'Javelin' Is Sufjan Stevens's Best Album Yet
Sufjan Stevens has played many roles throughout his nearly 25-year run as one of indie rock’s most versatile and ambitious artists. He’s been the queer, Christian poet (Seven Swans); the charming, traveling troubadour of the Midwest (Illinois); the anxious, experimental, performance artist in angel wings (Age of Adz); the singer-songwriter, stripped bare (Carrie and Lowell); and the desperate, despairing technologist (The Ascension).
On Javelin, his 10th studio album (out today on all major streaming platforms), Stevens is all these things at once. It’s the most in command he has ever been of his sprawling talents—and the result is his best album yet. Javelin isn't a return to form, nor is it a new direction. It’s a humble, mid-career admission. The older Stevens gets, the less sure he is of anything. Let me be the first to tell you: Confusion never sounded so good.
Javelin is both a joyful and demanding listen. On each one of its 10 tracks, Stevens begins down a pleasing, melodious path—played on the piano, the guitar, or one of his beloved woodwinds—only to quickly swerve into a dense forest of orchestration. Some of these sounds we’ve heard before. The unedited fingerpicking of “Javelin (To Have and to Hold)” recalls the avant-garde folk of Carrie and Lowell, while “Goodbye Evergreen” descends into the clangy, electropop chaos from The Age of Adz’s “Too Much.” Both tracks sound like a sentient Sega Genesis, but whereas “Too Much” was exactly that—too much—“Goodbye Evergreen” perfectly balances the strange and the familiar. That’s the genius of Javelin: Stevens serves all of his influences alongside one another in perfect proportions.
"Will Anybody Ever Love Me?"
Despite essentially operating as a one-man marching band, (Stevens has always produced his own albums and played most of the instruments on them, too), Stevens has often relied on help from friends and backup singers to deliver his message. But the women who appear on Javelin—Adrienne Marie Brown, Nedelle Torrisi, Pauline Delassus, Megan Lui, and Hannah Cohen—are his most effective contributors to date. “Will Anybody Ever Really Love Me?” features their oohs and aahs, which encircle Steven’s feathery vocals in a chorus of assurances. Their work effectively relays the compassionate heartbreak at the center of Javelin better than Stevens could ever do alone.
Stevens likely embraces collaborators because he is, by his own admission, an idiosyncratic guy. He has never strived for universal appeal. People who recognize Stevens’s gifts as a lyricist usually cite his talent for illustrating make-believe scenes—as he does on Illinois—or his knack for devastating details, like those in his 2015 masterpiece, Carrie and Lowell. The famously private artist has always been a cerebral, somewhat inscrutable songwriter. So it is somewhat surprising that on his 10th album, Stevens achieves through his lyrics the relatability he claims to have never sought.
"So You Are Tired"
Javelin’s universal appeal is evident early on. “I really wanna know,” Stevens pleads on the album’s third track, over a coruscating mix of strings, woodwinds, and electronic drums, “Will anybody ever love me—for good reason, without grievance, not for sport.” It’s hard to imagine a simpler, more devastating question. And yet, Javelin is chock-full of similarly gut-wrenching observations. On the intricate breakup ballad, “So You Are Tired," Stevens kindly embraces his lover, asking them “to rest your head” as they rewind through “fourteen years” of what Stevens “did and said.” Not since Lorde’s “Hard Feelings” has someone so accurately portrayed the kindness that surfaces between two people after all the fighting is done. It's the final gesture that comes before the inevitable conclusion, which Stevens succinctly and accurately describes on "Shit Talk." when he sings in that angelic voice of his, "I will always love you, but I cannot live with you."
We don't know what Stevens was going through when he recorded these songs. Maybe it was a breakup. It could've been a crisis of faith; Stevens has a long history of using the language of love to describe religion and vice versa. Whatever it was, though, it clearly left a mark on him because Javelin elicits big feelings, the kind you only feel after something happens that turns your life upside down. Javelin is a journey through crisis. It is a riotous acceptance of life on life’s unknowable terms. As it is with life, then, our job isn’t to endure it—it’s to embrace it. On Javelin, Sufjan Stevens shows us how.
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