In 1978, a couple claimed to see a three-humped creature break through the surface of Wallowa Lake in Oregon. A beast that, to their eyes, most resembled a twenty-foot snake. Although if you had asked a woman called Irene thirty years earlier, she would have told you that it had the head of a hog. A century prior, a local resident heard a low bellow, like that of a whale.
“But have you heard the story of my mother’s fate?” Sufjan Stevens sings amid the arpeggio-ripples of ‘Wallowa Lake Monster’ – “She left us in Detroit in the rain with a pillow case.” The Didion-penned adage that we tell ourselves stories in order to live is an alluring one when you consider the beasts and leviathans that lurk beneath the water, occasionally surfacing. A Native American tale of a spiked serpent is, perhaps, easier to assimilate than that of the colonial violence inflicted on the indigenous Nez Perce people who now live on a fraction of the lands there in the Pacific Northwest. With this in mind, might it not also be easier to home in on a mother’s abandonment than consider the submerged parts of her story that connect with it? The hazy shadows and shapes that too often vanish in the midst of our mythmaking.
That Stevens’ aqueous hosanna didn’t make it onto his seventh studio album, 2015’s Carrie & Lowell, is a thought-provoking one in light of the song’s lyrical precision, its singularity of self in Stevens’ bid to capture the nebulousness of his childhood, and thereby in tandem, his grief. How do you make sense of a mother who still eludes you – even in death? Two years after he detonated all expectations with his fiery and convulsive electronic symphony Age of Adz, in 2010, his mother Carrie died of stomach cancer, and, in the years that followed, he found himself returning to the earth-and-air fragility of 2004’s Seven Swans, in addition to the wistful nostalgia of his 2003 ode to the Great Lake State in which he was born: Michigan.
In an interview he gave upon the record’s release in 2015, Stevens was still stuck on a question that even this record, a profound and intimate expression of his grief, hadn’t quite answered for him: “What’s the significance of these experiences?” Named after a mother who left him at the age of one, and a stepfather who later helped him set up the record label Asthmatic Kitty when he was twenty-four, the album’s geographical focus grapples with this existential question by way of Oregon’s forests and lakes, where Stevens spent three summers between the ages of five and eight – a time when he saw his mother the most.
Now, ten years later, Stevens is returning to this question once again with an anniversary re-release of Carrie & Lowell, his sweet-sounding quest that took him into the depths of what he recently called his “misery, depression, dread and grief.” In it, Stevens’ tender-sad fingerpicking – belying the calloused morbidity of lyrics like “we’re all gonna die” on the spectral ‘Fourth of July’ – sit, newly packaged, alongside pared down demos of ‘Mystery of Love’ (with its semi-whispered “oh woe-oh-woah is me” and delicately-plucked strings – which found its way onto the soundtrack for 2017’s Call Me By Your Name), ‘Should Have Known Better’ (now almost translucent in its woodwind-chirruping simplicity) and ‘The Only Thing’ (“everything I feel returns to you somehow,” he trembles as precariously as a tiny bird). In addition, we also get soaring outtakes of ‘Wallowa Lake Monster’ and ‘Fourth of July’ – both spiritually grandiose in scale; the latter, a near-fourteen-minute winged-flight of ecstatic pain that levitates through the rafters of a lost, sacred space.
“What’s the point of singing songs if they’ll never even hear you?” Stevens trills, lullaby-like, on ‘Eugene’ – a Carson McCullers-esque short story of a song that recalls an assortment of tangled memory flashes: his lemon yogurt, the pull of a shirt, his mother’s dropped ashtray, a swimming coach who calls him “Subaru”. Over the years, his erudite lyric writing – imbibing the wooded transcendentalism of Walt Whitman by way of the Christ-haunted gothicism of Flannery O’Connor – has increasingly invited scholarly discourse on lyric sites and Reddit threads where fans annotate his labyrinthine verses with the same fervour as T.S. Eliot scholars. In one, which peruses the pulsating Carrie & Lowell paean ‘Drawn to the Blood’, attentive buffs swap interpretations of his “fire to the sun” reference – a prayer to god, says one; the gaseous pull of gravity, says another. Reading their takes, I wonder what Stevens, who holds a master’s in creative writing, makes of all this conjecture and debate, particularly when it comes to a record which begins with such uncertainty. “But I don’t know where to begin,” he sings softly on ‘Death with Dignity’, “but I don’t know where to begin again”.
Similarly to the book I wrote in the first year of my widowhood, Stevens doesn’t seek to neatly answer any of the exacting questions that seem to drive so many of his devotees on these message boards. We may tell ourselves stories in order to live, but these stories aren’t always ones we can trust – an elliptical truism which Stevens knows all too well. Grievers aren’t always the most reliable narrators, I opined at the beginning of my memoir – a memoir that, like Stevens’ autobiographical album Carrie & Lowell, is haunted by the shadows and shapes in the lake of our memories, an apt metaphor for the leviathan of loss.
“I’ve always had a strange relationship to the mythology of Carrie, because I have such few lived memories of my experience with her,” he said at the time of Carrie & Lowell’s release. On the one hand, we have Carrie the alcoholic and schizophrenic – so-called “reckless” and “unfit” by those around her. Yet on the other, we have Carrie “the wandering star” – a woman who, for a son excavating what he can “in the shadow of these unsatisfying facts”, is “unequivocal and pure”. Returning to his grief a decade later, this two-disc edition reappraises the tumult of this album’s creation with a new essay which explores the malleability and fallibility of our recollective faculty. “And so, here I am,” he writes, “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.”
And yet, he continues: “You cannot sing through the pain, or expel its haunting seizure into a musical sonnet.” For in truth, this album exists in testament to the pain and hardship of such art-making. Even upon its release ten years ago, Stevens opened up about the difficulties he faced in trying to understand the unfathomable through melody and rhyme. “Music failed me,” he writes here. His songwriting, so often a salve, quickly became a bullwhip, culminating in what he then called his “year of real darkness.” Too often we talk about catharsis when it comes to this kind of unburdening in personal writing. Yet I wonder whether the right word might not actually be submission: a yielding to the fallibility, not only of memory, but creativity too, and the possibility that the catharsis might never come.
I don’t believe that there is any musical sonnet or fragment of prose that might give a griever “closure” on what has been lost. But for me – and I suspect Stevens, too – there is something to be said for the act of creating irrespective of what might be achieved. Reading Stevens’ essay, I was reminded of the poetry of Jack Gilbert, who, in a 2005 elegy to his broken marriage, Failing and Flying, began with the line: “everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.” A nod to yet another fable, and one that, irrespective of the categorisations we place on grief, says much about the value of trying – come what may. Something which, when you boil it down, is all about letting go in some way: of the past, yes, but the future also.
Stevens finally managed this by handing over the production reins to his friend Thomas Barlett who was grieving for a sibling at the same time. And in so doing, something timeless was made. Just his voice, a few instruments (banjo, acoustic guitar, piano), and the distant wail from the lake. In grief we yearn for movement, a flicker of revelation, and in this re-release, what was so contained between the strings now finds divine weightlessness in its closing rhapsody ‘Fourth of July’ – lengthened and magnified, skyward and soaring.
Listening to the song’s organ calling us home, it is painful to concede that life has its own capitulations, too. In 2023, Stevens dedicated his new album Javelin to his late partner, Evans Richardson IV, who he described as “the light of my life, my beloved partner and best friend.” In the same post, he also revealed that he had lost the ability to walk after being diagnosed with the rare auto-immune condition Guillain-Barré syndrome. “What’s the significance of these experiences?” Stevens asked of his grief in 2015. And one wonders where this question sits with him now. Perhaps, like this record in perpetuity, in a state of unknowingness. “Somewhere in the desert, there’s a forest, and an acre before us,” he sings to us softly. “But I don’t know where to begin, but I don’t know where to begin again.”
