A Decade of Grief: Carrie & Lowell's 10th Anniversary Edition
- Claire Sibley
- Jun 7
- 6 min read
Updated: Oct 1
Carrie & Lowell is the seventh studio album from Sufjan Stevens and was released on March 31, 2015 through the label Asthmatic Kitty. The 10th Anniversary Edition, released on May 30, 2025, arrives with seven new demos, including “Mystery of Love,” “Wallowa Lake Monster,” and an almost fourteen minute version of “Fourth of July” which feels akin to the Carrie & Lowell Live version of “My Blue Bucket of Gold.”
A Decade of Grief: Revisiting Carrie & Lowell
In the ten years since Carrie & Lowell, Stevens has revisited the material multiple times. In 2017, he released The Greatest Gift and the concert film Carrie & Lowell Live, and in 2022, two new versions of “Fourth of July” were released on a 7-inch LP. In addition to the new demos, the 10th Anniversary Edition includes a 40-page art booklet with photos of Carrie’s life and an essay from Stevens reflecting on his initial intentions for the album and where it sits with him today.
The essay is on the sleeve of the LP containing the new demos. He opens by confessing that most of what he wrote about Carrie is mostly fabricated. She left Stevens when he was only a year old. He was fed a narrative about his mother: that she was reckless, selfish and unfit for motherhood. With his own unreliable memories and the memories he was told, Stevens wrote Carrie & Lowell in a desperate attempt to find answers in his grief. Stevens writes:
“Surely my art could make sense of the profound mystery of my mother’s life and death. […] But the process was painful, humiliating, and an utter miscarriage of bad intentions. My grief manifested as self-loathing and misery. Every song I tried to write became a weapon aimed against me, an indictment of ignorance, blame, resentment, and misappropriation. […] My music failed me.”
This confession might seem jarring to listeners who find solace in the album, but it speaks to a deeper truths about grief: it cannot be resolved and it demands to be felt. Sometimes, I feel like all grief asks of me is to be acknowledged. Stevens continues, “I was a fake, a failure, and a fool to ever believe that my art could save me, let alone make sense of the senselessness of death.” I think Stevens is being hard on himself here—I don’t think we can judge ourselves for how our grief manifests, but perhaps there is acceptance waiting on the outskirts here.
Stevens writes songs, I make zines, we both make collages, in hopes to make sense of the incomprehensibility of death, but it will never eliminate the grief. Rather, it accompanies our grief, allows it to expand, to shape-shift, to give it a place outside of ourselves to live, and to connect with others.
Grief Contains Multitudes
The new demos stay true to the original sound of Carrie & Lowell, but I hear a lightness in them. I find all the demos, versions, and remixes to be companions to the original album—one version does not replace the other, but provides a fuller picture to the multitude of emotions experienced while grieving. They are expressions of grief and in all the ways it can show up.
In my own experience with grief, I spent a lot of time playing tug-of-war with my own feelings. My mother, also estranged and who struggled with substance abuse and depression, died when I was thirteen. I couldn’t find the words to express the deep mourning that was called of me. It felt like something outside of me, pulling me into the darkness of the empty space her death had left behind. Simultaneously, I felt relief, anger, guilt, and compassion.
Carrie & Lowell, released four years after her death, cradled me in my dark teenage room, my dark teenage mind, and validated the confusion of my grief. “In a veil of great disguises/how do I live with your ghost?” Stevens sings in “The Only Thing.” How can I mourn someone I didn’t really know? Will I ever really know her? She eludes me, but I am of her. The album gave my grief a voice. It became a conduit for my own healing.
Celebrating Carrie
In writing Carrie & Lowell, Stevens calls it a “painful, humiliating, and an utter miscarriage of bad intentions.” In a recent interview with Robin Hilton at NPR, Stevens says, “I sort of feel like I don't have any authority over my mother and her life or experience or her death. All I have is speculation and my imagination and my own misery…”
When grief is fresh, it is extremely manipulative and all-encompassing. When my mother died, even though we were estranged, it brought her and our relationship to center stage. It felt like it was only happening to me, like it was changing my chemistry and being, and I could only see it through the distorted lens of grief. “What did I do to deserve this now?/How did this happen?” Stevens sings in “Drawn to the Blood.” I can understand Stevens’ embarrassment of the album—it is a time stamp of the fresh, quizzical manifestations of grief. It is a fable of a life imagined, which is easier to sit with than the thought that there are parts of our mothers we will never truly know or understand. Even in death, our relationship ebbs and flows, but we are doing the talking for both sides.
Compared to the elegy of Carrie & Lowell, the 10th Anniversary Edition feels like a deep exhale, a memorial of Carrie, and an acceptance. Accompanying the 2 LPs is a 40-page art booklet with family photos spanning four generations, interwoven with artwork and landscape photos Sufjan took while traveling across the western U.S. over a decade ago1. This immense collage is a profound shift in perspective. Carrie transforms from a two-dimensional figure defined solely by her role as a mother who died to a woman in her full humanity, with all her complexity and depth. “They’re just little snapshots,” Stevens says to NPR. “They’re kind of trifles in a lot of ways. But they represent a larger life that’s lived, most of it unseen and unrecorded.”
This has opened a new door for my own grief with my mother. In the last year, I saw photos from her childhood for the first time. After a lifetime of being told I look like my father, I could see myself in her. When I look in the mirror lately, I can see her looking back at me. Like a ghost playing peekaboo, she appears out the corner of my eye, only to disappear when I look head on. I was given a photo album from her first marriage, of her existence before me. Suddenly, she is not just my mother, a character in my life’s story. She is a protagonist of her own.
When Carrie died, she didn’t have many possessions. Stevens recalls to NPR, “She had a backpack with some stuff, but she didn’t really own anything or have anything. So I feel like this music and these photos and the memories that we have, they all reflect the greatness of her life, in spite of what little she had when she died."
The same could be said of my mother. I used to think she left nothing behind, but recently a small, quiet thought had appeared: She left me—the DNA of stories, the inheritance of identity, the echoes of a full life lived. I am a living testament to her existence, carrying forward not just her genetic material but pieces of her story, even the parts I never got to hear directly.
In closing his interview with NPR, Stevens parts, “[The album] ultimately has nothing to do with me anymore. The music is yours.” What makes Carrie & Lowell so powerful is how it takes grief, something that often feels so personal and isolating, and makes it communal. When we listen to this album, we hear our own stories reflected back, of complicated relationships with parents, unanswered questions in death, and desperate attempts to make meaning from loss. It is an outstretched hand, reaching not just towards Carrie, but toward everyone who has ever tried to love someone they couldn’t quite reach.
I will never be able to fully express my grief because it is a living thing, always shifting and finding new ways to show up. No amount of essays or zines or journal entries will resolve it, and I’m learning to accept that. This album is a time stamp in Stevens’ life, in mine, and in the lives of anyone who has found solace in these songs. It marks one of our hardest experiences while quietly insisting, that we endure.
Written in memory of my mother, Melinda.
1“Sufjan Stevens - Carrie & Lowell (10th Anniversary Edition).” Asthmatic Kitty Records, store.asthmatickitty.com/products/sufjan-stevens-carrie-lowell-10th-anniversary-edition. Accessed 5 June 2025.
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