Sufjan Stevens' Carrie & Lowell
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Upon the release of Sufjan Stevens' seventh studio album, Carrie & Lowell, two divergent groups found themselves as strange bedfellows: the LGBTQIA+ community and American evangelical Christians. Both were united in praise for Stevens' beautifully melancholic music.
Critically acclaimed as one of the best albums of 2015, the elegiac and intimate record about the death of Sufjan's estranged mother reflects the musician's own paradoxical posture-Carrie & Lowell is both sacred and profane, Christian and queer, traditional and progressive, despairing and hopeful.
Theologian and cultural critic Joel Mayward considers Carrie & Lowell as a mystical metamodern memento mori, Sufjan's symphonic (as opposed to systematic) approach to the questions of mortality, sexuality, and God. Fusing critical observations with personal narrative, Mayward examines the unique audience reception of Carrie & Lowell and the questions it raises: in a world of division, how might Stevens' affecting music act as a bridge of love between seemingly irreconcilable communities? As Carrie & Lowell reminds us of the painful truth that "we're all gonna die," perhaps it also offers a glimpse of transcendence and hope on this side of death.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mayward (Theology and the Films of Christopher Nolan), a theology professor at George Fox University, presents an offbeat and provocative study of Sufjan Stevens's 2015 album Carrie & Lowell "from a queer Christian perspective." The album explores Stevens's grief following the death of his estranged biological mother Carrie, weaving in ample queer and religious allusions (see "John My Beloved," in which lyrics like "I'm holding my breath/ My tongue on your chest" mix with calls for Jesus to "be near me, come shield me"). Those seemingly antithetical references, Mayward writes, represent an intertwining of erotic and religious love as the artist grapples with God, death, and the "transcendence and the tragic limits" of human existence. Mayward interweaves close analysis of individual tracks with intimate reflections on how the album buoyed him through his own struggles with faith (maybe, he writes, "Christianity was less about intellectual assent to particular creedal statements" than "about falling in love with Jesus and receiving His love in return"). This astute and lyrical analysis paints Stevens's music in a profound new light.
