In “So You Are Tired,” Sufjan Stevens’ lonely reflection of fatigue turns into one of anguish. “So you are tired,” he sings, his lulling piano caressing his voice. “So rest your head, turning back fourteen years, of what I did and said.”
He sang those words 20 years ago, on a song called “Vito’s Ordination Song,” his voice still sprightly and buoyant: “To what I did and said, rest in my arms, sleep in my bed, there’s a design.”
But in “So You Are Tired,” there’s a certain hoarseness now, as if the reality of a waning relationship hit him and he had to pull back. His depleted voice betrays the tenderness of his offer.
Perhaps death has a way of doing that.
On the day Sufjan released his latest record Javelin, a gorgeous highlight in a career full of them, he penned a dedication to his partner Evans Richardson IV, who died in April—the cuts and lacerations in his heart made all the more devastating by his advice: “If you happen to find that kind of love, hold it close, hold it tight, savor it, tend to it, and give it everything you’ve got, especially in times of trouble.”
So I put this record on with that note in mind and not much else. It’s hard to resist the impulse to put two and two together. With his best songs about death, Sufjan will play host, inviting you in even when he promises nothing but gloom.
Sufjan’s songs are dotted with specificities — almost like diary excerpts — that are often placed in the middle of a poetic phantasmagoria; his ruminations on mortality pulled in a lot of directions.
Take “Wallowa Lake Monster,” where he sings “She left us in Detroit in the rain with a pillowcase” and of these things, too: Spathiphyllum on his grave, Demogorgon or demigod, drunk cedar waxwings.
There is very little of this on Javelin. There are barely any signposts: drunk mothers, a young love killed by bone cancer. To say ‘Javelin is an album about death’ would be a fool’s errand. Conclusions are simply harder to draw.
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Instead there is devotion, a chock full of it here. Here he is again in “So You Are Tired”:
I was the man still in love with you
When I already knew it was done
I can’t begin to say how much these two lines fucked me up the minute I heard them.
On Javelin, Sufjan is front-facing, his vocals and his outpouring sounding more direct and immediate even when his lyrics do not. “Will anybody ever love me?” he asks at one point. He turns inward, returns to a well-trodden path of religious reflections and asks Jesus to lift him up on the beautiful “Everything That Rises.”
He is also unsparing in his self-loathing. “I’m drowning in my self-defense / now punish me,” he sings on propulsive opener and paean to a departed loved one “Goodbye Evergreen,” perhaps the clearest decoding on the whole record.
Javelin is also gorgeous musically, his ear for melodies unflinching. The record is mostly finger-picked guitar, bedecked with beautiful choral arrangements (I will follow Hannah Cohen, Megan Lui, Nedelle Torrisi, and adrienne maree brown to hell and back)
Sufjan soars and gets to nirvana on the song “Shit Talk,” an eight-minute odyssey and one of his most generous offerings. This song, featuring a quiet-loud conceit, is almost like a prayer—here he repeats “Hold me closely Hold me tightly, lest I fall” like an incantation, as the music takes a great ascent, the stacked vocals release the euphoric rush, and then finally the song crests into an ambient final note.
It’s just beautiful stuff. Sufjan can do songs like this in his sleep, but the rewards of listening to Javelin lie in the album’s consistency. All of the songs here occupy the same sonic language as Carrie & Lowell, but Sufjan opens Javelin up a lot more (he also plays all the instruments himself, the twangs and bleep-bloops are all his — except for some guitar assist from Bryce Dessner of The National in “Shit Talk”).
Javelin is less inert. The choir hits me like a ton of bricks. If the acoustic moments are the reprieve, the electronica is the grandeur, the sound of tumult.
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The first Sufjan song I ever heard and loved was “Casimir Pulaski Day,” the bone cancer song, from his traveling bard opus Illinois. He sings about a person with that illness and how they spend their days together—until the very end. At the time, I didn’t know his whole deal—how he is one of the most musically restless artists that I’ve ever had the pleasure of following along. This got me:
All the glory when He took our place
But He took my shoulders and He shook my face
And He takes and He takes and He takes
The expanse of Sufjan’s music is paved with fixations: planets on Planetarium, films on A Beginner’s Mind, a record he made with singer-songwriter Angelo De Augustine, the states of Illinois and Michigan. The closest thing he has to a fixation on Javelin is in the untraceable — make of what you hear what you will.
But in music and words, Javelin is without a doubt a Sufjan Stevens album — there are still heights to reach, new islands to chart.
At the end of the record, he reins in the turmoil with a cover of Neil Young’s “There’s a World.” It’s a wistful, sorta hopeful song. Even when the words aren’t his, the effect reminds me of the one through-line of this man’s music in the face of his many masks: his emotional acuity and generosity, as bright as the light of day.