't as if I sat down to write an album about my mother. It just sort of happened. I mean, at the time, I was writing like dozens of songs. And a lot of them, of course, were preoccupied with her because she had just died. But I don't really remember, because maybe I wasn't a fugue state. I don't remember what it was like. Do you remember the first song you wrote? God, I don't remember. It's all a blur. I don't remember writing these songs. I really don't.

And some of them I recorded like multiple times. Do you think that's... I repressed it all. I must have repressed it all. Well, I was going to ask you if you think that's some sort of defense mechanism, you know, there are difficult things I've gone through, and then people will ask me about something very specific that they remember from it, and it's just completely gone for me. Yeah. Yeah, that might be a result of trauma and PTSD. I do remember the moment that I was told

that she had passed away. I was on tour. I was doing the Christmas tour at the time, and her sister, my aunt had called and said, she's not well. She's in the hospital. They just operate on her. It's not looking good. You should come visit. So in between, shows I would fly to Houston where she was and visit her in the hospital and then fly back to the next city and set up the wheel of Christmas and do Christmas shows and then I would fly back. You know, I was doing that a little bit. And we had just woken up. We were in San Francisco and we were getting ready to set up the wheel of Christmas. I think my aunt called me and said she had passed away. So I was like working. I was on tour. I was in the back of a club. I was. I was in the back of a

club getting ready to set up a show. And my aunt had said, there's nothing you can do now. You should probably just finish the tour. She's going to be cremated. Then we can talk about a memorial service later. And so I had to like to do the show that day. It was kind of like the show must go on. And I just set up that stupid wheel. Did you ever see that tour? I didn't. No, I never saw the holiday show. It was horrible. You're being very hard on yourself. Well, I think there's just like this disconnect, you know, between the work that I'm doing and my interior life, you know.

Yeah. And at that time, the contradiction was so profound. You know, it's... I get that. Incredible that I survived it at all. I thought I had read at the time that you were with your mom when she passed away, but... No, I was... I was grateful that I was able to fly down and see her multiple times in the hospital and spend time with her with my siblings.

So we were there in the hospital. We sat by her bed and talked to her and made our peace. The song, I think, on the album that is my favorite and certainly wrecks me the most is Fourth of July. Raise you from the dead, oh good. On the fourth of July. All you do enough talk? My little heart. Tell me, what did you learn from the Tillamook burn or the Fourth of July?

We're all going to die. And it's not the line we're all going to die, which is just sort of, I mean, that's just a universal truth that we all have to accept. It's all the little nicknames that you share, my little hawk, my little Versailles, my dragonfly. And this, what I took as a conversation between you and Carrie, where she seems to be wishing you nothing but the best. Was this an entirely imagined conversation for you? Yeah, of course.

Yeah, that whole, that whole song and the interactions and the affections are all made up. Because I didn't have that kind of relationship with my mother. She was very loving and caring and affectionate, but we didn't have pet names and we weren't. intimate, you know, our relationship was distant, you know, because she mostly wasn't there, she wasn't available. And I wasn't raised by her, was raised by my dad,

my stepmom. And we called our parents by their first names. Yeah. We didn't even call them mother and father. So there was a kind of stayed at arm's length, impersonal, dynamic

to our relationship. And I think that song is kind of an imagined parallel, you know, reality, parallel universe in which we were more intimate and had pet names and could share things intimately with each other. But that wasn't possible. You included a handful of demos in this new release, including one of the Fourth of July that's nearly 14 minutes long and it's pretty different. Do you remember how you got from this to the final version, which is less epic, more stripped down. Yeah.

Well, you know, I recorded a lot of these songs multiple times. I do remember doing that. And in different scenarios and different studios, I remember really, really trying to figure it out. And that song I probably recorded four or five times. And it's interesting because the ending is just sort of is unresolved, but just sort of transcends lyrical content and just becomes a kind of a new age journey.

And it becomes a mantra. And I think that's probably ultimately like what I felt like where I really wanted to reside in was just the sonic landscape that didn't have words and didn't have narrative and didn't have any meaning. I just wanted to be in this intimate sonic space. Since I recorded Carrie-in-law, I've been doing a lot more kind of new-age ambient music.

I think I'm starting to realize, that like that's my happy place. That's really where I want to reside. It's like in a world in which there is no content, there's no language, there's no, nothing being really explicitly said. There's just sound. I have to ask then just, and we'll get back.

So do you not see yourself doing another vocal album in a while? Yeah, I haven't really been writing songs. I've been just making music, been doing a lot more instrumental stuff. Yeah. And producing other people's work. but for the time I feel somewhat censored and I'm kind of

allowing myself to live in that world where I don't have to say anything Well the album is of course it's very spare You talk about wanting to keep it intimate But I think you do so much with very little on it And there are some devices and motifs that you kind of deploy in I think really effective ways And one in particular that I love is on the song John My Beloved

And it's that pivot note that never stops, goes through the whole song. Oh, yeah. I get it's a meditation. Meditation is a good word. I was also actually thinking that it's like an alarm. A very gentle alarm, but an alarm. It kind of implies that nothing is changing here. Right.

Yeah, maybe it's that single repeated note is a beacon that gives us a center of gravity. And while we move about the chaos of the world, I think it's something that I do sometimes is, as I'm writing or recording or composing, and I find myself venturing onward and upward and upward through all the chords and notes and melodies, and trying to, you know, create new sonic relationships, new harmonic relationships, new harmonic relationships, but I always have to have this one note that kind of holds me down.

That's a lot of times how I compose too, is I find one note, and then I find all the various chords that share that one note, and even though you're kind of meandering and you're reharmonizing and changing keys, you still share that one common link, which is one note.

It gives you a center of gravity. Yeah, I've often wondered what, your creative process is like, you know, how you start and move through a song is, you know, how intentional is it? Or are you just sort of kind of letting it take you somewhere? I think a lot of it is impulse, you know, an instinct. I don't really, I don't really arrive with an idea. I just try to physically be present and allow my body to kind of enter into a musical space. You know, sometimes on the piano it's just shapes and, you know, physically engaging with an instrument I think is really important. One more song. You close with Blue Bucket of Gold. And there are

a couple of moments on this track where you reference the myths and fables that we tell ourselves. And, you know, you also say in your essay, again, how most of what you remember about Kerry's mostly fabricated. And I'm wondering if you're any closer to something that you can hold on to as truth in all of this. Or maybe what truth even looks like for you. Maybe truth is endurance, the substance of things that are eternal. And what is that? I don't know what that is.

Maybe different for everyone, but there are some things that are universal. There's truth in beauty. There's truth in justice. There's truth in grace. There's truth in love. It's a big difficult question, I know. And I guess I ask only because truth is something that it seems like you've been reaching for, or at least trying to understand what it even is.

Yeah. Maybe truth is emptiness, is vacancy. How so? I was thinking about this this morning, about black energy or whatever they call that, dark matter. Dark matter in the universe? Dark energy. You know, this majority of the universe. is this substance that we can't quite figure out or measure or understand.

And then maybe that's kind of a reflection of like what we are mostly non-existent or immeasurable, that there's a kind of vacuum to existence, the things that we don't see, that we can't feel that we can't measure, that those things are what are most important. And that the physical world is just a distraction. For me, having lived in the Catskills now for about six years, where I'm really, you know, entrenched in the natural cycle, you know, of the world around me, of the natural world, is that there is a kind of, I feel very irrelevant to it, you know.

It doesn't seem concerned about me at all. And I think in some ways there's like a greater truth to that, that I'm in the world but not of the world, you know, and that otherness that not belonging to me feels really comforting it gives me kind of a sense of presence of mind

so I think that the moment that we have here and now the present tense I think is the most valuable thing and it isn't about the stuff that we have or what's around us it's just about having that presence of mind

and I do think that death is a kind of reminder of that because death doesn't exist really It's a, death is a, you know, a manifestation of non-existence, right? So we're all moving towards non-existence. And I think the sooner that we can resolve ourselves to that non-existence, then we can live in presence physically and spiritually, I think, with more fullness. Well, we're getting really heavy here, but I think about all this stuff all the time.

And I also find great comfort in everything that you just described. Some people don't. It terrifies some people. But I'm the exact opposite. It does. It comforts me. And it grounds me in a way. And it makes me appreciate, I don't know, being here at all.

Right. I mean, we do. We live in a beautiful, bountiful, boundless world that is offering so much to us. you know, maybe that's what's so frustrating about this record for me is that I could see and feel and hear the evidence of my effort and trying to make sense of it and musically and structurally and narratively, but I knew deep down inside that I was dealing with something that was unresolvable, and that the final tapestry of the album was never really going to be a stand-in,

you know, for my relationship with my mom. and that's okay. You kind of have to just live with the chaos of it. Yeah. I don't want to disparage. I don't want to sound like I don't like this album or that I'm, I don't want to talk shit about it. You know, I think I want to disassociate from it, you know.

I want to acknowledge that ultimately has nothing to do with me anymore. This music is yours. Sufion Stevens talking about his album, Carrie and Lowell, really love where he lands there at the end of the conversation when he says that the music is for everyone else now. I only had about an hour or so with Sufion Stevens. Really felt like we could have just talked all day about life and why we're here and all those kinds of big questions. It was so great to finally connect with him about this album all these years later and to revisit the music of Carrie and Lull because it really is incredible, I think.

You can read a transcript of this conversation on her website. That's at npr.org. to spend more time reading through it and sit with it more, you'll find it there. We've been ending every episode of the show this spring by looking back at the past 25 years of All Songs Considered, you know, talking about our number one songs from each year. We're going to take a break from that, but we'll be back next week with a look at the year 2014. Until then, for NPR Music, I'm Robin Hilton. It's All Songs Considered.