On the brink of an album launch, many artists will post glamorous selfies or adverts for shiny new merch. Not Oscar-nominated, indie-folk star Sufjan Stevens, though. Instead, days before the release of his exquisitely crafted 11th album, Javelin, he posted a snap of the specially adapted toilet seat he’s been using since a life-threatening bout of the auto-immune condition, Guillain-Barré syndrome, left him (hopefully temporarily) unable to walk. It was a typically Stevensian move. Confronting, quirky, witty: the sculptural custom loo photo dialled into his long-running lyrical exploration of mortal vulnerability, along with our extraordinary ability to adapt to pain, and find beauty in the strangest, loneliest, most despairing places.
“Should have Known Better” – the best song on his 2015 masterpiece, Carrie & Lowell – saw him whispering and picking gently at his guitar to burrow deep into the raw memory of being abandoned at a video store, aged “three maybe four”, by his alcoholic, bipolar mother. He then introduced warm electronics to lift the song’s final third, as he resolved to look to a future illuminated by the birth of his brother’s daughter.
Every song on Javelin repeats that trick. They begin as small, hushed singer-songwriter seeds before germinating suddenly, like desert plants after rain, into exultant bursts of indie chamber pop. A drum kit sounds like it’s falling down a fire escape onto a medieval recorder group at the close of “Goodbye Evergreen”; “Everything That Rises” fades out to some trippy, marimba-inflected electronica, while “Genuflecting Ghost” is haunted by an organ. Imagine a songwriting laboratory where the young Paul Simon is asked to write the first two-thirds of a track, while Bjork is drafted in to help him zhuzh up the final third. Chuck in some off-grid Christian imagery and a few divine female harmonies and you’ve got the sonic picture.
To the chagrin of some of his more obsessive fans, Stevens has long-been guarded about his romantic status. But, where Carrie & Lowell came in the wake of his mother’s death, his latest work feels like a breakup album. “You know I love you/ But everything heaven-sent must burn out in the end,” he sings on the opening track, “Goodbye Evergreen”.
“Don’t go, my lovely pantomime,” he pleads on “A Running Start”. On “So You Are Tired”, he soothes a lover “breathing disaster” and begs to “turn back 14 years of what I said and did”. The cello-anchored “Javelin” rejects possessive relationships and perhaps marriage: “It’s a terrible thought/ To have and to hold.”
Yet he manages to find solace in this strange new freedom. “No more fighting/ No more talking s***,” he exhales on “S*** Talk”, where “our romantic second chance is dead/ I buried it with the hatchet/ Quit your antics/ Put them at the foot of the bed/ And set it on fire.” Cleansing flames are also invoked on “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?” as the singer seems to call for a Viking burial ship as he orders: “Burn my body, point me to the undertow/ Push me off into the void at last/ Watch me drift and watch me struggle/ let me go…”
Stevens is a cryptic writer, though, and there’s a good chance he’s reflecting on a break-up that took place years ago. Or perhaps he’s singing about a loss of faith. Good luck making sense of his gnomic-impressionistic sequence of “mini essays” on love that come in the rather lovely booklet accompanying the album. (One sentence runs: “My sexual discourse began to die a slow death of observation and objectification, a nonsense category of substances seen and deemed believable, predicating a cosmic break from the universe: a psychic rebirth, from which invisible things transformed into figures of speech, wherein figures of speech were left dead in the wake of rivulets and rivers, drowning in a molten waterfall of dread, where they would meet their maker in linguistic whimsy.”)
But while the prose sinks, the songs take to the air. Each operates less like the smoothly thrown javelin of the title and more like dandelion clocks plucked by Stevens, who carefully rotates them to admire their complexity, before blowing them in a scattered burst – like tiny parachutes – into the sky.
He closes the album with a cover of Neil Young’s 1972 song “There’s a World”. As the lightly plucked guitar notes and harmonies (courtesy of Adrienne Maree Brown, Hannah Cohen, Pauling Delassus, Megan Lui and Nedelle Torrisi) float around him, he hymns “all God’s children in the wind”. It doesn’t pack quite the same melancholy, melodic punch as Carrie and Lowell. But it’s lovely to feel all the heavy stuff just breeze past you.
