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.