Sufjan Stevens shares 'big feelings' on his new album Javelin
Craig Jenkins and Mel Woods review the musician’s 10th studio album
Sufjan Stevens is a songwriter of big feelings, and his 10th studio album, Javelin, proves he's still at the top of his game.
Today on Commotion, culture critics Craig Jenkins and Mel Woods talk with host Elamin Abdelmahmoud about how the album, which is dedicated to Stevens' late partner Evans Richardson IV, is a study in grief, love and honouring the big relationships in your life.
We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.
Elamin: Craig, you started your Vulture review by saying that Sufjan Stevens has "long evaded easy categorization — musically, romantically, philosophically." Can you tell us a little more about that?
Craig: Let's talk about what happens after the 2005 album Illinois. People have fallen in love with this sound, and they spend the next couple of years waiting for him to return to it. After The Avalanche: Outtakes and Extras from the Illinois Album! comes out, it's another couple of years before you get him back in The Age of Adz mode. And everything he does in between are all these fascinating experiments to get into different corners of his creativity. He can do arrangements, he can produce, he can play all this strange synth stuff — and you would just get him diving into those pockets and keeping people on their toes.
Elamin: Yeah. There's a real tendency, I think, to either focus sonically on what Sufjan is doing, or lyrically on what he's doing. And sometimes when you combine the two of them, like on this record, you get this kind of dissidence of the most beautiful arrangements possible and the saddest possible lyrics. Is this a hallmark, at this point, for Sufjan?
Craig: Yeah. That voice, there's a sweetness to it. There's an innocence to it that just counteracts [or] undercuts what he's saying; it adds a dynamic tension that all this stuff is coming out of this vessel, and that's definitely part of the thing. It's all these instruments, these really delicate, strange stuff that most people don't think to play, to stick into a record like the one that he's making.
Elamin: Mel, for me the thing that really sticks out about Sufjan is that you hear a lot of those instrumentations; you don't hear a lot of those instrumentations doing that particular work. It's sort of like a twee sound, and then the content of it is the deepest grappling with death you ever heard.
WATCH | Sufjan Stevens' official album stream for Javelin:
We've got to say, Mel, on the day that this album was released, Sufjan wrote this beautiful dedication to his partner, Evan Richardson, who died in the spring. Sufjan referenced being in love with men in his music, but this is kind of the first time he's talked about a relationship publicly. How did you react when you saw that post?
Mel: It was a mixture of grieving with him, along with this validation and confirmation. I, and many people, have had many big gay feelings to Sufjan's music. He makes big feeling music for big gay feelings. I came up during the Carrie & Lowell era … and the whole album may be arguably the saddest Sufjan album.
Elamin: That's the one about his mother's death.
Mel: Yeah, and so it's interesting seeing this enter his canon of grief, and enter his canon of big feelings and working through things. To have that extra layer of knowing that he loved and was loved, and that that influenced this music in such a way really kind of enriches the listening experience. We don't know these artists. You can write the most personal lyrics in the world — these intimate things that make it feel like we know this person. But to get a little life detail like that is both a reminder that we don't actually know this person. He's not actually our shoulder that we've been crying on for all these years. He's a guy making music who has his own life, his own love and his own grief. I think it was a lot of big feelings.
Elamin: I want to come back to that notion of Sufjan as a confessional or not confessional songwriter, because I think he's flirted a lot with that notion without necessarily fully committing to it. But also we should say that after the album came out and that statement came out, Mel, a lot of the media ran these headlines about Sufjan Stevens had officially "come out." You wrote this piece for Xtra Magazine about this media response. How did you feel about that?
Mel: It was a bit frustrating, I think, because he's been obviously out to the people who matter for a long time. So what does it really mean to "come out," and what does it mean to come out publicly? I think it distracted from what is a spectacular album in of itself, and also from his grief and mourning this person; to have that be shoehorned into an easy coming-out narrative is really frustrating. I think it does a disservice to the music and to his life. He's in his late 40s; he's been out and about. It's a different story. I think we have this obsession with categorizing people and defining them by things, and instead I think we should just be focusing on the big gay feelings that the music makes and has been making for years.
Elamin: In that context then, Craig, let's go back to this idea of Sufjan as confessional and maybe not confessional. He's kind of managed to remain pretty mysterious; you never really know what he's doing in between albums. He's not one of those artists where you can keep track of them. But he's also woven a lot of the intimate details of his life into his lyrics. Then Javelin comes out, and he's open not only about what he's going through in terms of losing a partner, but also about the fact that he was diagnosed with a pretty serious autoimmune disease. Then you hear this album that is grappling with death, grappling with the sort of fleeting nature of life. How do you think that context changes how we listen to this album?
Craig: I don't know that it should. I guess on paper, you can file it under "terrible things happening to this guy, and beautiful music coming out of it" … as in the case of any darkly autobiographical song, like the one from Illinois about the friend who's dying. That stuff galvanizes him, unfortunately, in a way. His art is just clear-eyed in a way that it doesn't necessarily feel like it needs to be in those dark times. I guess there is definitely the urge to see this as another instance of this guy persevering, and this terrible stuff in his life making him reevaluate and appreciate what we have. But also the record itself doesn't necessarily lend itself to that reading. There's a lot of breakup sounding stuff in it. And so once again, we should never feel safe in our assumption of knowing what's going on with the guy, even when we get the bits of clarity that we do, I think.
You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.
Panel produced by Jane van Koeverden.