Buried in the separately-released outtakes of Sufjan Stevens’s gut-wrenching album Carrie & Lowell (2015), the singer-songwriter jokes, “It’s a little-known fact that I can’t cope / I’m the champion of repression.” Even sonically, this quip has some truth to it—Stevens has become famous for his wispy, almost whispering voice and a quiet intensity ready to burst open.
While he has gone through many musical “eras” over the years, Stevens is at his most stirring in Carrie & Lowell, which was rereleased this May to celebrate the album’s tenth anniversary. Perhaps the album’s success is unintentional: in a recent interview, Stevens explained that he struggled to piece together the record, let alone perform it repeatedly for audiences. “There’s kind of a resignation to that album that doesn’t really exist in anything else I’ve done,” he told Vulture. “With everything else, there’s so much force of will and intentionality: I’m on a journey, and I’m seeking to fulfill some kind of musical destiny, and the album represents that journey. But Carrie & Lowell is a record of failure and the relinquishing of my will.”
Named for his mother and stepfather, Carrie & Lowell most directly documents Stevens’s grief following his mother’s death in 2012 and the long road toward recovery which followed. More than that, however, the album is “about” many other things: his childhood home of Oregon; faith; queerness and the body; depression, substance abuse, and self-harm. Not easy stuff to sing about. While performing, “I had to pretend I was someone else,” Stevens explains.
When I was onstage, I was playing a role. In order to get through the set and sing those songs over and over again, I had to disassociate from all of it. I think that’s a normal reaction to grief, a way of surviving. Even now, I can’t listen to the material.
The album’s commercial success has only complicated this dissociation. As his interviewer notes, Stevens’s song “Fourth of July,” which describes an imagined hospital conversation between him and his dying mother, has over 500 million streams on Spotify. “Did you get enough love / my little dove / why do you cry?” Carrie asks him. By the end of the song, we have our answer—and a somber memento mori: “We’re all gonna die.” Whatever games of hiding and disclosure Stevens plays to preserve himself, some things can’t be repressed: the expanded, re-released version of the song now spans fourteen minutes, ending only after repeating the outro mantra dozens of times. We’re all gonna die.
Stevens’s dance of dissociation, disclosure, and witness will be especially familiar to LGBTQ+ people—so much so that the barely hidden queer themes across Stevens’s work have become a meme, most famously through a now defunct Facebook page asking, “Is This Sufjan Stevens Song Gay or Just About God?” Until recently, Stevens preferred to leave the question open, and demurred from discussing his personal life—perhaps neither songwriting nor the parasocial relationships that define contemporary music are the best mediums for every form of personal disclosure.
Like many of Stevens’s other albums, however, Carrie & Lowell is jam-packed with queer subtext wrapped in religious imagery. The most obvious example, “John My Beloved,” imagines a dinner conversation between Jesus and his “Beloved Disciple” John. Their dialogue is set against a pulsing piano thump, beginning not in the Upper Room, but with “stumbling words at the bar.” The Beloved Disciple plaintively confesses his love for Jesus: “I’m holding my breath / My tongue on your chest / What can be said of my heart?” John’s tone and gesture blur the lines between close friendship and an altogether different kind of love.
What, the song makes us wonder, was John feeling when he laid himself upon Jesus’ bosom at the Last Supper (John 13:23)? What does it mean to have such an intimate, physical encounter with the Savior, to lay your tongue on his chest? What beautiful, understated intensity—and what pain—must have accompanied that moment. No close embrace can fully bridge the chasm between teacher and disciple, let alone that between God and man. Jesus will go off to die, and John will never get the answer to his questions. “So can we pretend / Sweetly before the mystery ends?” John pleads. “I am a man with a heart that offends with its lonely and greedy demands / There’s only a shadow of me, in a matter of speaking, I’m dead.”
Although queer people have drawn on the Beloved Disciple motif well before Stevens, the point is not to make a historical or factual claim about the sexuality of either participant in the exchange. Instead the Beloved Disciple becomes an occasion to explore what it means to love another wholly, soul and body.
In the Vulture interview, Stevens opened up about the queer religiosity of his music. As he put it lightly:
The religious is very sexual. It’s erotic. Look at Catholic art through the ages, Baroque art. It’s all very fleshy and sensual and full of naked bodies. I’ve always embraced that. I’ve always felt that my relationship to God is a very intimate and sensual one. Sacraments are. It’s engaging with God in a physical way. You’re literally eating the flesh and drinking the blood of God during the Eucharist.
Behind his claim lies a deep resonance between queer culture and the Catholic imagination extending far beyond just erotic motifs: an insistence on the body and on a fleshly, sacramental worldview full of hidden possibility. To be Christian is to embrace our bodies not just as broken vessels carrying our immortal souls, but as integral to the economy of salvation—I believe in the resurrection of the body. Even, and perhaps especially, the queer body.
Sometimes, this resonance takes a dark turn. “The Only Thing,” for instance, is a song about loss, suicidality, and maybe even the pain of queerness in a world—and a faith tradition—that sometimes asks us to cut off our own flesh for the sake of the Kingdom, as if the body itself did not belong there, too. Invoking Jesus’s warnings in Matthew 18:6–9, Stevens asks: “Should I tear my eyes out now, before I see too much? / Should I tear my arms out now, I wanna feel your touch / Should I tear my eyes out now? / Everything I see returns to you somehow / Should I tear my heart out now?” These instructions sound particularly cruel to LGBTQ+ people in non-affirming settings: Is there any way to excise sin from the queer body without killing ourselves? What is left after we “tear out” everything broken?
Given Stevens’s loyal fanbase of LGBTQ+ Christians and Carrie & Lowell’s commercial success, it’s no surprise that the album’s queer religiosity—and that of his whole discography—has been discussed and analyzed ad nauseam.
Nevertheless, there are still new insights to be found in the re-release. In an essay accompanying the new vinyl, Stevens explains his discomfort with the whole project. Carrie & Lowell, he says, was “painful, humiliating, and an utter miscarriage of bad intentions. My grief manifested as self-loathing and misery…. It was foolhardy to believe anything good could come of superimposing my mother’s memory onto my music in the first place. But I did it just the same.”
In an interview for NPR, Stevens doubled down on this evaluation: “I’m kind of embarrassed by this album,” he said. When asked to explain, Stevens told the interviewer, “I sort of feel like I don’t have any authority over my mother and her life or experience or her death. All I have is speculation and my imagination and my own misery, and in trying to make sense of it all, I kind of felt like it didn’t really resolve anything.” Carrie and Lowell, then, felt like a backfired experiment in disclosure—what Stevens sees as an undisciplined attempt to concretize a mess of emotions into a few short pieces of music. He attempted to control something he probably shouldn’t have and subsequently lost agency over his own story. As he might tell it, to disclose everything was to end up hiding himself and the very people about whom Carrie and Lowell was written.
Perhaps the relentless effort to scour Stevens’s work for LGBTQ+ themes—or really, the move to “queer” art, culture, and scripture altogether—evinces a similar sort of failure. Is there a danger to asking if “this Sufjan Stevens song is gay or just about God” at all? Who are we to take an artist’s jumbled morass of grief and prune it into useful motifs for our own process of self-becoming? It feels as if we don’t deserve this intimacy—to be in the hospital room with Stevens and his mother, or more accurately, inside his wounded dreaming. Can you preserve any intimacy or agency at 500 million streams?
Queer religiosity has often, like Stevens himself, repackaged secrets to tell them from a new perspective. Jesus and the Beloved Disciple, Ruth and Naomi, David and Jonathan, St. Sebastian, and the list goes on. It would be a mistake to think this narrative-building aims at uncovering historical facts; rather, it uses religious stories and imagery to do something exciting, useful, and transformative. We write queer people into Christian history, sometimes without their permission, so as to make a statement—that the Christian story has always been our story, too. Just as Carrie & Lowell is a costume Stevens puts on to make sense of the senseless, the move to find (even obvious) queerness in Christian history and theology or in Stevens’s discography is a creative act of playfulness that inherently involves some degree of exploitation, either of ourselves or others.
Surely we deserve some grace in the process. There is hardly more urgent and more human work than storytelling, even when we do it with some degree of reticence, resignation, or shame. The story is maybe just as important as the storyteller—and can take on a fruitful life of its own, authorial intent aside.
At the end of his NPR interview, Stevens explained that there is freedom in the act of finally letting go, in letting stories be just that. “I knew deep down inside that I was dealing with something that was unresolvable, and that the final tapestry of the album was never really going to be a stand-in for my relationship with my mom,” Stevens explained. “And that’s OK. You kind of have to just live with the chaos of it. I don’t want to disparage; I don’t want to sound like I don’t like this album. I think I want to disassociate from it. It ultimately has nothing to do with me anymore. The music is yours.”
