Song of the Week delves into the fresh songs we just can’t get out of our heads. Find these tracks and more on our Spotify Top Songs playlist, and for our favorite new songs from emerging artists, check out our Spotify New Sounds playlist. This week, Sufjan Stevens returns with a spellbinding new track, “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?”
Sure, we all want to be loved. It’s a common side effect of our human condition, a catalyst for both bliss and carnage. Like many songwriters, Sufjan Stevens has studied consuming love and the crushing isolation without it. But on his new track, “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?,” a spellbinding offering from his forthcoming album Javelin, the songwriter has reached an urgent impasse. He wonders if that consuming, weightless feeling will ever truly arrive, and if so, when?
“Chase away my heart and heartache/ Run me over, throw me over, cast me out,” Stevens sings over a sparse string arrangement that recalls his early work. He requests that his body be burned and pushed off “into the void at last,” and asks to be washed, anointed with “that golden blade.” Stevens is no longer interested in the hope of love blossoming like flowers; he’d rather it flatten him in a stampede.
Stevens expands the scope of the song quickly, incorporating new voices, wandering instruments, and an emotionally charged climax. There’s a clear exchange of pleasure and pain throughout the song, with his masochistic requests contrasting the open-hearted instrumentation.
It all blends perfectly with the song’s touching music video, directed by regular Stevens collaborator Stephen Halker. Throughout vast, winding landscapes, we’re given kaleidoscopic images of people in all stages of life, of color collages and cars, of families and children and dogs and drag queens, and of Stevens’ own Javelin album cover. As the song picks up in energy, the presentation of these images expand accordingly, eventually turning into a dizzying array of colors, shapes, and faces.
It’s a wonderful combination of Sufjan Stevens at his most intimate and his most widescreen — the soft glory from Seven Swans combined with the courageous candor of The Age of Adz. Few songwriters are capable of depicting this existential crossroads with such pointed liberation, with such a strong, evocative vocabulary, with so much despair and ecstasy all at once. Sufjan Stevens makes it feel like love should — effortless.
— Paolo Ragusa
Associate Editor
