Pitchfork: How would you describe your relationship with your mother growing up?

Sufjan Stevens: She left when I was 1, so I have no memory of her and my father being married. She just wandered off. She felt that she wasn't equipped to raise us, so she gave us to our father. It wasn't until I was 5 that Carrie married Lowell. He worked in a bookstore in Eugene, Oregon, and we spent three summers out there—that's when we actually saw our mother the most.

But after she and Lowell split up, we didn't have that much contact with Carrie. Sometimes she'd be at our grandparents' house, and we'd see her during the holidays for a few days. There was the occasional letter here and there. She was off the grid for a while, she was homeless sometimes, she lived in assisted housing. There was always speculation too, like, "Where is she? What is she doing?" As a kid, of course, I had to construct some kind of narrative, so I've always had a strange relationship to the mythology of Carrie, because I have such few lived memories of my experience with her. There's such a discrepancy between my time and relationship with her, and my desire to know her and be with her.

Pitchfork: Did you ever call her “mom” or was it always “Carrie”?

SS: We always called our parents by their first names: Carrie and Rasjid. I'm not quite sure why.

Pitchfork: What was Carrie like as a person?

SS: She was evidently a great mother, according to Lowell and my father. But she suffered from schizophrenia and depression. She had bipolar disorder and she was an alcoholic. She did drugs, had substance abuse problems. She really suffered, for whatever reason. But when we were with her and when she was most stable, she was really loving and caring, and very creative and funny. This description of her reminds me of what some people have observed about my work and my manic contradiction of aesthetics: deep sorrow mixed with something provocative, playful, frantic.

Pitchfork: Since she wasn’t around that much, how did you perceive of her as a kid?

SS: There was an awareness early on that she had schizophrenia, suffered from depression, and that she was an alcoholic. And because both my mother and father were alcoholics and substance abuse ran in our family, when my dad got sober and started going to Alcoholics Anonymous, we all went to 12-step meetings so we could participate in his recovery. So we had very concrete, responsible language to describe a person's struggle with addiction. We could talk about Carrie in those environments, and there was a healthy camaraderie in that culture. But I remember being a little bit embarrassed about having to go to Alateen meetings, and I didn't start drinking until I was at least of age. It was so stigmatized.

Pitchfork: Were you there when Carrie passed away?

SS: Yeah. She had stomach cancer, and it was a quick demise. We flew to see her in the ICU before she died. She was in a lot of pain, and on a lot of drugs, but she was aware. It was so terrifying to encounter death and have to reconcile that, and express love, for someone so unfamiliar. Her death was so devastating to me because of the vacancy within me. I was trying to gather as much as I could of her, in my mind, my memory, my recollections, but I have nothing. It felt unsolvable. There is definitely a deep regret and grief and anger. I went through all the stages of bereavement. But I say make amends while you can: Take every opportunity to reconcile with those you love or those who've hurt you. It was in our best interest for our mother to abandon us. God bless her for doing that and knowing what she wasn't capable of.

Pitchfork: That’s a very Zen outlook.

SS: Well, love is unconditional and incomprehensible. And I believe it's possible to love absent of mutual respect.

Pitchfork: Did you feel any closure at the end—did you get to have a conversation?

SS: For sure. At that point, I was only interested in communicating my love for her, unconditionally. There was a reciprocal deep love and care for each other in that moment. It was very profound and healing. But it's the aftermath that sucks—the emotional ramifications and repercussions that occurred for months and months following her death. It nearly destroyed me, because I still couldn't make sense out of it. In writing about it on this album, I was in pursuit of meaning, of justice, of reconciliation. It wasn't very fun.

Pitchfork: Considering you had a distant relationship, were you at all surprised that her death hit you so hard?

SS: Yeah. In the moment, I was stoic and phlegmatic and practical, but in the months following I was manic and frantic and disparaging and angry. They always talk about the science of bereavement, and how there is a measurable pattern and cycle of grief, but my experience was lacking in any kind of natural trajectory. It felt really sporadic and convoluted. I would have a period of rigorous, emotionless work, and then I would be struck by deep sadness triggered by something really mundane, like a dead pigeon on the subway track. Or my niece would point out polka-dotted tights at the playground, and I would suffer some kind of cosmic anguish in public. It's weird.

I was so emotionally lost and desperate for what I could no longer pursue in regard to my mother, so I was looking for that in other places. At the time, part of me felt that I was possessed by her spirit and that there were certain destructive behaviors that were manifestations of her possession.

Pitchfork: How so?

SS: Oh man, it's so hard to describe what was going on. It's almost like the force, or the matrix, or something: I started to believe that I was genetically, habitually, chemically predisposed to her pattern of destruction. I think a lot of the acting-out was rebellion, or maybe it was a way for me to… ah, this is so fucked up, I should probably go to therapy.

In lieu of her death, I felt a desire to be with her, so I felt like abusing drugs and alcohol and fucking around a lot and becoming reckless and hazardous was my way of being intimate with her. But I quickly learned that you don't have to be incarcerated by suffering, and that, in spite of the dysfunctional nature of your family, you are an individual in full possession of your life. I came to realize that I wasn't possessed by her, or incarcerated by her mental illness. We blame our parents for a lot of shit, for better and for worse, but it's symbiotic. Parenthood is a profound sacrifice.

Pitchfork: The sort of rebellion you’re talking about almost sounds like more of a teen-angst sort of thing.

SS: Fun, flirty, and 40! [laughs] I do feel like I'm 40 going on 14 sometimes. I wasn't rebellious as a kid. I was so dignified and well-behaved. But that kind of [destructive] behavior at my age is inexcusable.