Many of us knew where the night was headed before Sufjan Stevens even took a breath. Pittsburgh wasn't going to be different from Baltimore, which was no different from Jersey City, where his "Hotline Bling" cover made its well-documented debut. A handful of YouTube videos and Setlist.fm logs took away the surprise at Heinz Hall, but you can imagine how much of a sidewind that original performance must have been. For his Jersey City audience, it might have felt like Oscar Isaac's out-of-nowhere dance sequence in Ex Machina—a jarring tonal shift from everything that preceded it, which somehow still worked as a natural progression.
And yet Stevens’ encore-capping take on "Hotline Bling" isn’t just another innocuous cover. Viewed as a YouTube artifact, the performance seems like nothing more than a surprisingly faithful tribute to Drake’s biggest pop moment—he hasn’t transformed it into a brooding, acoustic lullaby. But an isolated video tells very little about its context in the show. A majority of his main set consists of Carrie & Lowell in its entirety, but sequenced for an even more relentless assault on the tear ducts (sample section: "John My Beloved", "The Only Thing", "Fourth of July"). It’s a tour that finds Stevens performing the most gut-wrenching and personal material of his career, and these songs still visibly take a toll on him—he wiped his eyes when the lights came down after "No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross".
One of Carrie & Lowell’s most heartbreaking elements was its resolution, or lack thereof. Stevens ends the record on "Blue Bucket of Gold", a gentle song that echoes his pleas from earlier on the album, in search of unrequited validation from his mother. "Tell me you want me in your life," he begs throughout the track, even though he knows that it’s too late for her affirmation. By ending the record here, Stevens suggests that this loose thread is something he’ll grapple with for the rest of his life, and that it may not ease with the passing of time. Not coincidentally, he’s been concluding every main set on the tour with "Blue Bucket of Gold", which trails off into a nearly 10-minute long cyclone of noise.
But the miracle is, there's an encore—by not letting Carrie & Lowell’s closer get the last word, Stevens draws out the hopeful crescendo of "Should Have Known Better" over the show’s two-hour period. Before the Jersey City show, his encores typically consisted of a "hits" collection from Illinois, Seven Swans, and Michigan, and he still leaned on those highlights for the Pittsburgh date. But with the inclusion of "Hotline Bling" he’s giving us a gratifying update on his post-Carrie & Lowell life. The Sufjan Stevens back catalogue counts as a minor emotional reprieve from his current material, but "Hotline Bling" is a well-earned triumph.
At every show since Jersey City, he’s invited tour opener Gallant back out onstage to join in on the festivities, while projections of Drake’s face, the "Hotline Bling" single artwork, and various packaging for Drake’s Cakes appear on a screen behind them. As high-profile covers go, it falls into the category of polished karaoke—and that doesn’t have to be a knock. Stevens and Gallant perform it amiably, like the musical theater star who hits every note, but is still loose enough to make the whole bar laugh. They recreate hundreds of GIFs right before our eyes, leaving the tennis rackets and pizza boxes up to our imagination.
If we take Stevens at face value, he could be covering "Hotline Bling" because Drake is his self-proclaimed "spirit animal"—but he might be up to something else here. Earlier in the encore, Stevens broke his more than hour-long silence to deliver a monologue about living with "open eyes and open hearts," to look out for those around us who can use a shoulder to lean on or a set of ears. He’s a firm believer in the show as a shared experience between artist and listener. Although Stevens is the one baring his soul, he wants us to meet him halfway.
By covering a song as ubiquitous as "Hotline Bling", Stevens isn't just banking on a midpoint— he’s going all the way to ensure universal celebration. Aside from poptimist skeptics, parents who were dragged along for the show might be some of the only audience members who’d feel left out by a song of the moment. Material this inclusive is a far cry from the specificity of Carrie & Lowell.
Not all of us can relate to the precise trauma he details on record, but debilitating loss is among life's only guarantees. He understands that everyone walks into a Sufjan Stevens show with their own emotional baggage—whether it’s a roster of departed loved ones, or the people we can't imagine losing. Achieving a shared experience doesn't have to mean participating to the same degree, but for allowing the listener’s vulnerability to shine through. So when Stevens invites Gallant out for the final song, it’s an exuberant reward for everyone who’s spent the past two hours sifting through some serious shit.
Drake’s "Hotline Bling" is another old-guard Drake song about longing for a nebulous time, place, and lover; Sufjan’s "Hotline Bling" is a brilliant epilogue of survival. It’s some of our only concrete evidence, post-Carrie & Lowell, to suggest that he’s emerged from the darkness with fragments of joy intact. If Stevens can recover from his deepest valleys, swishing around onstage to a Drake song, then why can’t the rest of us?