Sufjan Stevens' gorgeous new album is what grown-up emotional music should sound like

Pain sounds better when it’s exaggerated.

There’s a self-evident history of music romanticizing pain: torch songs for abandoned relationships, dirges for tragic deaths, pleading hymns hoping to persuade. Dusty Springfield clawing at the ankles of a disinterested man walking out the door. Bonnie Raitt singing from the perspective of a man who shot his wife’s lover. There’s also a history of pain in Sufjan Stevens’ own discography: the desolation of 2003’s Michigan, the helplessness of "To Be Alone With You." But for Stevens, this pain has tended toward the universal, altruistic. It morphs the characters in his albums from lost, weary souls into messianic beings. He’s made a career out of catapulting dejected idols into untouchable,...

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Sufjan Stevens' gorgeous new album is what grown-up emotional music should sound like