Asthmatic Kitty Records celebrates the ten-year anniversary of Carrie & Lowell with an expanded double-LP album that includes seven previously unreleased bonus tracks, a 40-page art book, and a new essay by Sufjan Stevens. The deluxe edition also offers an alternative cover: a full-framed version of the original Polaroid zoomed out to reveal the photo’s caption written in a child’s handwriting—“Carrie & Lowell”—disclosing the source of the album title (it was written by Sufjan’s sister Djamilah). The new edition was designed by Sufjan himself: the 40-page booklet contains various collages of vintage family photos spanning four generations interfused with artwork and drawings (on themes of death, dying, grief and the state of Oregon) as well as landscape photos Sufjan took while travelling across the western U.S. over a decade ago.

The original album is preserved on one disc, while disc two contains 40 minutes of extras, including demo versions of “Death With Dignity,” “Should Have Known Better,” “The Only Thing,” and “Eugene”. Expansive outtakes of “Fourth of July” and “Wallowa Lake Monster” are also included, both featuring a more cinematic mood. The final gem is the original demo of “Mystery of Love.” This song came from the original Carrie & Lowell album sessions but was later re-worked and re-recoded for Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name. The demo version here features solo guitar and voice with slightly altered lyrics.

The double LP is available on semi-transparent violet vinyl at retail stores worldwide and on blue and white custom color mix vinyl exclusively in the AKR store.

At the start of 2015 Sufjan’s catalog already included entries to his fifty-state project – Michigan (2003) and Illinois (2005). There was also Seven Swans (2004) which explored both the divine and the desolate in equally tender shades. Age of Adz (2005) flipped everything known about Sufjan on its head in a cacophony of grand, glitchy electronics and ever morphing structures. His catalog also included hours of Christmas music that appeared across 10 volumes with the release of Songs for Christmas and Silver and Gold (2006, 2012) or his cinematic suite, The BQE (2009).

Then, in March 2015, Carrie & Lowell arrived – Sufjan’s most personal album to date. The result of an immensely difficult process in which Sufjan’s songwriting – usually a salve – failed him in the wake of his mother’s death. He was eventually led out of a cycle of creative doubt with a rare handover of production duties to Thomas Bartlett. A return to Sufjan’s folk roots in its deliberate, sparse instrumentation, what came forth is presented with an unexpected clarity of vision. In wrestling with darkness and devastation, life and death, Sufjan was eventually able to begin making sense of the beauty and ugliness of love.

Carrie & Lowell was an instant critical success. Sufjan toured the album and personally connected his findings with his listeners, a beautiful hand-over of sorts happened – making these songs those of the listeners and their lives and losses and complexities. In the years that followed the music would weave itself, undimming, into the fabric of our shared culture. Since the album’s release the live tour was turned into a live album, so surprisingly celebratory and cathartic as to become something else entirely. We have since also heard outtakes, remixes, and iPhone notes via Sufjan’s The Greatest Gift mixtape as well as a collection of ‘Fourth of July’ versions that took one moment from the album and explored its every crevice.

Ten years on, this anniversary edition does things differently to those other treasures. Rather than deconstructing the album or building on it and continuing its legacy, here we are taken back to the moments leading up to and including its release. The album is presented in its full form once again, alongside a glimpse of the different roads it could have taken. In short, it is made to feel new again, to remind us of how it felt pressing play for the first time. 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.