Pick four songs from any band and you can tell a lot about their sound. This summer, I’m featuring #RockBlocks, four picks from bands across various genres. They might be wildly different from each other, but what binds them together is the fact that they’re all a part of my life soundtrack.

Carrie & Lowell reminds me a lot of Beck’s Sea Change album. A recording born out of personal loss, featuring minimal instrumentation. Sufjan is often at his best with this stripped down sound, and this album was a return to those indie folk roots after a period of electronic exploration. As the opening track, “Death with Dignity” was a warm welcome back to Sufjan’s acoustic side.

I believe it will go down as one of Sufjan’s greatest songs. The musical scales are a vast playground for his melody. On “Death with Dignity”, his vocals climb, jump, soar, sit still and lay down, a self-contained metaphor for everything he must’ve been feeling after losing his mother. The song also proves that Sufjan never lost his acoustic touch. He was just off exploring other musical outlets there for a bit, like all the great music artists do.

“Spirit of my silence, I can hear you, but I'm afraid to be near you.”