One day in 2015,

I began by listening to Carrie & Lowell a bit by mistake, without paying much attention, as sometimes the radio is turned on to fill the void in a room too large, to surround himself with a reassuring presence. Sufjan Stevens' new album had just been released, I was going to give it a distracted ear and then, if, as often with the American, one or two folk pearls emerge themselves from a somewhat baroque and vaguely magma indigestible in length, I would isolate them, as I had isolated Chicago or Futile devices on its previous LP. I had launched the album and kept going (I'm going a lot) to my business.

But from the first steps, I felt something weird, a strange feeling that emanated without my being able to put my finger on it. A calm, an absolute absence of artifice, a unity, a melancholy too. Phrases, random songs rather minimalist, stood out behind the guitar often in arpeggios, the banjo and the ultra soft voice of Sufjan Stevens. "You'll never see us gain," "We're all gonna die," "When I was three, three maybe four, She left us at that video store." Lourdes, very Lourdes phrases that hid behind falsely light melodies.

I did not know, before listening carefully this time, that Carrie & Lowell was an album of mourning. A bit like Lou Reed's Magic and Loss, the album was inhabited by an absence. Sufjan Stevens, who lost his mother in 2012, wanted to tell this absence through eleven songs some of which are absolutely overwhelming. A word, a note that comes off, a tablecloth synth at the end of a song. A presence floats around a disc that we absolutely can not listen with a distracted ear and especially not while going. Fourth of July, the heart of the album, poignant masterpiece of absolute lacrimal power, has the gift of you to stick a blow of phenomenal blues and to undermine the most assertive virility of the males supposedly insensitive. I bite my lower lip and I do not do it.