“Cut up” has never been Stevens’ most comfortable mode, but luckily, the rest of the album settles into more fitting ones. With the benefit of hindsight, you can start to hear the ghosts of beloved solo Sufjan songs moving around inside some of these Christmas originals: “Justice Delivers Its Gift,” originally recorded in 2010, now sounds like a dry run for “Should Have Known Better,” which he’d release five years later. Meanwhile “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!,” recorded in 2003, carries spindly echoes of “Casimir Pulaski Day,” which didn’t see release until 2005.
Even at their most melancholy, his Christmas songs somehow feel inclusive, maybe just because there are always so many other voices in them, including contributions from Richard Reed Parry, Gabriel Kahane, Aaron and Bryce Dessner, Sebastian Krueger, and others. Just as with a caroling group, you can’t really pick out who is doing what, nor are those distinctions terribly important—what matter is the warmth and presence massed voices, the homey way they peel apart a little bit at the very edges, as often happens with impromptu group music making.
So why is Stevens giving us this compilation now? Maybe combing through his multiple LPs feels like pulling out the tangled nest of Christmas lights from the back closet, and he made this for our convenience. Maybe the sentimental appeal of a single volume reminded Stevens of the well-loved Bing Crosby Christmas LPs you can still find at antique-store dollar bins right now. Maybe he was just feeling sad, like a lot of us do at Christmas, and reached for the consolation of familiar rituals.
2026 has been a year of gradual reemergence for Stevens. His longtime partner, Evans Richardson, died in April 2023, and he was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré Syndrome that same August. September marked Stevens’ first onstage appearance in eight years, and he quietly appeared alongside his friend and Hudson Valley neighbor Meg Lui, whose recent debut album he helped record and produce. “This Christmas (It Only Gets Better),” the lone new song, plays like an atonement and confession (“I admit I am a misanthropic man/I only see the worst in things, I guess”). But he reaches out a hand to us in the chorus, his voice quavering: “Will it get much worse, my friend?” before offering something like a benediction: “Don’t put it past the Earth/To get better in the end.”
