Too much love, indeed.
For Carrie & Lowell, Sufjan Stevens decided to pick up his banjo again. One friend said the album feels like the unofficial Oregon installment of Stevens’s 50 States project, because the songs return to the time Stevens spent in Eugene with his mother, Carrie—a schizophrenic with bipolar disorder and substance-abuse issues who died in 2012.
Carrie abandoned the family when Stevens was about a year old. But between the ages of 5 to 8, when she was married to Lowell Brams, Stevens and his siblings spent summers with the couple…