On November 9, 2015, Sufjan Stevens performed his latest solo album, Carrie & Lowell, at North Charleston Performing Arts Center in South Carolina. This performance was later released on YouTube and Vimeo on April 28, 2017. The show incorporated an expansive lighting display and cathedral-like LED columns featuring home videos. Much of this vintage footage highlights family birthdays, graduations, and weddings, lending the performances the emotional arc of a memorial. I found the stage design to be extremely effective at amplifying the somber mood of Sufjan’s most personal album release to date. Even though I was not able to attend this show in person, it was easy for me to turn the lights off and become fully immersed in the recorded presentation.
Before I begin, I want to give some context to the album as a whole. First, the title refers to the name of Stevens’ late mother and her ex-husband Lowell. Lowell serves as Stevens’ father figure despite after his divorce from Carrie and is currently involved with Stevens’s record label Asthmatic Kitty. As a child, Sufjan lived with his mother and stepfather for three summers in Oregon. Other than that, he barely saw his mother, who struggled…show more content… The song begins with Stevens alone on the stage with a mandolin, fingerpicking a series of three-note arpeggios at a moderate tempo that repeat throughout most of the song. It serves as the only instrumentation we really hear other than a brief introduction of piano and a female vocalist that harmonize at different octaves the individual notes of the main melody. This is intriguing for Sufjan, known for having entire orchestras in some of his projects. Because of how little instrumentation there is, it’s immediately clear that there is an emphasis on the vocals and lyrics in this song. The apparent lightness of the sound contrasts with the heavy subject-manner, creating a
