Sufjan Stevens Launches North American Tour at Academy of Music Tonight

To celebrate the release of his album Carrie & Lowell, singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Sufjan Stevens will tour North America beginning in Philadelphia at the Academy of Music tonight, April 10 at 8 p.m.

Carrie & Lowell is the follow up album to 2010's The Age of Adz, which Stevens' performed to a sold out crowd at the Academy of Music in November 2010. His return to the Academy of Music will include his 14-piece ensemble and a performance of new works from Carrie & Lowell, set to be released March 31 on Stevens' own Asthmatic Kitty Records, as well as treasured gems, such as "Chicago" from 2005's Illinois.

Carrie & Lowell was recorded by Stevens alongside Casey Foubert, Laura Veirs, Nedelle Torrisi, Sean Carey, Ben Lester and Thomas Bartlett and mixed by Stevens, Bartlett and Pat Dillet. Thematically the 11 songs address life and death, love and loss, and the artist's struggle to make sense of the beauty and ugliness of love. The album is named for Stevens' mother and stepfather and is a return to Stevens' folk roots. Watch a trailer for the album HERE

"Stevens gets points for daring to follow his instinct for near total re-invention and for the plain fact that no matter how hard he tries to break his sound down to drum machine beats, glitchy synths and screaming guitar clotted noise - as he does on the frankly difficult The Age Of Adz - he can't help but make beautiful music when he simply sings and plays an acoustic instrument." -Dan Deluca of the Philadelphia Inquirer on Stevens' 2010 Academy of Music performance.

Tickets are available from $35 to $40, and can be purchased at the Kimmel Center Box Office on Broad and Spruce Streets, online at www.KimmelCenter.org or charge by phone at 215-893-1999.

A singer-songwriter currently living in Brooklyn, NY, Sufjan Stevens' preoccupation with epic concepts has motivated two state records (Michigan & Illinois), a collection of sacred and biblical songs (Seven Swans), an electronic album for the animals of the Chinese zodiac (Enjoy Your Rabbit), two Christmas box sets (Songs for Christmas, vol. 1-5 and Silver & Gold, vol. 6-10), and a BAM-commissioned programmatic tone poem for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (The BQE). In 2010 Stevens released an expansive EP (All Delighted People) and the full length The Age of Adz, a collection of songs partly inspired by the outsider artist Royal Robertson.

Stevens recently collaborated with New York City Ballet choreographer and dancer Justin Peck on Year of the Rabbit, a modern dance program set to a classical orchestration of Enjoy Your Rabbit and an original orchestral score commissioned for Peck's ballet Everywhere We Go. Stevens' second BAM commission Round-Up, an instrumental accompaniment to slow-motion rodeo footage, recently premiered at BAM's Harvey Theater.