On the brink of an album launch, many artists will post glamorous selfies or adverts for shiny new merch. Not Oscar-nominated, indie-folk star Sufjan Stevens, though. Instead, days before the release of his exquisitely crafted 11th album, Javelin, he posted a snap of the specially adapted toilet seat he’s been using since a life-threatening bout of the auto-immune condition, Guillain-Barré syndrome, left him (hopefully temporarily) unable to walk. It was a typically Stevensian move. Confronting, quirky, witty: the sculptural custom loo photo dialled into his long-running lyrical exploration of mortal vulnerability, along with our extraordinary ability to adapt to pain, and find beauty in the strangest, loneliest, most despairing places.
“Should have Known Better” – the best song on his 2015 masterpiece, Carrie & Lowell – saw him whispering and picking gently at his guitar to burrow deep into the raw memory of being abandoned at a video store, aged “three maybe four”, by his alcoholic, bipolar mother. He then introduced warm electronics to lift the song’s final third, as he resolved to look to a future illuminated by the birth of his brother’s daughter.
