Of all of this year’s Academy Award nominees for Best Original Song, Sufjan Stevens’s “Mystery of Love,” from “Call Me by Your Name,” was the only entry promising little in the way of absolution. “But love is stronger, stronger than them all,” Mary J. Blige bellows in “Mighty River,” from “Mudbound.” In “Stand Up for Something,” from “Marshall,” Common and Andra Day demand optimism: “Do the best that you can do / Then you can look in the mirror, proud of who’s looking back at you.” The actress Keala Settle offers further affirmation in “This Is Me,” from “The Greatest Showman”: “I know that there’s a place for us, for we are glorious!” And Miguel, in “Remember Me,” from “Coco,” goes so far as to suggest eternal life: “If you close your eyes and let the music play / Keep our love alive, I’ll never fade away.”
But “Mystery of Love” is about settling, calmly, into desperation. Its principal lesson is that sometimes love does not conquer all. The song deepens and echoes the emotional arc of “Call Me by Your Name,” which recounts the intoxication of love and the gravity of heartbreak, how it obliterates everything:
A horrifying thing, how vulnerable we are to rapture! Both “Mystery of Love” and “Visions of Gideon,” another song Stevens wrote for “Call Me by Your Name” (it plays, memorably, as Elio, the story’s protagonist, reckons with the irrevocability of what he’s lost), feel consonant with the starkness and beauty of “Carrie & Lowell,” Stevens’s seventh and most recent record. “Carrie & Lowell” is, in a way, a concept album about grief: Carrie, Stevens’s mother, died in 2012, but her struggles with depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia meant that she was effectively absent all his life. How does a person reconcile with an empty space? On “No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross,” Stevens, singing in a brittle falsetto, confesses his hopelessness: “Fuck me, I’m falling apart.” But voicing sorrow doesn’t always ease it. “It really offered no catharsis or resolution or reconciliation for me,” he later said, of the album.
New Yorker writers on the 2018 Academy Awards.
Stevens, of course, did not win the Oscar—the prize went to Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, who co-wrote “Remember Me.” (They also won the award in 2014, for “Let It Go,” from “Frozen.”) But Stevens did perform with an all-star band, including his former collaborator St. Vincent, the bluegrass musician Chris Thile, and the singer Moses Sumney. Folk musicians tend to underline their earnestness with a conspicuously unadorned stage, but Stevens’s shows are often elaborate, replete with costumes and bespoke sets—blatant fabrications that temper the intimacy of his songwriting. I first saw Stevens live in 2004, when he’d just released “Seven Swans,” a tender record about God. He played in a little movie theatre in Harrisonburg, Virginia, as part of the Mid-Atlantic College Radio Conference, and wore an enormous pair of white, feathery angel wings. Years later, at the Bowery Ballroom, in New York, in support of a record about the state of Illinois, he and his backing band dressed as cheerleaders, with an orange “I” stamped across each of their chests. When he released “The Age of Adz,” a frantic dance record, in 2010, he performed in a black-and-neon jumpsuit.
The Oscars telecast is a preposterous event, but occasionally something extraordinary happens: a brief, pure moment. In 1998, it was Elliott Smith singing “Miss Misery,” from “Good Will Hunting,” in an ill-fitting white suit. (James Horner and Will Jennings won that year, for “My Heart Will Go On,” from “Titanic.”) This year, Stevens wore a pink-and-black-striped jacket, decorated with dragons, and an oversized bow tie. Though he favors a vapory whisper, he is a tense and precise singer. He rose from below the stage and ran through a less-than-two-minute version of the song—short, but in a particularly wrenching way. This, too, felt resonant with the relationship in “Call Me by Your Name.” Before you can even understand what something is, or what it means to you, it’s over.
Luca Guadagnino, the director of “Call Me by Your Name,” recently called Stevens “one of the greatest American artists.” Stevens has turned down offers to write for movies before; in a recent interview, he said that “putting songs in films is often reckless and distracting and manipulative.” This time, though, he was responding to the “idea of first love being really irrational and sensational, and feeling boundless in its experience.” The airiness of his performance felt germane to the infinitude of mourning, the way in which pain seems to take up all the space in the world. Until, one day, it doesn’t.
