Is this the best album you haven’t heard?

SUFJAN Stevens has been around and releasing music for over 20 years now but the Indie folk star has not hit the heights his stellar songwriting deserves.

His 2015 album Carrie and Lowell is a modern-day classic for fans of the singer-songwriter genre and may critics named the album the best of that year. With many critics giving the album five stars.

Steven’s has a unique style of song smithing he is reminiscent of songwriting greats Elliot Smith, Jeff Buckley and Nick Drake.

His music is effortlessly melancholic but unlike some more down-tempo songwriters who could send you into an unwanted pit of despair his music can be described as ‘happy sad.

The second song on Carrie and Lowell and the most well-known song on the album ‘Should’ve Known Better’ is a prime example of Stevens’s work. The track starts off with a jangly acoustic guitar while his unusual singing voice dances around the melody. Stevens is not a classic ‘good singer’ but his voice is intriguing and different he is often compared to cult 90s singer-songwriter Eliot Smith and there is a striking resemblance.

Also like Smith Stevens is a very good lyricist. His words are often more in a poetic style rather than a narrative one like some of the other songwriters in the genre. A good example of this is in the song ‘John My Beloved’. Stevens sings, “Beloved of John, I get it all wrong. I read you for some kind of poem. Covered in lines, the fossils I find. Have they no life of their own?”

I am guessing most people do not know what they mean or even of they have a meaning but the structure and way the fit the melody is brilliant

‘Carrie and Lowell’ is an album that could be described as timeless. If someone played this album to me and told me it was by a singer from the 1960s or 70s I would believe them.