Sufjan Stevens talks about Carrie & Lowell

What a great interview with Sufjan Stevens on his "Carrie & Lowell" album. It's kind of difficult to understand how a work that most of us consider an absolute masterpiece could be so painful for his creator.

The interview is taking place due to the publication of the new 10th anniversary edition of the album (and shit, it's also kind of difficult to understand how 10 years happened that fast).

The new edition looks amazing

The whole interview is great but I love specially this question and answer because "Fourth of July" is also my favorite song of the album. A song that can easily break your heart:

The song on the album that is my favorite, and certainly wrecks me the most, is "Fourth of July." And it's not the line "We're all gonna die" — I mean, that's just a universal truth that we all have to accept. It's all the little nicknames that you share: "my little hawk," "my little Versailles," "my dragonfly." I took it as a conversation between you and Carrie, where she seems to be wishing you nothing but the best. Was this an entirely imagined conversation?

Yeah, of course. That whole song, and the interactions and the affections, are all made up, because I didn't have that kind of relationship with my mother. She was very loving and caring and affectionate, but we didn't have pet names, and we weren't intimate. Our relationship was distant because she mostly wasn't there. I was raised by my dad, my stepmom — and we called our parents by their first names. So there was a kind of staid, at-arm's-length, impersonal dynamic to our relationship. And I think that song is kind of an imagined parallel universe, in which we were more intimate and had pet names and could share things intimately with each other. But that wasn't possible.

The 10th anniversary edition of the album is available in Sufjan's bandcamp.