The Water Wants Hurricanes: Weeping with Sufjan Stevens

Sufjan Stevens releases his thirteenth studio album today. It’s his tenth if you don’t count a trio of records released with collaborative partners (Planetarium with Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly and James McAlister, Aporia with Lowell Brams and A Beginner's Mind with Angelo De Augustine) and, with the recent news about his health, it’s impossible not to hear the 10 new songs refocused by the lens of illness and recovery. 

The album was not created under that shadow. Javelin was recorded before Stevens was struck down - literally. One day in August he awoke, unable to walk. “My hands, arms and legs were numb and tingling and I had no strength, no feeling, no mobility,” he wrote on his Tumblr. He added, “My brother drove me to the ER and after a series of tests—MRIs, EMGs, cat scans, X-rays, spinal taps (!), echo-cardiograms, etc.—the neurologists diagnosed me with an auto immune disorder called Guillain-Barre Syndrome. Luckily there's treatment for this — they administer immuno-hemoglobin infusions for five days and pray that the disease doesn't spread to the lungs, heart and brain. Very scary, but it worked. I spent about two weeks in Med/Surg, stuck in a bed, while my doctors did all the things to keep me alive and stabilize my condition. I owe them my life.”

What the lengthy recovery from Guillain-Barre Syndrome means is that Stevens won’t be able to play Javelin live - at least not for a while. And, like so much of his repertoire, the songs on the record are asking to be given pure form on a stage. Richly melodic, overflowing with heart and heartache (the backing vocals on “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?” will sweep you into the album’s surging, emotional core), part return to the alt.folk he first emerged with but also overlaid with bleeps and other electronica, washes of enveloping sound (“Goodbye Evergreen”) and anguished brass (on the epic 8 and a half minute-long “Shit Talk”), Javelin displays an artist in sublime control of his gifts, with new things to say about what it means to love or not be loved (“So You Are Tired” is a stark distillation of the final days of a long relationship). The 10-track album closes with a version of Neil Young’s “There’s A World”, originally released half-a-century ago on the album Harvest, the much unloved London Symphony Orchestra-heavy original is here recast and reclaimed as an elegant hymn for community: “There's a world you're living in/No one else has your part/All God's children in the wind/Take it in and blow real hard.”

Stevens has always been a prolific artist - his recorded output includes three soundtracks, two mixtapes and three compilation albums - and today you can also watch Javelin on YouTube, complete with lyric videos for each of its songs. In a previous entry here I lamented the absence of even the most minimal credits on albums released on streaming platforms but, underneath the YouTube link, it’s pleasing to see who worked with Stevens on Javelin, among them Heba Kadry, an Egyptian mastering engineer who brings music into the final stretch from her base in New York.

Stevens recorded, engineered, arranged, produced and mixed and did all the original artwork, photography, typography, layout and design for Javelin so it’s hard to imagine him constrained by a rare disorder which causes your body's immune system to turn on you and attack your nerves. His hospital blog on Tumblr - the only platform he uses (his label Asthmatic Kitty reposts some content on Instagram) - laid bare the many procedures and “hospital swag” and artifacts (high-end wheelchairs and toilet commodes) of acute rehabilitation. And, in what can only be seen as cosmic timing, he goes home today, for what could be more than a year of recovery, the very day that Javelin pierces the world.

Will enough time with Javelin turn it into my most beloved Stevens album yet? Anyone who has loved this artist for the more than two decades he’s been making music knows it is hard to choose a favourite but, since its release in 2015, I would select Carrie & Lowell. The album is Stevens’ most intensely autobiographical, a meditation on complex grief that emerged after his mother, Carrie, died of stomach cancer in 2012. Carrie suffered from depression, schizophrenia and alcoholism, and Stevens and his siblings grew up in Michigan with their dad and stepmother. 

The album’s title is a reference to the time the children spent with their mom and their stepdad, Lowell Brams, who was married to Carrie for five years. “She left when I was 1, so I have no memory of her and my father being married,” Stevens said in an interview. “She just wandered off. She felt that she wasn't equipped to raise us, so she gave us to our father. It wasn't until I was 5 that Carrie married Lowell. He worked in a bookstore in Eugene, Oregon, and we spent three summers out there—that's when we actually saw our mother the most.” Alongside being evoked so beautifully in Carrie & Lowell - both the album and its title song (listen to this i-Phone demo to feel the intimacy of Stevens’ songwriting) - Brams currently runs Stevens' label, Asthmatic Kitty, and recorded the New Age album Aporia with his step-son. If you haven’t heard this masterpiece - I don’t use the word lightly - of grief, abandonment, unexpected love and joy (“My brother had a daughter/ The beauty that she brings, illumination" on the exquisite "Should Have Known Better") and suffering then I would suggest doing it by watching the official live film 

If Carrie & Lowell is my favourite record, the song of Stevens’ that has the most meaning for me is “Sister” off Seven Swans. Released nearly 20 years ago, it’s an album that casts the songwriter’s eye to the divine, the religious even, but in this performance in 2011, Stevens confirms he wrote the song for his sister. In 2015, after my brother-in-law Anthony disappeared at sea, I put Seven Swans into my car CD player and when “Sister” came on, I knew it had also been written for a brother who sailed an 11 metre yacht beneath a cyclone with winds of over 200 kilometres per hour, not because he intended to but because people who could never hope to reach the humanity that Stevens displays in all his work put him there. I remember dropping my daughter off at school in the heart of Johannesburg and then turning the car around and heading home, “Sister” playing as I crested the Westcliff hill before sweeping down Jan Smuts Avenue, and weeping - always weeping - as I listened to these words.

“What the water wants is hurricanes,

And sailboats to ride on its back.

What the water wants is sun kiss,

And land to run into and back.”

I leave you with this, dear reader. 

There are many links in this Substack piece because Stevens is prolific and generous about sharing his work, dispatching it like gifts through the virtual wires. I hesitate, therefore, to add even more. But if you have time for reading as well as listening this weekend, here is a series of 10 mini essays that Stevens wrote as part of a 48-page booklet of original art and essays which comes with the vinyl of Javelin. You won’t be sorry you spent time with them.