Sufjan Stevens, the sensitive troubadour who began his career chronicling the geography and stories of the Midwest, where he grew up, on albums like “Illinois” and “Michigan,” has made the jump more recently to record songs examining the geography of his own life.
He’s narrowed specifically on his own life and his complicated growing up — one not so much more complicated than many in his generation, raised at a time of rising divorce, blended families and stepparents. His might have been a bit more odd — at the edge of a cult, amid a lot of beliefs of reincarnation and Edgar Casey, and what he called an obsession with death.
They all came together in a suite of somber songs with aching detail that resulted in his latest and most intimate album, “Carrie & Lowell,” named after his mother and stepfather, which he played in its entirety (and, at least at first, largely the same order) in his delicate show at the DAR Constitution Hall in Washington D.C. Tuesday.
Rare is the singer whose presence demands a total silence among his devoted audience. None dare speak, hoot or even cough during his hushed and lyrical performances with his versatile four piece band. Nor did anybody yell “Rock and roll!” though they would have certainly been justified to do so.
It made even a minor thing like a guy in your row humming along to songs seem like the biggest distraction (eventually earning a shush from someone else equally put out).
Stevens songs dance in silence based on melody, so it’s easy to explain the humming along. Yet their lyrics reveal shocking details that might make you catch your breath. “When I was three, maybe four, she left us at that video store,” he sings in “Should Have Known Better.”
Elsewhere he says, “I forgive you mother, I can hear you and I long to be near you” in “Death with dignity.” Much later, he’s considering suicide, in detail in “The Only Thing.”
Self examination through painful childhood memories have been examined to great effect previously in rock, most vividly perhaps in John Lennon’s “Plastic Ono Band,” a testament to Arhur Janov’s primal scream therapy. Artists do such personal self searching in public perhaps to share commonalities.
The fine line is whether such obsession with the past, presented in such a giant package (he could have leavened it with his other, lighter songs, but he did not) is a way of exploring universal yearnings or a display of terminal self-focus. Illustrating the personal songs with what we assume are home movies of childhood tended to push the needle too much in that direction.
Still, he was committed to this thing, and the audience was with him 100 percent.
But even he seemed relieved when at the end of seven consecutive songs from the album, to pause and speak for the first time, explaining yet another childhood story, before going into the looser and louder “Fourth of July,” still from the same new album.
Once he had largely finished “Carrie & Lowell” with its title song, he touched on earlier, equally delicate work — “The Owl and the Tanager” from “All Delighted People”; “and the “Futile Devices” from “Age of Adz.” But it was his “Seven Swans” album from which he found the personal songs that fit best with his new ones, with “In the Devil’s Territory,” “Size to Small” and especially “Sister” though that one stopped dead in the middle because of a cough. No problem; the audience cheered that too.
The noisiest that Stevens and his unintroduced band got came at the end of a few songs that built to an anthem, none so big as the churning many minutes of “Blue Bucket of Gold”
Aside from the tones of “Redford” that began the long show, he saved the Midwestern songs for the four song encore, when everybody left the hall still humming the final “Chicago.”