The essay that came with the 10th anniversary vinyl edition of Carrie & Lowell -> [ID under a read-more, as this is a long essay:
"Whatever I can recall about Carrie is mostly fabrication. (Memory is malleable, fallible and largely manufactured.) I was barely a year old when my mother and father separated, so the hard facts of those events are unavailable to me. I was just a child. As was my mother, just 25 years old, with four kids, a failed marriage, and no real support from her own family. Or, at least, that was the narrative we were most often told in the aftermath of our family’s dissolution. Another version also made the rounds: Carrie was reckless, selfish, impulsive and unfit for motherhood. And so she abandoned us. But that is untrue. In fact, Carrie was the one largely forsaken – by life, by friends and family, by circumstances, by God, by society, by herself. There is a sustained loneliness to her existence which I cannot judiciously describe or explain, but it is a familiar and existential separation which I can comprehend deeply and affectionately within myself. Loneliness is my inheritance.
When I am prone to abandon myself to this overwhelming disempowerment, I say I am depressed, disenchanted, disassociated from reality, and having the likeliness of my mother. That is an easy and convincing rationalization of my misery, of course. This fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree. I am just like her. But once again, this feels untrue, unfair and slightly devious. My misery is my own making. And I must own up to it.
In my mind, the songs on “Carrie & Lowell” are the messy evidence of owning up to my misery, depression, dread and grief, which threatened to consume me and ruin me in the aftermath of my mother’s sudden death from cancer. I barely knew Carrie, and yet her passing ushered in fierce and emotional hurricanes, unraveling so many years of my fastidious posturing of survival and saneness to a fault. All of that came crumbling down. And I found myself face to face with the black-hole facsimile of nothingness that I assumed had plagued Carrie for much of her life: the demon in her was now the demon in me. I was possessed.
In hindsight, I can now identify these dark and dangerous thoughts as signs of severe depression and quizzical manifestations of grief. But at the time, I was so blithely confused and disentangled by the trauma of her death that I took it personally and approached it competitively, committed to processing these dark feelings in a way that I knew best: by writing songs. Surely my art could make sense of the profound mystery of my mother‘s life and death. A song is many things: a bittersweet medicine, a probe, an illumination, a dissection of truths. We are told to write what we know, what we see and feel, to apprehend the world around us with curious investigation and self-reflection. But 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. I saw the remnant of my ego laid out before me like a corpse wielding a guitar, feigning insight and integrity. And 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 out of superimposing my mother’s memory onto my music in the first place. But I did it just the same. And the result was a hot mess. For the first time in my life, I was faced with the limitations of a creative process that exercised exploitation and exhibitionism as expressions of personal truth. My music failed me.
Death is a jarring and judicious refinery of our naive practices, of course. You cannot sing through the pain, or expel its haunting seizure into a musical sonnet. Suffering is an insurmountable abyss that cannot be filled with music. Pain is boundless, borderless, and inscrutable to art. And so, with this resignation of terror, I came to identify my music as a false god (which I had worshiped with fatuous rapture), and as a faulty apparatus (which I had wielded unscrupulously) – all of which led me to counterfeit revelry and revelations. Finally disposed of these creative tools for survival, I was left with the devastating realization that I was a fake, a failure, and a fool to ever believe my art could save me, let alone make sense of the senselessness of death.
I eventually came out of this malaise with a newfound repertoire for life – a song of duty and determination to survive, at any cost. The melancholy and madness I felt may have been a manifestation of the true nature of my spirit and imagination, but they were not reliable or sustainable. They were out to kill me. My suffering was solace, but not salvation. There were no more signs and wonders in my life or in my work: I was left with bleak resignation and stoic convocation. The result was simple and bittersweet: the world is chaos and I am simply one of its wild electrons of consciousness suspended in a universal bedlam. Echoes of the Serenity Prayer came to mind: that I must accept the things I cannot change, cultivate the courage to change the things I can, and pray for the wisdom to know the difference. My new objective was blunt and mundane: to disarm all the willful ambitions of my art and follow whatever crisscrossing course of indirection that prevailed before me – to settle upon serenity or death, whatever comes first.
Carrie owned up to her misery with aplomb. I was told she suffered from schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, ennui,and an enthusiastic distrust of power and orthodoxy. She heard voices, she had visions, she was consumed by paranoia and superstitions. She abused drugs and alcohol. I was told that at times she lived on the streets, was a vagabond, boundless and free. At her best, in safe environments, she was loving, caring, intelligent, carefree and inquisitive. She had quick wit and cutting insight into the foibles and follies of human behavior. She laughed a lot, at herself and others. She loved music, literature, poetry and art. She played piano, she crocheted, she wrote poetry, and she rolled with the punches.
Now living in the shadow of these unsatisfying incidental facts, I still find myself excavating eulogies and elegies. Carrie was a wandering star in a galaxy of infinite sensation. Carrie was a cosmic pariah, unknowable and uncontainable, and existentially alone. Carrie was unequivocal and pure, completely whole in confidence and without conditions, living out the fullness of her agony and ecstasy with curiosity and delight Carrie owned up to everything about herself without deflection. She was beautifully and wonderfully made – my mother, my star, my queen, my mystery, my nemesis, and my muse. And so, here I am, back at the beginning of things, investigating unreliable, irreparable memories of a woman who refused to be comprehended or classified by the mundane realms of ordinary society. Carrie was not really made for this world. And when she left it, I was reminded of my own inherent worldlessness, and the underlying alien spirit she planted within me. I love her for this generous gift of otherworldliness. I love her unconditionally, without judgment, in life and death and in everything in between." - Sufjan Stevens in his 10th anniversary Carrie & Lowell vinyl essay.] [To the right of this essay is a picture of Carrie as a young woman.]
Lava crosses the main road to Grindavík and flows on the road leading to the Blue Lagoon, in Grindavík, Iceland, Thursday, Feb. 8, 2024. A volcano in southwestern Iceland has erupted for the third time since December and sent jets of lava into the sky. The eruption on Thursday morning triggered the evacuation the Blue Lagoon spa which is one of the island nation’s biggest tourist attractions.
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