admin Stevens has always been gifted at blending pain and hope, and that gift has never been more evident than on Javelin; it’s impossible (at least for me, and anecdotally, for everyone I’ve talked to about the album) to listen without crying, particularly to the heartrending song “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?” And I can’t help thinking that Javelin presents an opportunity for collective catharsis that many of us desperately need.
U.S. society has never been particularly good at carving out space and time for grief. Many have found themselves left behind by the back-to-business governmental response to the pandemic in recent years, and there is currently no federally guaranteed right to bereavement leave for workers who have lost family and/or loved ones. (Even in relatively progressive California, where most workers are entitled to up to five bereavement days following the death of a family member, the question occurs: Is there a single-digit number of days off that can accommodate such an ancient agony?) All this makes it all the more important for our cultural artifacts to give us space to process our heartache. “I take my suffering as I take my vows,” sings Stevens on “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?” proclaiming the necessity of wedding yourself to your pain if you ever hope to truly excise it.
About six years ago, I found myself going through a particularly hard time that—while existing safely within the confines of what a former therapist of mine liked to call “small-T trauma”—left me regularly crying in my car on the way to work and too exhausted to even unfreeze a Trader Joe’s meal for dinner when I got home, instead repairing to my room for takeout I couldn’t taste, couldn’t afford, and didn’t really want. I knew on some level that I could have talked to my friends or my family about what was going on with me, but I felt ashamed to take up their time with what felt like the small-potatoes woes that were consuming me; I lay in bed and wept instead, listening to Jeff Buckley and Elizabeth Fraser’s rendition of “All Flowers In Time Bend Toward the Sun” over and over on repeat over the course of weeks’ worth of sleepless nights.
