Recommended Album: Sufjan Stevens – ‘Javelin’

Context can change everything, especially in the song writ of one Sujfan Stevens. The elegiac songwriter has been known to blur themes of spirituality, love, and death interchangeably throughout his art, and it usually isn’t until you read some post-release interview with him where you realize he’s singing about his closeness to a higher power and not that of being intimate with a lover, or that the songs you think are about breaking up are actually about people dying. Then again, maybe it’s exactly as you thought it was, and the mystery remains. Following the release of Javelin, we learned two critical details about the life of Stevens throughout the course of his 10th studio album’s recording in the heartbreaking news that Stevens’ partner, Evan Richardson IV, whom he later dedicated the album to in an Instagram post, had passed away this past April, and that Stevens himself had recently been diagnosed with the debilitating autoimmune disorder Guillain-Barre Syndrome that left him unable to walk as he sought treatment in an extensive hospital stay. Life’s been heavy on his end, but in listening to Javelin, we’re not hit with the same harrowing sadness that devastated Carrie & Lowell. Stevens’ latest batch of songs are otherwise an adorned creative arch bridging his solo folk kindling with the more whimsical avant-pop experiments, and in it, his music touches magic even when words like “cancer” become more sharper in view throughout the tragic love of “Goodbye Evergreen” or when considering if his most perfect torch song to date, “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?”, may not just be about whether or not he’ll ever meet someone, but rather if he’ll ever find the kind of love he already did have and lost much too soon. We’ve already heard Sufjan at his lowest, and Javelin — like the sport’s fete of Olympian form and strength as it is named — is his enduring knowledge that sadness often exists only because of the light that came to us first.

Highlights: “Goodbye Evergreen”, “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?”, “Shit Talk”

Sufjan Stevens’ Javelin is available now on Asthmatic Kitty.

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