From forthcoming new album CARRIE & LOWELL,
Sufjan Stevens with a track taken from his much anticipated album Carrie & Lowell, due out 30th March. the track ‘Should Have Known Better’ features a fingerpicked guitar cascading above gradual washes of a choral backing vocals, delicate bleepings introducing a looped melody towards the end with tambourine keeping time.
It’s a plaintive song sung with delicious poetry, the lyrics interchanging fragmented memories with feelings conjured with figurative language, a vista of the confessional mind punctuated with clues and and imagery, a landscape strewn with inexplicably emotive curiosities and relics. As the snow melts and the season turns, comes Sufjan Stevens to remind us that everything dies. His new album, Carrie & Lowell, is centered around the death of his mother, Carrie, who was in and out of his life from the start. “There’s such a discrepancy between my time and relationship with her, and my desire to know her and be with her,” and “Should Have Known Better” takes us back to the beginning he remembers, where Carrie leaves him in a video store at the age of “three, maybe four.” In a hushed voice, he sings like he’s clinging onto a blanket for warmth as he fixates on the black shroud that enveloped him in the wake of her absence, muting his ability to transparently express himself.
But halfway through, an uplifting electric keyboard line kicks in; a subtle percussive note steadily taps out a reminder to keep going; his voice shakes off the ice and forms a chorus with itself, flowering into something hopeful. Sufjan flips the melody from the black shroud into a tender lyric about shoving aside his fear, discovering an oasis of perspective when he looks to his brother’s newborn daughter and sees his mother in her face. When he sings “nothing can be changed,” he doesn’t sound resigned, but ready to look forward. It’s the dawn at the end of a long night, a prayer that past traumas might be healed by a beautiful present.
The Fat Angel Sings 