Javelin

What draws me most to Javelin is the relationship between Sufjan’s voice and the sounds around it. He still sings very softly, and sometimes at the end of a line it feels like his breath is about to scatter along with it. But the accompaniment doesn’t always stay quiet with him. The drums suddenly get heavy, electronic sounds break in, the harmonies pile up until one person’s whisper turns into a crowd singing together.

When I listen to Carrie & Lowell, I often notice the gaps between the sounds. Javelin is clearly more willing to fill those gaps. It has acoustic guitar and piano, and also full voices, percussion and electronic sounds that aren’t very tame. Several things that might not sound like they get along are put into the same song.

I like this a lot. Singing softly can carry a lot of feeling, anger, urgency, even losing control, without needing a louder voice to express it. Goodbye Evergreen does this in a little over three minutes.

The opening piano is very simple and the voice is close, almost getting you ready for another quiet folk album. Then the beat and electronic sounds suddenly press in, and the song gets much bigger all at once. The turn isn’t smooth, it’s even a little rough, but it works well here. The goodbye before still seemed like something that could be explained clearly, but the sounds that come after already refuse to cooperate.

I’d rather hear it as an emotional loss of control. Sufjan’s own way of singing doesn’t change much, and the arrangement does the collapse for him. And precisely because he doesn’t sing harder along with it, the gap between the sounds is more noticeable.

Next, A Running Start becomes light again. The plucked strings keep moving forward, and the harmonies and small ornamental sounds make the whole song feel airy. The natural scenery in the lyrics and the wish for a kiss also keep a bit of the excitement of a love that has just begun.

The placement of this song is good. The opener has already said goodbye, but the second song still has so much wanting to get close. Because of this, time on the album doesn’t move forward in order. Goodbye and a flutter of feeling can appear right next to each other, and it doesn’t sound contradictory.

When Javelin was released in 2023, Sufjan dedicated it to his partner Evans Richardson, who died that year.

Will Anybody Ever Love Me? is one of the songs on the album that grabs you most quickly.

The title asks so directly that it makes you a little uncomfortable. The images in the verses are far more intense, with a sense of self-punishment and purification, but at the chorus it falls back to a question anyone can understand. The melody opens up here too, and the percussion and many voices singing together give the song a force that stretches outward.

I especially like that it doesn’t sing this question as something pitiful. That longing is fragile, of course, but as other voices join it also becomes frank, even a little justified. Wanting to be loved is allowed to be sung out properly.

The many voices singing together are a very important part of Javelin. Sometimes they stay close to the main melody, sometimes they draw out long notes behind it, sometimes they seem to answer Sufjan. The lead voice stays thin throughout while the surroundings get thicker and thicker, and this difference lets closeness and openness exist at the same time.

Everything That Rises and Genuflecting Ghost continue this approach. The repeated phrases and layered voices have the feeling of a hymn, but the electronic sounds make them less settled. Especially in the later part of Genuflecting Ghost, the sound starts to get restless, and the softness built up earlier doesn’t last the whole way.

These places make me feel that the religious feeling in Javelin also comes largely from the music itself. Repetition, response and singing together give a person’s confusion a shared way of being sung. Even without explaining the religious images in the lyrics one by one, you can hear the urgency of asking for an answer.

My Red Little Fox is softer. The piano’s three-beat time has a gentle rocking feeling, the melody slowly lifts, and the voice spreads out behind it. It puts affectionate names, the desire to kiss and religious language together, and it sounds very natural. For Sufjan, physical closeness and spiritual dependence always seem to sit very near each other.

Still, listening to this stretch straight through, you also notice a similarity in how the arrangements are thought out. It starts quietly, gradually adds harmonies, then pushes the sound somewhere fuller. Each one is beautiful on its own, but put together, a few of the buildups really can be guessed in advance. Luckily the melodies and rhythms are different enough that this familiarity didn’t get boring.

What moves me in So You Are Tired is that it doesn’t rush to push the emotion up.

The piano gives a steady, slow support, and Sufjan’s singing leaves a lot of room. The lyrics look back at a relationship of fourteen years, with doubt, with reluctance, and with the numbness of already knowing it’s over while the feeling isn’t over yet. The repeated phrases make the song feel like it is confirming, bit by bit, something it doesn’t want to accept.

The restraint here is important. If it were sung more fiercely, the song might turn into an accusation. The way it is sung now keeps the hesitation. He seems to still have questions to ask, and also knows that asking them may not help.

As the harmonies and accompaniment gradually join in, the whole song gets fuller, but the tiredness at the start doesn’t go away. I think this is where it is more accurate than plain sadness. When a relationship ends, you don’t always have enough energy left to express all your feelings completely.

The title track Javelin (To Have And To Hold) is under two minutes, like a pause squeezed between two long songs. The sound is soft, but the lyrics have the image of throwing a javelin and nearly hurting someone. Placed here, it lets the narrator on the album show his own aggression too. The one who has been asking to be loved can also hurt other people.

This song doesn’t develop much, and it leaves an uncomfortable aftertaste. It ends quickly, but that thought gets carried into the next song.

Shit Talk is the most fully developed piece on the whole album.

At over eight minutes, it has enough room to build up slowly. The guitar loop keeps a feeling of moving forward, other parts enter one after another, and the repeated phrases get heavier along the way. The lyrics have love and also the tiredness of no longer being able to stay together, and the tone is not always the same.

Toward the end, he leaves this line again and again.

I don’t wanna fight at all.

It has no rhetoric in itself, but among the voices and accompaniment that keep increasing, it carries more and more weight. The first time I heard it, it sounded like stating a position; after a few more listens, it sounded like a request, or like trying to convince himself.

This is where repetition really works. The same line gives no new information, but the changes in the sounds around it keep changing it. The earlier songs also used the method of stacking layer by layer, and Shit Talk does this more slowly and more completely, letting the listener stay inside it.

I really like its long outro. After the words stop, the music goes on for a while. The feeling just before was too dense, and it really does need this stretch as a buffer. It also lets the last song, There’s a World, land gently, with no need to make a bigger climax.

There’s a World is very short and lightly arranged. Placed here, it has the feeling of finally being able to turn your attention elsewhere. After listening to the whole album, when you think back to that sudden outburst at the opening, you find that the calm at the end did not come easily.

What moves me most about Javelin is still that it doesn’t treat singing softly as the only way to express things. Sufjan’s voice is very suited to telling private things, but the arrangements keep carrying those words outward. The harmonies, drums and electronic sounds sometimes support him and sometimes almost drown him.

This also puts distance between it and Carrie & Lowell. By the end of Javelin, what I remember is not only what he sang but also how those sounds joined in, bit by bit. One person speaks first, and the others follow. The question still hasn’t been answered, but by the end of the singing, it is no longer only his voice.