A Chronological Tracklisting of Sufjan Stevens' Carrie & Lowell

Note: This is the second of a three part series further exploring Sufjan Stevens' 2015 album Carrie & Lowell. Part 1 can be found here: The Sufjan Stevens Narrative Spectrum: A Visual Guide. Part 3 can be found here: The Three Musical Victories on Sufjan's Carrie & Lowell. For links to other articles on Sufjan's music and Carrie & Lowell in particular please see the end of this article.



As I have tearfully listened to Sufjan Steven's Carrie & Lowell in several concentrated waves over the course of 2015 (no seriously) the album has failed to make sense to me as a single cohesive narrative. 


Every song offers brief moments from Sufjan's life: here we find him a child visiting his mother in Oregon, now we find him an adult standing next to her at her deathbed, then we find him living into his grief through destructive thoughts and behavior, and finally there he is learning to let go of the past and the mother who haunts him. The songs are fading polaroid snapshots pinned to a wall where the general emotions make sense when taken together but the overall story does not because the chronology of his story is all jumbled up, sometimes even within a single song. Carrie & Lowell is obviously a singular work meant to be listened to as a whole and in that sense the album makes sense. And yet, as I could not piece together his journey by listening to the album from start to finish. 

Aesthetically, I have no criticisms of Sufjan's tracklisting. It is impeccable. Besides, when it comes to literature I am used to and have even come to relish non-linear narratives. Even so, one day I began to wonder what would happen if I attempted to put the songs in chronological order. Here now is my best guess as to how Carrie & Lowell should be arranged, with the songs put in the order in which they happened in Sufjan's life. Consider this alternative tracklist and recommended playlist.

A full admission from the start: I could be entirely wrong about my tracklisting and am open to hear other suggestions. What makes Sufjan's music so generally tough to sort through is he continually jumps back and forth between different narrators and different metaphors, something I pointed out in last week's article on his "narrative spectrum". On top of that, a number of songs on Carrie & Lowell (e.g., "Eugene" and "Should Have Known Better") contain flashbacks and flash forwards. In other words, this tracklist is a hypothesis and Sufjan's work as a whole remains open to interpretation.

We are going to take this in waves. 
The first list is the general re-ordered tracklist of Carrie & Lowell.
The second list is the re-ordered tracklist broken up into significant sections of Sufjan's life, with descriptions of those sections.
The third list is an expanded tracklist including songs from other Sufjan albums that have references to his parents or family.

List 1: Simple Chronological Tracklist
I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER Part 1 ("When I was 3, 3 maybe 4")
EUGENE Part 1 ("I just wanted to be near you")
CARRIE & LOWELL
BLUE BUCKET OF GOLD (A told from the perspective of Sufjan's mother)
JOHN MY BELOVED
I'M DRAWN TO THE BLOOD
DEATH WITH DIGNITY
EUGENE Part 2 ("At the bed near your death")
FOURTH OF JULY
ALL OF ME WANTS ALL OF YOU
EUEGENE Part 3 ("Now I'm drunk and afraid")
NO SHADE IN THE SHADOW OF THE CROSS
THE ONLY THING
I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER Part 2 ("Don't back down, nothing can be changed")
BLUE BUCKET OF GOLD (As told from the perspective of Sufjan himself)

List 2: Chronological Tracklisting Put Into Sections (with commentary)
As I see it there are four distinct time periods represented in Sufjan's life.

Period 1—Childhood: Young Sufjan, abandoned by his mother, goes back and forth visiting her Oregon during his summers. He seems to observe her from afar, never getting too close. A part of Sufjan will always be lost to the abyss of a mother who was not there for him. Even while alive the ghost of Carrie haunts Sufjan. A parallel narrative from the perspective of Carrie (his mother) is offered, with her singing a breakup song of sorts to her ex-husband (and Sufjan's stepfather) Lowell. She is left pleading with Lowell "Why won't you love me right as I was ready to love you?"

Songs:
I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER Part 1
EUGENE Part 1
CARRIE & LOWELL
BLUE BUCKET OF GOLD (Told from the perspective of Sufjan's mother)



Period 2—Adulthood and Relationships: The adult Sufjan, try though he might, struggles to make connections with other people, most especially his lovers. These two songs are specifically about Sufjan's troubled relationships, and yet Carrie presence (or lack thereof) hovers over them, the emotional deficit she gave her son working its way through his attempts at intimacy. He finds himself in unhealthy and perhaps abusive relationships. Sufjan himself is a kind of ghost to those he is close to; he is dead while yet alive. His prayer has always been to love and be loved, but love will forever be mingled with pain and thus the everpresent distance between himself and those he attempts to love.

Songs:
JOHN MY BELOVED
I'M DRAWN TO THE BLOOD

Period 3—Carrie's Death: Sufjan finds himself at his mother's deathbed, with her barely alive. He looks back with aching regret, powerless to change anything in the past. At this stage he is more reflective and has not yet entered into a period of grief or despair. In the end though, he is filled with the all-pervading reality of everyone's eventual death. His mother, now dead, comes to him and attempts to guide him through. In fact, the ghost of Sufjan's mother could be said to inhabit Sufjan from this point onward (as he mentioned in interviews around the album's release), with her controlling the destructive behavior he finds himself committing in Period 4. Sufjan has always longed to be near his mother, but this sudden "nearness" in the wake of her death leads to a mental, emotional, and spiritual sickness/breakdown which he had not experienced up to this point in his life before, a man in his mid-30's.

Songs:
DEATH WITH DIGNITY
EUGENE Part 2
FOURTH OF JULY

Period 4—Pilgrimage, Depression, Destruction, and hints at Redemption: Sufjan goes on a wandering pilgrimage after his mother's death, perhaps bringing a lover with him for all or part of it. He takes himself to the places in Oregon that remind him of her. He enters a deep existential darkness. Again, he struggles to be close to the ones he loves. He wants them in his life and yet he wants to be away from them. Sufjan enters into heavy drug use, most likely heroin, and fails to see a way to escape the "dragon". He entertains numerous suicidal thoughts, seeing no real reason to continue living. And yet, in the shadow of the cross there is only light. Whether or not it is an oppressive light or a light of freedom remains to be seen, but in his darkest moment Sufjan enters an upswing. Now, looking at his past with regretful disdain one final time, Sufjan learns to let go. Everything he sees and feels leads back to his mother but he has come to the point where he can no longer look back; he must boldly press on into the future, focusing only on what is ahead of him. Choosing to live, choosing to trust blindly in God's grace, accepting beauty when he sees it, Sufjan, fool though he is, finds illumination in time spent with family, particularly in the life of his niece. Finally, Sufjan reaches out to his lover/friend. He is now ready to emotionally engage again, to enter into a relationship, and if not with another person, then he will cry out to God, his ultimate hope. 

Songs:
ALL OF ME WANTS ALL OF YOU
NO SHADE IN THE SHADOW OF THE CROSS
THE ONLY THING
I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER Part 2
BLUE BUCKET OF GOLD (Told from the perspective of Sufjan)

List 3: Expanded Chronological Tracklisting, including songs from other albums
Here I try to make sense of the songs Sufjan included on his previous albums that already let us into the story of his youth and family life. These are songs we can now look at through the lens of Carrie & Lowell, songs we might have previously passed over thinking "Oh, this is just another sad Sufjan song." With Carrie & Lowell the map of Sufjan's life has been vastly expanded, bringing the meaning of past songs into sharper focus.

This list includes the same order as the other lists but with the other songs inserted where I saw them breaking into the Carrie & Lowell chronology, put in boldface for emphasis.

Songs: I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER Part 1 ("When I was 3, 3 maybe 4")
EUGENE Part 1 ("I just wanted to be near you")
CARRIE & LOWELL
ROMULUS Part 1 from Michigan: Here Sufjan delves further into the sadness, loneliness, and shame he felt in relation to his mother. In the first three verses we get three snapshots of when Sufjan got to spend time with his mother in his youth, all of them a kind of pathetic failure at parenting on Carrie's part.
SEVEN SWANS from Seven Swans: An apocalyptic prophetic vision melded with suburban American life, this song mentions Sufjan's mother and father, though it is not very apparent how they fit into the loosely told story of the Lord's return. Of special note is its reference to "the dragon", a character or symbol mentioned twice in Carrie & Lowell in the songs "Drawn to the Blood" and "No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross."
BLUE BUCKET OF GOLD (Told from the perspective of Sufjan's mother)
SIAMESE TWINS, BELLY BUTTON, GODZUKI, AND SATAN'S SAXOPHONE from A Sun Came: These are all silly, absurdist "skits" taken from A Sun Came. The pitch of the vocals has been modulated to sound higher in order to make the narrator, presumedly Sufjan, sound younger, though it is not clear if the "skits" were recorded when Sufjan was a child/teenager or recorded during his college years. Either way, the "skits" feel like they are done in the voice of a child, as if Sufjan is trying to portray a younger version of himself. Most notable is "Satan's Saxonphone's" which tells the story of "my mother" who would vomit all over everything in the house only to have the dog come in and slip on it. The "story" ends there, descending into a two minute anarchic pseudo-jazz free-jam. Is this just pure Suf-silliness or an underhanded jab at his mother?
THE SEER'S TOWER from Illinoise: One of the strangest Sufjan lyrics (which is saying a lot), which finds a sister-song in "Sevens Swans" in it's blending of the apocalyptic with the mundane, Sufjan somehow manages to portray the Seer's tower as a kind of divine throne room. Towards the end of the song though he suddenly decides to mention his parents: "Oh my mother, she betrayed us, but my father loved and bathed us." In the context of Illinoise as an album those lines are a bit of a non sequitur, but when related to what we know about his upbringing now, they seem much more significant.
SISTER from Seven Swans: This song is tangentially about Sufjan's sister who lives in Detroit.
ROMULUS Part 2 from Michigan: A grown up Sufjan sees the veil of his mother pulled back, revealing a repulsive person, someone he would never want to be close with.
JOHN MY BELOVED
I'M DRAWN TO THE BLOOD
DJOHARIAH from All Delighted People: A song about Sufjan's sister, she too faces much hardship in her love relationships. This song is notable for its focus on her as a kind of representation of universal motherhood "For the mother is, the mother is glorious victorious, the mother is the heart of the world." Sufan's mother was a "failure", but motherhood itself as an office or a virtue is something he very much believes in and extols.
DEATH WITH DIGNITY
EUGENE Part 2 ("At the bed near your death")
FOURTH OF JULY
ALL OF ME WANTS ALL OF YOU
EUEGENE Part 3 ("Now I'm drunk and afraid")
NO SHADE IN THE SHADOW OF THE CROSS
THE ONLY THING
I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER Part 2 ("Don't back down, nothing can be changed")
BLUE BUCKET OF GOLD (Told from the perspective of Sufjan)

As a reference, here is the visual guide I laid out in last week's article. It definitely helps to listen to Carrie & Lowell while thinking of where on this spectrum each song lies.

Please read the fine print.

Related Posts:
An Amazing List of Unreleased Sufjan Stevens Songs
Carrie & Lowell is a Minor Sufjan Stevens Album (and that's a good thing)
Unanswerable Questions 3b: Sufjan Stevens' Carrie & Lowell
What the New Sufjan Album is Teaching Me
Reminder: I Still Hate Sufjan Stevens