A song collection of emotional breadth from the most loving work at home.
He will only want to answer to the Lord for the long and difficult paths that the super songwriter and singer Sufjan Stevens takes from one peak to the next in his work. The folk songs on the ILLINOISE and MICHIGAN records in the early 2000s were orchestrated celebrations of American history in the slipstream of their own spirituality, the electronic mobilization followed with THE AGE OF ADZ (2010), and on CARRIE & LOWELL in 2015, Stevens dealt with the death of his mother , with the albums of the last few years he mostly left minimal instrumental traces.
The song collection JAVELIN now takes memories of these developments with it as a matter of course and celebrates them (literally and at the same time) with overdriven, intense sound spaces (as in the fantastic three and a half minute opening “Goodbye Evergreen”), which can at any time lead to a flute-beautiful ambient beam. The artist conjured this up largely in the most loving and detailed homework, accompanied by an almost always-present choir and once by Bryce Dessner (The National).
In the quiet moments, Stevens invites us into the emotional expanses that he can open up on the pages of this self-portrait. For the finale, he picked up Neil Young’s orchestral work “There’s A World (HARVEST, 1972) and played the dedication to all of God’s children in his world.