Here’s the first single off of Sufjan Stevens’ new album Carrie & Lowell
Last month, Sufjan Stevens and his label, Asthmatic Kitty, put out a trailer for Carrie & Lowell, the gentle-voiced folk rocker’s first solo album in five years. Now, they’ve released a single, “No Shade In The Shadow Of The Cross” to stoke interest in the album’s March 31 release. As with the album’s title track, heard in the trailer, the song seems to be a step back from the harsher sounds of Stevens’ last major release, 2010’s The Age Of Adz. A breathy, Christianity-tinged acoustic meditation on love and loss—or, in technical terms, “a Sufjan Stevens song”—“Cross” is only a few Abraham Lincoln references shy of fitting in on Stevens’ breakout 2005 album Illinois. The only nod to the darker turn Adz seemed to signal is the song’s solitary use of the word “fuck,”a momentary sharp moment in the song’s sad, meandering daydream of sound.
