Photo by Emmanuel Afolabi

Sufjan Stevens' latest album Carrie & Lowell is unlike any previous work he’s ever released. Haunting and intimate, it pulls back the curtain on the devastation and sadness of his childhood and invites us into its aftermath, and says this happened to me. Ten years ago, the Mountain Goats’ 2005 landmark, The Sunset Tree, did much of the same thing. It interrupted the career of a beloved songwriter, and entrusted fans and listeners with their pain and experience. They were candid about the sort of stuff their peers would think to wrap in cool allegories. The sum of it all suddenly recast their discography in a new light—it showed us something fuller, something inescapable.

-=-=-=-In many ways, Sunset Tree is something like an antecedent to Carrie & Lowell. The narrative arc of these two albums puts parental abuse and neglect at the center; they also reckon with the death of the parent that hurt them. Stevens’ mother, who suffered from both schizophrenia and addiction, abandoned Stevens as a child. The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle grew up with the daily threat of physical and verbal abuse from his stepfather. These two albums are linked not only thematically, but in the candor and transformation showcased within them. Both of these albums came from songwriters a decade deep into acclaimed careers and who were mostly known for discographies rich in mythology, spirituality and characters. Their music, while intensely personal, had never been directly autobiographical until then, when grief spurred a reckoning—and brought about songs that broadcast resiliency and grace in the face of complex loss.

The parallel demons these two singers carried into adulthood loom large in their artistic lives, though both were seemingly only able to tackle them after their parents' death. The devastating revelations that finally worked their way into these records opened new avenues of connections to their audience: any casual listener with a crappy childhood could find their life reflected in these records. Gateways are opened, not just to discographies but to the possibility of healing through the catharsis of song.

What elevates these albums isn’t just their honesty or eloquence, but the devastation they refuse to hide. For both songwriters, the deaths of their parents brought self-examination, sadness and self-harm in their wake. The Sunset Tree opens with "You or Your Memory", a song in which Darnielle finds himself in a hotel room, "laying out his supplies" of St. Joseph’s Baby Aspirin and Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers. Alone, haunted by the spectre of his stepfather, he’s bent on self-destruction. "Lord if I make it through tonight, then I will mend my ways and walk the straight path to the end of my days," he sings. For all that Darnielle’s survived, he’s still facing the challenge of making it through the night. Just as he faced surviving adolescence (as the anthemic "This Year" attests), but now within his stepfather’s absence, he remains his only abuser, unable to free himself from the trauma of the past. Sometimes there is no way to escape a memory.

Darnielle finally greats his stepfather’s death on the album closer, "Pale Green Things", which juxtaposes something like relief and sets up shop in a singular moment where, decades before, they’d bonded over horse betting: "That morning at the racetrack was one thing that I remembered." It’s an elegiac way to end the album, but it’s cold comfort.

Carrie & Lowell mirrors the self-examination and self-acceptance of The Sunset Tree, its true spiritual successor. In the time following his mother’s death, Stevens is "drunk and afraid, wishing the world would go away." After her death, he finds himself unable to escape the paragon of his mother’s influence, the pall of her lifelong absence now made concrete. "Drawn to the Blood" and "No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross" are despairing, desperate for grace: "For my prayer has always been love. What did I do to deserve this?" Or later, as he bluntly puts it, "Fuck me, I’m falling apart." Like Darnielle, Stevens dwells in a rare memory of time spent positively with her, recalling a summer stay in Eugene, Ore. at his stepfather’s urging. Despite that she’s gone, he clings to her, almost bodily so, "lost in her sleeve" as the lyrics to "Eugene" suggest. A desire for maternal intimacy hangs, forever unresolved. Both Carrie & Lowell and The Sunset Tree present the listener with an opportunity to not only take part in these artists' emotional experiences but to reassess his or her own. The impulse to dwell on our familial past is easy, but the ability to self-reflect and possibly self-heal, is not. It takes the strongest and most introspective lyricists to do so, ones powerfully drawn to the blood from which they came.