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Sufjan Stevens' devoted following includes a sizeable contingent of Christians. His near perfect banjo-driven rendition of Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing almost single-handedly resurrected an apparently dated hymn into the regular repertoire of any self-respecting church with a fair quota of young adults. His Christmas albums confront the kitsch of Christmas head on, managing to cast a redemptive and genuinely spiritual light on the weird mix of Victoriana, consumerism and high Christian festival that is the modern Western World’s Christmas. And his unselfconscious references to atonement, redemption, God and Bible studies in songs like the impossibly beautiful Casimir Pulaski Day speak powerfully to those of us for whom all those things are precious.

Sufjan’s eagerly anticipated new studio album, Carrie & Lowell, was released just before Easter. After the 1970s inspired, brassy Sci-Fi electronica-adventure of The Age of Adz, Carrie & Lowell marks a return to a much more sparse singer-songwriter album. If Age of Adz was a party to which anyone willing to dress loud was invited, Carrie & Lowell is a meal for one, late at night, in your trackies.

The album narrates Sufjan’s loss of his mother, Carrie, in 2012 and his relationship to his stepfather, Lowell. It is a striking account of grief’s ability to mug a person mid-stream in adult life and send them to dark places, asking long-buried questions, feeling feelings one hasn’t felt since childhood. Has anyone for example captured the complexity of the son-stepfather relationship more simply and elegantly than in the line from “Eugene”?:

The man who taught me to swim/He couldn’t quite say my first name

In the same track Steven’s captures the vulnerability of loss:

And now I want to be near you./Still I pray to what I cannot see …

Songs like “The Only Thing,” say out loud things that reside in deep and dangerous places. Addressed to his mother: “In the vale of great disguises, how do I live with your ghost? … I wonder if you loved me at all?”

Carrie & Lowell is full of prayer, of lament, and of quiet hope. If you’re already a Sufjan fan, tracks like “Eugene” and “Death with Dignity” will soon find themselves next to “Arnkia” and “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!” on your “Sufjan Swoon” playlist. But — if I may put this delicately — talk of Christmas albums, revived hymns and tender prayers might give the wrong impression to people making their way to Sufjan for the first time. Carrie & Lowell goes to some very dark places and has some language and subject matter that probably rule it out as the obvious solution to Nana’s Christmas present this year. Just putting it out there.

The Southern Gothic novelist Flannery O’Connor warned her fellow Catholics not to write “with the Church looking over your shoulder.” Perhaps paradoxically, O’Connor, by following her own advice, managed to write some of the most theologically rich fiction of the twentieth century. C. S. Lewis likewise wrote perhaps his most arresting prose in A Grief Observed, precisely because he determined, in faith, to describe grief as it is, not as it “ought” to be. Christian art, it seems, is best done when Christians do art, not when they are overly self-conscious in trying to do “Christian” art. Sufjan Stevens has done something similar with Carrie & Lowell—produced a sad, sometimes dark, occasionally difficult and often beautiful account of loss and grief, in which the moments of grace are rich and real.

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