The Most Depressing Album of the Year Is John Legend’s Sufjan Stevens-Produced Children’s Album
Consider yourself warned.
“John Legend Announces Kids Album Produced by Sufjan Stevens” sounds like the kind of random Mad Libs headline I would have made up to test out a new CMS feature back at my old job running Pitchfork’s news section. Shockingly, though, it is a real thing that actually exists in the real world. The album is called My Favorite Dream and it came out in August. You probably haven’t heard it, unless you are a superfan of EGOT-winning, wedding-playlist staple John Legend, or a superfan of indie folk hero Sufjan Stevens, or a caregiver of a young child who is desperate for something new to play in the car. (I fall into the latter category.)
I am here to warn my fellow grown-ups: This album is extremely depressing. I cried multiple times while listening to it. This shouldn’t have been a surprise. If you’re familiar with Stevens’ work, you know that he specializes in songs biomechanically engineered to extract liquid from tear ducts. His discography is a taxonomy of grief, longing, spiritual searching, and the mystery of love. Even his Christmas songs can be pretty sad. Why on earth would John Legend, a man whose phenomenally successful career is built upon a foundation of relentless positivity and hope for a better world, decide to make an album for children with this guy? “I have been a fan of his for like 20 years,” Legend told the AP. “When I was writing these songs, my first thought of who I wanted to produce this was Sufjan, because I love how dreamy he can make music, and how whimsical, and how much character he has to everything that he makes. And I just felt like it would be the perfect energy for a children’s album.”
On the resulting album, Legend sings nine originals and a few covers (including “You Are My Sunshine,” objectively one of the saddest songs of all time) over Stevens’ orchestrations. About half of the tracklist gestures towards fun family singalongs, but the twee, oompah-ing horns can’t distract from the melancholy oozing from Stevens’ background vocals, leaking all over Legend’s velvety croons. And the other half is mournful, string-soaked lullabies. It is decidedly not “whimsical.” It is only “dreamy” if the dream he is referring to is the one from the second verse of “You Are My Sunshine,” which, if you forgot, goes like this:
The other night, dear
As I lay sleeping
I dreamed I held you
In my arms
When I awoke, dear
I was mistaken
So I hung my head and cried
The first clue that we weren’t exactly dealing with “Baby Shark” here came from an interview Legend and Stevens did with the L.A. Times, published shortly before the album’s release. “One of the main reasons I decided to do John’s album is because I hadn’t been able to really work on anything outside of self-care and rehabilitation,” Stevens said, alluding to his grief over the April 2023 death of his partner, Evans Richardson, as well as his September 2023 diagnosis with the debilitating autoimmune disorder Guillain-Barré syndrome. “I finally wanted to get back to work, but I didn’t really have the mental capacity to write my own music.”
Surely, easy-breezy fun times would ensue?
Stevens continued, “I think there’s also a general apocalyptic anxiety that pervades a lot of our culture today. What I love about these songs is that they focus on the kinds of aphorisms that speak directly to our fears and worries. You don’t have to be a kid to appreciate what he’s singing about.”
“General apocalyptic anxiety” pretty much sums up the mental state of many people these days, including myself. Perhaps if I hadn’t first encountered this album in the dreary weeks following the election, breathing air choked with smoke from brush fires in New York and New Jersey during a historic drought, the tears wouldn’t have flowed so freely. John Legend was a fixture on the Kamala Harris campaign trail; My Favorite Dream was released a week after he performed at the DNC. Now we live in a world in which a man who spread racist lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Legend’s hometown is going to be President again. No amount of Legend singing “Love, love, love/Makes you feel better/Love, love, love/Keeps us together,” is going to fix that.
Like a parent trying and failing to assuage their child’s anxieties with meaningless platitudes, so too does My Favorite Dream backfire spectacularly. “Always Come Back,” seemingly meant to assure children that Mommy and Daddy will always return from their business trips, is built on a bed of weepy Old Hollywood strings, culminating in a crescendo straight out of Sufjan’s Seven Swans. It reminds me of nothing so much as Fantine’s deathbed song in Les Miserables, as the dying prostitute hallucinates that her long-lost child is at her side. “Go to Sleep” is reminiscent of both the lullaby the dead mom sings to Elsa and Anna in Frozen 2 and Sufjan’s “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?”. “Safe,” with its promise that a pair of loving arms will always protect kids from harm, is ensconced in ethereal Sufjan harmonies a la “Mystery of Love” or “Should Have Known Better.” It sounds like it was written in a bomb shelter.
These songs wrecked me. Not in an “I’m watching a Disney movie and I’m welling up because parenthood is so emotional” way. Rather in an “Oh my god, the world is so fucked, why did I even have a child?” way.
Gotta go, I need to make an appointment with my therapist.
