It’s been three years since singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens released his last studio album, and in that time, the world has changed immeasurably; we’ve seen millions of COVID-related deaths, felt the impact of a long-overdue racial reckoning, and watched as generations’ worth of persecuted people have left the familiar behind in a desperate bid for safety. Maybe it makes a certain kind of cosmic sense, then, that Stevens’ newest album Javelin was released last week; we’ve long been in need of a kind of emotional coda to our collective mourning, and who could be more qualified to deliver one than the king of wistful introspection?
Javelin deals with grief on a personal scale, not necessarily a global one. In a moving Instagram post, Stevens dedicated the album to his late partner Evans Richardson. But in times as fraught as ours, the remove between the immediate and the faraway feels increasingly thin; after all, isn’t every world conflict a matter of life-or-death emergency for someone, even if their lived reality appears worlds away from our own? As Zadie Smith wrote early in the pandemic, “Suffering is not relative; it is absolute.”
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Stevens has always been gifted at blending pain and hope, and that gift has never been more evident than on Javelin; it’s impossible (at least for me, and anecdotally, for everyone I’ve talked to about the album) to listen without crying, particularly to the heartrending song “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?” And I can t help thinking that Javelin presents an opportunity for collective catharsis that many of us desperately need.
US society has never been particularly good at carving out space and time for grief. Many have found themselves left behind by the back-to-business governmental response to the pandemic in recent years, and there is currently no federally guaranteed right to bereavement leave for workers who have lost family and/or loved ones. (Even in relatively progressive California, where most workers are entitled to up to five bereavement days following the death of a family member, the question occurs: Is there a single-digit number of days off that can accommodate such an ancient agony?) All this makes it all the more important for our cultural artifacts to give us space to process our heartache. “I take my suffering as I take my vows,” sings Stevens on “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?” proclaiming the necessity of wedding yourself to your pain if you ever hope to truly excise it.
About six years ago, I found myself going through a particularly hard time that—while existing safely within the confines of what a former therapist of mine liked to call “small-T trauma”—left me regularly crying in my car on the way to work and too exhausted to even unfreeze a Trader Joe’s meal for dinner when I got home, instead repairing to my room for takeout I couldn’t taste, couldn’t afford, and didn’t really want. I knew on some level that I could have talked to my friends or my family about what was going on with me, but I felt ashamed to take up their time with what felt like the small-potatoes woes that were consuming me; I lay in bed and wept instead, listening to Jeff Buckley and Elizabeth Fraser s rendition of “All Flowers in Time Bend Toward the Sun” over and over on repeat over the course of weeks’ worth of sleepless nights.
The first time I listened to that particular YouTube performance of “All Flowers in Time Bend Toward the Sun” once the clouds had more or less passed and I’d begun to feel somewhat normal, I was wholly unprepared for the physical reaction I had. My throat dried up and my eyes welled as if on command as I listened to Buckley and Fraser sing about how “I know you say that there’s no one for you.” I hadn t meant to imbue the song with so much emotion or to turn it into a kind of time capsule of my depression, but that s what happened, and when I listen to its chorus now, I’m still reflexively sad, but I’m also trying to remind myself to be proud of the time and work I put into feeling better.
Maybe that s the key thing about a grief soundtrack, whether you’re consciously choosing one or just retreating into the musical equivalent of a “safe room” by listening to one song or album over and over while you attempt to work through your pain: It’s not necessarily going to fix whatever ails you or cure your suffering overnight, but eventually and hopefully, you’ll listen to the Sufjan or Jeff Buckley or SZA album that you once reached for on repeat and think: “That was a time, and now it s passed.”
Of course, that kind of hindsight is reserved for the luckiest among us, those of us whose problems diminish or disappear over time instead of constantly defining our existence. I don’t know how to reckon with that kind of systemic misfortune, or how to properly hold in mind the anguish of those across the world for whom grief is not an occasional visitor but a daily practice. But I know that—as cheesy as it may sound—music might be one way to bridge the gap, or at least to acquaint us more intimately with each other’s suffering.
