Last September, just two days after the release of his eighth studio album, The Ascension, Sufjan Stevens’ biological father died. It might seem curiously superfluous to add the ‘biological’ part, but admirers of the Michigan native’s remarkable body of work will be familiar with his stepfather, Lowell Brams — after all, Stevens’ masterful 2015 album, Carrie & Lowell, name-checks him, while the pair (Brams and Stevens) released their own album, Aporia, early last year. But this was the death of his actual father, Rasjid, and the loss hit him hard.
he Detroit native is mindbogglingly prolific and when he set about making music to capture the various stages of grief, he let his talents run wild. The result is Convocations — a quintuple album comprising two-and-a-half hours of music.
Some of the individual albums in the project have already been released on streaming platforms and the whole thing will be unveiled next weekend. It’s an audacious and immersive collection of 49 instrumental tracks that Stevens says helped him navigate the loss of his dad. And in their own right, they provide an aural balm for the fraught, anxious times we’ve all lived through over the last year and a bit.
For those of us who can’t get enough of Sufjan Stevens, Convocations is another captivating chapter in the artistic life of one of America’s greatest contemporary musicians.
Ever since the release of his third album, Michigan, in 2003, Stevens has stood apart from his contemporaries. He is a songwriter whose widescreen vision has long frustrated anyone wanting to apply a simple label. Even ‘singer-songwriter’ seems risibly inadequate when it comes to getting a handle on his creative output. And yet, at his very best, Stevens is a master troubadour — a songsmith from the top shelf.
On Michigan, Sufjan stunned critics with the scope of songs. These were no ordinary mediations on love and loss and the whole damn thing. Instead, Stevens delved deep into the life, times, history, people and places of his home state. If the album boasts a giddy array of styles, sounds and influences, the subject matter is just as dizzying. Several of the songs, not least Flint (For the Unemployed and Underpaid) and Oh Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head, track the troubled state’s journey from manufacturing powerhouse to beaten docket.
He repeated the trick two years later (and after the release of the meditative, home-spun religion-fixated Seven Swans.) Illinois saw him turn his attention to Michigan’s neighbouring state and was even more dazzling. At the time, he talked about releasing an album for every state, which he dubbed the Fifty States Project, but later dismissed it as a joke designed for promotional purposes.
For aficionados of American song, Illinois — or Come On Feel the Illinoise, as it’s stylised on the cover — was the moment Stevens truly announced himself to the world.
And there is one track in particular, John Wayne Gacy, Jr that demonstrates what an unusual songsmith he is. A reminder: Gacy was one of the most notorious serial killers of the 1970s, responsible for at least 33 homicides. He preyed upon young men. The fact that he frequently worked as a children’s entertainer and was fond of donning a clown’s costume makes his crimes even more sinister. And yet, Stevens’ tender song tries to imagine what life was like for Gacy — a glimpse beneath the mask.
A year later in 2006, Stevens released The Avalanche, the appropriately named album of out-takes and extras from the Illinois sessions.
No deep-dive into Stevens’ work would be authentic without the acknowledgement that his quality-control instincts frequently let him down. Like Ryan Adams — before his high-profile ‘cancellation’ — Stevens seems to release everything he records in studio. Even for someone of his abilities, there’s patchiness.
Take his one-man army attempt to make the Christmas song relevant again. He has released in the region of 100 Yuletide songs and while many aren’t worth your time, the ones that hit the mark — such as Christmas in the Room and That Was the Worst Christmas Ever! — deserve to be heard by a wide audience.
But it’s Stevens’ unwillingness to take the easy road that makes him such a compelling figure. “I’m getting tired of my voice,” he said after Illinois. “I’m getting tired of the banjo. I’m getting tired of the trumpet.”
The gimmicky, avant-garde electronica album, The BQE, began life as a live show before morphing into an intriguing project inspired by one of New York’s most gridlocked thoroughfares, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
A slightly conventional album, The Age of Adz, from 2010 saw the singer look inward for some of the most emotionally intimate songs of his career. But instead of sparse arrangements, Stevens threw the proverbial kitchen sink at his tunes, best captured by the lengthy title track and I Walked. The album attracted mixed reviews at the time, but it worked beautifully in a live setting.
Stevens’ tour in support of the album called to Dublin’s Olympia in 2011 and the gig was rapturously received. Along with an 11-piece band, he managed to demonstrate his ease at marshalling such an enormous sound and, paradoxically, conveyed a sense of intimacy that might elude a single musician armed with acoustic guitar.
Fast-forward to 2015 and Stevens was that soul with the acoustic guitar. Carrie & Lowell stands as one of the greatest albums of the 2010s, a stunningly raw and emotive document of grief and the passing of time. It was inspired by the 2012 death of his mother, Carrie. The two had a difficult relationship and he spent most of his formative years with his stepmother. But on this hushed collection of songs, he exorcised several ghosts and sung tenderly about an unshakeable love.
Fourth of July is an extraordinary track which sees Stevens recounting a final conversation with his mother as she lay dying of stomach cancer in a hospital bed. The song’s narrator shifts constantly: one moment it’s Stevens himself, the next Carrie.
There’s an unbearably poignant version of the song on the concert album, Carrie & Lowell Live, which was recorded in North Carolina. He just about manages to hold it together over a mournful piano accompaniment before the coda builds to a propulsive and frenetic climax.
Carrie & Lowell was sensitively produced by Doveman, aka Thomas Bartlett (whom Irish trad fans will know as one-fifth of the Gloaming). Speaking to this writer last year, Bartlett was modest about his role: “It was more an editing job. Sufjan is always so prolific and for that album he had recorded maybe 40 songs. My job was to go away with them and see what would work for the album, so I went to… Nova Scotia and I played them over and over again and sort of whittled it down.”
Bartlett’s contribution should not be underestimated — one of the reasons why Carrie & Lowell is so lauded is because it’s a lean, perfectly sequenced album. The same can’t be said of The Ascension, last year’s spiritual record, or indeed, Aporia, the ambient album he made with Lowell Brams that was apparently inspired by Enya and Boards of Canada.
Some will say Convocations could have done with a good edit too, but on this occasion, its marathon run-time succeeds. Each of the volumes, Meditations, Lamentations, Revelations, Celebrations and Incantations, stands alone and demands to be heard in full. In some respects, they work as functional art, to borrow Brian Eno’s well-worn phrase, and provide an ethereal soundscape for these working-from-home times.
But as is usually the case with Stevens, for those who make the effort, this is music that connects in a deep and profound way. It’s been a fascinating journey so far and, happily, it’s hard to work out where he’s going to next.
Sufjan Stevens’ quintuple album ‘Convocations’ is released in full on May 6.
