Grief, illness and a Christmas album. Sufjan Stevens’ slow comeback

Butterfly wings on his shoulders, a band in cheerleader uniforms; on stage, a banjo, trumpets, a vibraphone and a choir singing songs with titles as long as nineteenth-century title pages. It is 2005 and Sufjan Stevens, aged thirty, with the face of a seminarian and the voice of an altar boy, presents the album that transforms him into the poster child of a generation. Twenty-one years later, on an evening in late September, in a small venue in Kingston, in the Hudson Valley, a fifty-one-year-old man sits unannounced at the piano and accompanies a young singer-songwriter, Meg Lui, whose debut album he produced. Just one song, with a few vocal harmonies in the background. It is his first time on stage in eight years. Now there’s also a Christmas album on the way, with a title that says it all: “Worst Christmas Ever!”. It’s a compilation: fifteen tracks selected from the over one hundred recorded for his Christmas box sets, plus a previously unreleased track, “On This Christmas (It Only Gets Better)”, the first new song since his life fell apart. Not much, you might say. For him, it’s a great deal.

What happened? 2023 is the year when everything falls apart. In April, Evans Richardson, his partner, aged 43 and head of staff at the Studio Museum in Harlem, dies. No one knows: Sufjan has never spoken about his private life; he has always let his songs speak – and remain unsaid. In August, he wakes up one morning to find his hands, arms and legs numb. He is unable to walk. A trip to A&E, two weeks confined to a hospital bed, and the diagnosis: Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks the peripheral nerves. He recounts it in September, with a photo of himself in a wheelchair and a caption that’s already a joke: ‘yours truly from a wheelchair’, forever yours from a wheelchair. Rehabilitation begins: intensive physiotherapy, learning to stand again. In October, ‘Javelin’ is released – his most intimate album since ‘Carrie & Lowell’ – and on the day of its release, a dedication to Evans appears on Instagram: ‘the light of my life’. It is his coming out, and part of the press focuses on that rather than on his grief. The songs do not name names: they address broken relationships, guilt, and pleas – but after that dedication, everything becomes clear. Then silence. No concerts – and in any case, he had not performed since 2018, the night of the Oscars when he sang “Mystery of Love” for Call Me by Your Name. After six months, he was walking again.

To understand why his absence weighs so heavily on the music scene, we need to go back to the start of the millennium – which now feels almost like another geological era. Music discussed on blogs, MySpace, the first iPods, Brooklyn as the spiritual capital of the new rock scene. American indie in the noughties brought together Arcade Fire, Grizzly Bear and Bon Iver: cultured young people, often from the provinces, keen to rediscover folk, orchestral arrangements and, above all, the song as a handcrafted artefact. Sufjan was the perfect embodiment of this. He announced his intention to dedicate an album to each of the fifty US states but ended up making only two, "Michigan" and "Illinois", and years later admitted it was merely a publicity stunt. Yet he stands entirely on his own; he is an outspoken Christian in Bush-era America, adored by a secular and progressive audience. He often mentions God in his songs, and on the same album he recounts the story of the serial killer John Wayne Gacy with sublime compassion. ‘Chicago’ features on the soundtrack to ‘Little Miss Sunshine’, and with him, the indie scene discovers it can be pop without compromising its integrity. It is the last era in which a musician can build a slow-paced world, made up of full-length albums to be listened to from start to finish, before streaming shatters it all. And yet it is streaming itself that cemented his status: ‘Fourth of July’, whispered at his dying mother’s bedside, surpassed half a billion streams. Little by little, Sufjan went through all these transformations – the dizzying electronica of The Age of Adz, the grief over his mother’s death in Carrie & Lowell, the American malaise of The Ascension; despite himself, some wrote that he had become the ‘poster child for death’.

Now the recovery is slow. In 2025, in his first interview since the collapse, he says he is “okay”, that he feels “in a state of recovery and survival”, but no concerts, tours or recording sessions. He talks about gardening, walking the dog, and the Asthmatic Kitty label he founded with his stepfather – the Lowell from the album. He works a little on other people’s music, saying “I’m at the service of other things”. The world carries on without him. *Illinoise*, the dance show based on the 2005 album, does well on Broadway and wins a Tony; reissues are released to mark the twentieth anniversary of *Seven Swans* and the tenth of *Carrie & Lowell*; he produces a children’s album for John Legend. Then came Meg Lui’s album, recorded in his home studio. Then the Kingston gig. And now the Christmas song. Which, like all his Christmas songs, is a strange affair: no sleighs, no joy, but rather a catalogue of wrongs and a plea for forgiveness. He describes himself as ‘a misanthropic man’ who sees the worst in things, and explains that he loves ‘the idea of a Christmas apology’. The video is made up of six thousand hand-painted frames – the sort of artisanal madness reminiscent of the noughties, when the world was smaller and he was younger. Christmas, on the other hand, has always been his laboratory: since 2001, he’s been recording Christmas songs as gifts for friends and family. Starting afresh with a gift makes sense in its own way. Whether it’s the beginning of something or just a truce, next year will tell.