The voice you hear is generated, and the words are the ones printed below. Read along if you like.
Date Night — Listening
Some records ask to be played while you cook or tidy or talk, and some ask for the lights to be turned down and the room to be left alone. Carrie & Lowell is the second kind. It is a quiet album, and a quiet evening is the only fair way to meet it.
Sufjan Stevens released it in 2015 on Asthmatic Kitty, and it is about his mother Carrie and his stepfather Lowell Brams. It is hushed and close and unhurried, a record that sounds as if it were sung at arm’s length from you in a dim room. Play it for two people who are willing to sit still, and it becomes less like an album than like a shared silence with a voice in it.
THE EVENING
Plan a small supper and make it early, so the cooking is finished before the record begins. Something warm and plain that smells of autumn and asks for no attention once it is on the table. Apples, onions, a little sage, a pan that did its work in the oven while you laid two places. When the plates are cleared, the evening can turn from dinner to listening without anyone having to announce it.
Then turn the lamps down. Not off, only low, until the corners of the room go soft and the faces across from each other are lit from the side. Pull the chairs a little closer than the table wants, or move to the sofa, with a blanket across both laps if the night is cold. Put your phones in another room, because the album does not forgive an interruption.
Pour the calvados before the first track and pour it small. A glass of calvados, neat, belongs to this record for the same reason the apples belong to the supper: it is warm, a little sweet, and tastes of an orchard in the cold. Sip it slowly. It should last the whole of side one.
Make the rule at the start, and keep it kindly: no conversation until the last track has ended. It is harder than it sounds, and it is the point. Two people sitting in the same low light, hearing the same voice, with nothing to say until it is over, are doing something rare. You will find that you hear each other differently when the record stops.
Watch each other, now and then, without speaking. A glance across a glass in a dim room can hold more than the talk you would have had. If one of you is moved, let it be. If one of you reaches across, let that be too. The record is patient and has made room for all of it.
WHAT IT WILL DO
An album like this does not entertain. It gathers a room around a feeling and then holds still. By the middle of the record the two of you will have stopped performing the evening and begun simply living it, and that is the best thing a date can do. The quiet does the work that conversation sometimes cannot.
When the last track ends, do not rush to speak. Let the silence run as long as it wants. Then say whatever comes first, even if it is only a few words, and then ask the other person what they heard. The answers are often surprising, because everyone listens to a record about family with their own family in the room.
Leave the lamps low and the glasses where they are. There is no need to put anything away tonight. The record has done its work, the apples have done theirs, and the two of you have given an evening the thing it most wanted, which was your full attention.
From the kitchen: an autumn supper of pork and apples suits this record, and Pork chops with apples and cider, recipe by Nigel Slater, on BBC Food, can cook quietly while the light goes.
The album is easy to find, on Amazon, should you want it by the lamp at home.
Pairs with: Carrie & Lowell
POUR — A glass of calvados, neat.
MOOD — Lamps turned low, a small glass in each hand, and a record that asks for silence.
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