Carrie & Lowell by Sufjan Stevens

Classic albums tend to collapse the distance between the listener and the artist, and Carrie & Lowell does this more completely than almost any record in recent memory. There is something about its intimacy that feels almost illicit, as though you are not meant to be hearing this. It has the quality of a letter that was never intended to be sent, or a diary found tucked behind a wall. And yet it communicates universally, because what Stevens is ultimately singing about is not just his mother or his grief but the primal human experience of loving someone who cannot fully love you back, of trying to make meaning in the face of absence and death. "We're all gonna die," he repeats at the end of one song, and it is not morbid so much as clarifying — a statement of fact that arrives like a kind of release.Featured songs:Death With DignityShould Have Known BetterDrawn To The BloodFourth Of JulyThe Only ThingBlue Bucket Of Gold