Sufjan Steven’s latest album “Javelin” feels like a nostalgic dream about flying by a little river in the summer while being serenaded by guitar and banjo and strange orchestrations about love and how it’s ending.
That threw me for a bit of a loop. His last few albums had felt to me like fever dreams (specifically “Convocations”) and surreal meanderings (specifically “A Beginner’s Mind”), and while I found them fascinating and filled with emotion, they were definitely out of my classic-rock-and-jazz wheelhouse. Here, Steven takes a step in, sitting down with his audience for a heart-to-heart that feels wonderfully timely.
For the uninitiated (as I was last week), Sufjan Steven is a Michigan-born artist who has written 10 albums, plus three in collaboration with other artists, 20 singles and three soundtracks—all this in styles ranging from singer-songwriter, to lo-fi folk, to electronica, to strange experimental sounds. I recommend checking him out if you want something interesting and thought provoking to listen to.
He leans on his singer-songwriter roots more heavily in this album, with a lot of the songs starting out acoustic and expanding to a beautifully produced widescale instrumentation. He has found a way to merge both his original sound he had back in his first albums and his more recent use of distortion and synths to make dreamlike, touching songs that keep you invested and just a little off balance.
There is a reason this caught my attention: even some of my favorite artists often do a pretty bad job of merging their styles. And honestly, most of them only seem to try to do that when their audience starts turning on them, leading to really forced tone that takes away from their music. Stevens, on the other hand, is doing this because it is what he wants to do. He uses his growth to make something cohesive and better.
The lyrics are what gut-punches you as you listen, though. They are, like with all genuine artists, a reflection of what he has experienced, and these past few years have not been easy on him. His father passing away in 2020, his partner passing away in early 2023 and being diagnosed with the autoimmune disorder, Guillain-Barré Syndrome, later that year were certainly devastating. He recorded “Javelin” in his home while he was receiving treatment and recovering. You would think this would push him to a dark, drowning tone in his music, but that actually is not the case.
The album has a distinct flavor of yearning and hope, made a whole lot more potent because he roots it down in the tragedy that he is experiencing. This means there are beats in his album that touch very near to despair, as in “Goodbye Evergreen” when he says “I cut from the inside, I’m frightened of the end, I’m drowning in my self-defense.” This darkness would not make for a good album, in my opinion, if it was not paired with gentler songs like “Everything That Rises,” where he begins the song asking Christ to help him turn his thoughts around. He seems very deliberate with his balance of dark and light in the album, and that lends both sides more meaning than an album full of just one could.
“Javelin” is a careful walk through grief and hope, and one that astonished me with its perspective. I know myself enough to know I could never write an album like this if I were in his shoes, but Stevens does it in such an empathetic, relatable way. It elevates the album’s purpose from being a catharsis or a drowning to being a gentle, raw look at how a person processes the ending of something they love. This hit hard, in a good way.
