For Fans of Sufjan Stevens

Grief memoirs and grief films often reach for catharsis, the clean resolution that lets audiences leave the theater lighter. Carrie and Lowell refuses. It is an album about a mother who struggled with mental illness and addiction, who was absent for much of Stevens's childhood, and who died of cancer in 2012. The songs do not resolve their contradictions. They hold them: love and resentment, closeness and distance, faith and its collapse. The result is one of the most honest records of the 2010s, and a companion piece for anyone who has lost someone before they could finish knowing them.

Concept albums about American states sound like the kind of project that collapses under its own weight. Illinois does not. Stevens spent years in research: local history, mythology, famous residents, serial killers, floods, prairie light. The result is an album that uses Illinois as a lens for the American experience rather than a catalogue of trivia. Songs about John Wayne Gacy and Decatur sit beside celebrations of Chicago and the Superman mythology that came out of the state. It is a record that cares about place the way great American literature cares about place.

Much of Stevens's work is explicitly Christian in its imagery and framework. This can be easy to dismiss in a cultural moment that treats religious faith as either sincerity or kitsch. But the devotional tradition in art, from Bach to Flannery O'Connor to Bill Viola, operates on a frequency that secular work rarely reaches: it is concerned with mortality, transcendence, and the question of whether anything holds. Seven Swans is the most purely devotional of Stevens's records. Its faith is not triumphant. It is searching, quiet, and more honest about doubt than most explicitly agnostic art manages to be.

Javelin arrived in 2023 alongside the news that Stevens's partner, Evans Richardson, had died of a degenerative muscle disease. Like Carrie and Lowell before it, the album became something different once its context was known: not a grief record made in hindsight, but one made during the thing itself. There is a tradition in music of late style, a term borrowed from Edward Said, that describes work made with a full awareness of finitude. Javelin belongs to that tradition. It is not a comfortable listen. It is a necessary one.