Fourth of July
Sufjan Stevens does not write a lot of happy songs. Ambitious? Breathtaking? Bardic? Sure. He swims in grief—letting it lap over him, pooling handfuls, submerging for long intervals—while sunlight penetrates the water and reflects off the surface. Although we are just entering (an unusually cold and rainy) June, I thought of “Fourth of July” this week when I read about Senator Ernst throwing everyone under the bus at a townhall with her flippant, “We’re all gonna die” (a refrain in the song) response to proposed Medicaid cuts and outraged constituents. It’s Pride month, y’all. I am not giving any more space than necessary to casual nihilism.
Stevens has persevered through a lot. His mother, Carrie, struggled with schizophrenia and substance use disorder and left him as a young child, which he recollects in “Should Have Known Better.” She died of stomach cancer in 2012. His longtime partner passed away in 2023. A few months later, he was diagnosed with Guillain–Barré syndrome, an autoimmune disorder that affects the peripheral nervous system. He had to relearn how to walk and is still recovering. The album, Carrie & Lowell (2015), deals with just the former, his mother’s agonizing end.
“Fourth of July” is a fictional exchange of good wishes and musings from her deathbed. Although he was physically present with her in those final weeks—as much as his touring schedule allowed—the pain and medication made her hard to reach: “I don't have any authority over my mother and her life or experience or her death. All I have is speculation and my imagination and my own misery, and in trying to make sense of it all.” Most therapists (and any good friend) will tell you that closure is something we give ourselves. Often, the meaning we derive from painful endings and unfinished stories is all that is available to us when healing from a person whose absence from (or presence in) our lives deeply wounded us. We can not expect emotional presence from someone who has only offered emotional distance. He reflected, “It was so terrifying to encounter death and have to reconcile that, and express love, for someone so unfamiliar.”
“Fourth of July” is an expression of care, acceptance, and unconditional love while holding that truth. It doesn’t have the shimmering melody of “Death with Dignity” or the “The Only Thing,” but the imagery Stevens conjures is gorgeous. He refers to Carrie as a “star in the sky,” and pleads—as if to hold and encompass her—“Oh, could I be the sky.” On the newly released Version 4 of the track, I think he succeeds in this endeavor. At nearly 14 minutes long, “Fourth of July” morphs into an empyrean meditation on all the world’s fires eventually burning out as the “Tillamook burn,” a series of devastating forest fires in Oregon between the 1933 and 1951; an annual fireworks display; or the life of a vivacious but unknown (to him) woman. Despite such lyricism, he has been highly self-critical of this album.
In an interview reflecting on the 10th Anniversary Edition, he shared: “Since I recorded Carrie & Lowell, I've been doing a lot more kind of new-age, ambient music. I think I'm starting to realize that that's my happy place: a world in which there is no content, there's no language, there's nothing being really explicitly said. There's just sound.”
My happy place is with words. Carefully selected flowers in a bouquet. But words do fail us at times, and the 2025 release of “Fourth of July” embraces that with overlapping synthesizer and acoustic piano reverb that echoes the passage and expansiveness of time. Grief is still with us and the will to endure: “…there's greater power in survival. And sometimes survival requires sensitivity and openness, and even subservience. I think I've just become a lot more subordinate to the chaos of the world around me and less inclined to fight it, because I'm starting to learn that you cannot create change by force: You just have to move through it, and be open to transformation.”
Hilton, Robin. “10 Years later, Sufjan Stevens offers a startling reevaluation of ‘Carrie & Lowell’.” NPR, 27 May 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/05/27/1253209950/sufjan-stevens-interview-carrie-and-lowell. Accessed 3 June 2025.