Wiki
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Length
4:43
As the closing song to "Carrie & Lowell", “Blue Bucket of Gold” doesn’t offer much closure. Sufjan reaches out to his surroundings for support–his friends, his faith–and finds nothing of note. He closes the album musically in an aura of sombre lament and lyrically by pleading for a promise that someone will be there for him like his mother never was.
The song gets its title from The Blue Bucket Mine, a lost rumored treasure site somewhere in the Oregon wilderness. Supposedly the gold or copper there was so abundant you could fill a blue bucket with it. As the discovery of this mine predated the California Gold Rush, it was a pretty big deal.
Sufjan’s personal blue bucket of gold (that is, a treasure he has only heard of and can hardly imagine) is probably a metaphor for his mother, who abandoned him when he was young. Just when she returned into his life, she died of cancer.
“I didn’t know (my mom) well in a lot of ways and I didn’t know how to say goodbye on the last track with articulation. So I quit playing piano and vocals and just stopped. I wanted to surrender her to the beyond with noises that sound bigger than just me.”
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