Photo: Sufjan Stevens
American folk musician Sufjan Stevens built his reputation on, among other things, being able to craft tear-jerkers. If you’ve seen Call Me By Your Name, you’ll know that his music, especially when accompanied by a weeping Timothee Chalamet over that film’s end credits, can pack quite a wallop.
So it seemed a particularly cruel twist of fate when, earlier this year, he announced he was undergoing treatment for Guillain-Barré syndrome, which left him without feeling in his hands, arms, and legs.
On the release of his new album Javelin, its dedication revealed that tragedy had struck again in April, when Steven’s partner Evans Richardson IV died at the age of 43.
The sadness of Steven’s music is now tied to his personal life in ways it hasn’t really been before: ongoing and specific. But the album itself might be his most hopeful, with each song transcending its wistful opening with a sense of communal celebration.
Stevens came into greater public view in 2009 when he released Michigan, a collection he said was the first in a series that would cover all fifty states. By that stage he’d already released two solo records that were lumped into the resurgent freak folk scene.
A few years later came Illinois, which would turn out to be the last of the fifty states project. He later admitted it was a promotional gimmick. And it worked, helped by both albums’s outsized ambition: balladry grafted to brass and choral arrangements, and prone to jazzy excursions.
In between the two, he released Seven Swans, which kept a relatively focused palette, honing in on his voice and guitar, and themed around Christianity. In 2015 came Carrie & Lowell, similarly hushed and contemplating the death of his mother.
There was also an ambient record and a collaborative one, and two that supplanted acoustics with electronics.
Javelin falls somewhere in between those more quiet offerings and the blockbusters, many of its songs beginning as a whisper, then rising in scope and volume as they go.
Stevens is still crafting melodies no one else; if you’re not hooked during the verse you will be by the chorus. His voice is like a conduit to pure empathy, and if I have one complaint it’s that on Javelin it’s often altered by editing and Autotune, in ways that I think aren’t meant to be audible.
On ‘Everything That Rises’ there’s an artificial vibrato that seems intentional, but elsewhere I’d rather hear the odd bit of flatness or sharpness than the jarring digital precision that sometimes eventuates.
Niggles aside, Javelin combines Stevens two sides better than anything else he’s done. There’s a chaotic pile-up of synthesized sounds in the opening track, but from then on he pulls back on the arrangements enough that they never overshadow the words and music.
And he’s still fantastic at deploying countermelodies, often entering midway to elevate songs even further. You can hear what I mean on the title track, when the appearance of a keyboard line sends the track heavenward.
Javelin is such a voluminous record, I was surprised to see that Sufjan Stevens performs almost all its parts, save for a cameo on guitar from The National’s Bryce Dessner, and a quintet of backing vocalists.
It’s threaded through with the usual references to Christianity, and the search for meaning, and while some of its songs refer directly to his recent tragedies, the theme of persisting in the face of heartbreak is one he’s always been drawn to. It’s impossible not to be moved.
