The Whispering Magic of Sufjan Stevens

And how he brought me closer to my cousin

I saw my cousin Andreas a few months ago, at my younger cousin Tia’s sweet sixteen. It was the first time I’d seen him in about a year, and he looked different – he’d grown a mound of thick, curly hair, he’d grown an inch or two, and he was wearing a bowtie.

College really had changed him.

I rarely reach out to him, and I can only say that I wish to make more of an effort. To be honest, though, I sometimes forget my parents exist while I’m caught in the whirlwind of a blooming and beautiful, albeit jarring, college experience. Still, Andreas will occasionally send a Facebook message my way, asking how my second year has been going, and I’ll respond,

I went to a really chill party this past weekend.

I played a lot of guitar yesterday.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Red Hot Chili Peppers recently. You like them, right?

Yet, the message he sent me a month ago went beyond our usual banter. I opened it to find an article about Sufjan Stevens, an increasingly popular folk musician, in which he decried a ‘Christian Nation’ as heretical despite his devotion to the faith. Andreas eloquently added, “This guy is a fucking genius.”

I read it. Sufjan implored Christians to “die to your ego, to your family, your heritage, your narrow-minded ideology,” in order to gain access to their true self. Though I’m no longer religious, I couldn’t help but agree.

I started listening to Sufjan about a year ago, and I hadn’t known that Andreas was also a listener until Tia’s sweet sixteen. When he revealed he was in love with the man’s music, I produced my own fanboy ravings. We proceeded to shower the folk singer with compliments, expressing how enthralled we were by his unorthodox performances, his wild fashion, and his quirky method of expression – but we seemed most intrigued by his musical style. Though Sufjan’s music is classified as indie folk, it might as well be classified as introspective, melodic avant-garde with a refined country flair. His songs churn, echo, swell with complex sound, and often grapple with topics that are honest, uplifting, and haunting. His arrangements cover what it feels like to experience love, joy, disappointment, and death. Most of the songs are minor in key and incorporate a reverberating chamber of guitars, banjos, pianos, and brass that swirl into a mélange of sound, all backed by an unassuming, half-whispering voice that communicates in verses of minimalist poetry. He reminds me of a younger Bob Dylan with a better voice and a subtler twang.

Of course, Andreas fell head-over-heels for Sufjan as he’s also a talented musician. He’s been playing guitar and studying the intricacies of musical composition since grade school, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, his favorite “mainstream” artist is Radiohead. “They’re the kind of group that just always finds a way to one up their previous work,” he once mentioned. “It leads to albums that have mind-boggling depth.”

He said the same about Sufjan in our Facebook conversation. He outlined the variety of sounds in Steven’s lineup, citing the more lighthearted, traditional folk beauty of Illinoise (2005) and its storytelling prowess, raving about the stripped-down album Seven Swans (2004), and marveling at the experimental, melodic electronica that surges through every vein of Age of Adz (2010). Like Radiohead, Andreas said, Sufjan has the ability to craft diverse, cathartic musical pieces that consistently make the listener feel reflective, wistful, and vulnerable.

Carrie & Lowell (2015), Sufjan’s most recent album, is his most introspective. It’s a simple, heartbreaking ode to his recently-passed mother, Carrie, a rarely-present apparition in his life, who battled schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, drug addiction, and eventually succumbed to stomach cancer.

The first track on the album, “Death with Dignity,” begins with Sufjan’s whispery, ethereal voice and his subtle musings on mourning and forgiveness:

Spirit of my silence, I can hear you / But I’m afraid to be near you / And I don’t know where to begin . . .

I forgive you mother; I can hear you / And I long to be near you / But every road leads to an end / Yes every road leads to an end . . .

The album creeps toward a stunning, somber middle with “Fourth of July,” an ambient track that illustrates Sufjan’s views on mortality and visceral, familial love:

The evil it spread / Like a fever ahead / It was night when you died, my firefly . . .

Well you do enough talk / My little hawk / Why do you cry? . . . / We’re all gonna die . . .

Other tracks like “The Only Thing” and “No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross” are just as affecting. The album comes to a misty-eyed close with “Blue Bucket of Gold,” a swelling sendoff that trails off behind a floating choir.

Naturally, when Andreas sent me another Facebook message about a week ago, the first sentence he wrote to me was:

“Dude, Carrie & Lowell is such an amazing fucking album.”

I couldn’t help but agree.

We then engaged in an in-depth back and forth about how Sufjan has the ability to tap into a wide range of emotions in each piece, and in such a short timespan. The conversation broadened in scope, and we soon found ourselves talking about impactful books we’d recently read. At some point, we started talking about our own lives: our dissatisfaction with a competitive artistic reality, dreams deferred by worries about the future.

“I’m sitting through all these hardcore quantitative classes and asking myself how the hell my education is helping me become the person I wanna be,” he wrote. “I hate every programming and math class I’m in and I know I’ll be miserable if I put all of that ahead of making music. But it’s so hard to make it as an artist, you know?”

“Well, I’m constantly worried I’m making the wrong decision pursuing a career in writing, but you know what? That’s what makes me happy,” I replied. “It doesn’t matter how hard it is. You can’t put off what you really want to do just because you want to play it safe.”

Silence on the other end for a few minutes. “Thanks,” he eventually wrote back. “I sorta needed to hear something like that. It’s nice to know other people feel the same.”

Just before I signed off, I told him that we needed to hang out in the future, and I genuinely meant it.

“Of course,” he wrote. “I’d love to.”

It wasn’t until after my smile faded that I realized what Sufjan, that whispering musical magician, had done. He’d brought us together.

*Originally featured in Reverberations Magazine*