Sufjan Stevens ‘Mystery of Love’ Demo on ‘Carrie & Lowell’ Reissue

Sufjan Stevens dug deep into his archives while reflecting on the anniversary of Carrie & Lowell, his stirring seventh studio album released exactly 10 years ago today. The musician will release an expanded edition of the record on May 30, but his starting point isn’t one of the original 11 songs on the album. Instead, Stevens rediscovered the “Mystery of Love” with the sobering demo of the song he later released in 2017.

This version of “Mystery of Love” is more intensely present than the original, which coated Stevens’ voice in thick layers of haze. There were no notable changes to the lyrical content between recordings, but with the demo comes a flurry of archival footage to contextualize the emotional performance. Carrie & Lowell (10th Anniversary Edition) will arrive with a 40-page art book containing four generations worth of family photos, images captured by the musician, and drawings reflecting the weighted themes present across the album. It also contains a new essay from Stevens.

“Mystery of Love” is one of five demos that will appear on the reissue, joining “Death With Dignity,” “Should Have Known Better,” “Eugene,” and “The Only Thing.” The other two tracks that close out the second disc of the release include “Wallowa Lake Monster (Version 2)” and “Fourth of July (Version 4).”

“Carrie & Lowell is presented in its full form once again, alongside a glimpse of the different roads it could have taken,” a description of album reads. “There are new corners to explore, photographic realising of moments previously only lyrically painted, direct reflection from the album’s creator, subtly different weight on certain syllables that speak to Sufjan’s mind right before he shared it with the world.”

The new artwork for Carrie & Lowell centers an image of Stevens’ mother and stepfather, enshrined in a crackling polaroid weathered by time. In the white space below the image, their names are marked down in pink ink with his sister’s handwriting. His relationship with his mother was complicated in life, and no less so following her death in 2012.

“With this record, I needed to extract myself out of this environment of make-believe,” Stevens told Pitchfork in 2015. “It’s something that was necessary for me to do in the wake of my mother’s death — to pursue a sense of peace and serenity in spite of suffering. It’s not really trying to say anything new, or prove anything, or innovate. It feels artless, which is a good thing. This is not my art project; this is my life.”