Only three sense memories remain from the night my wife and I came home from the hospital after our daughter died, 10 years ago this May. My brother, sleeping like a dog on the couch behind us, a miserable sentinel. The warmth of my wife’s hot tears and breath on my face, inches from my own. And something else, in the background, playing over and over again: Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell.

Why would we do that to ourselves? The album that opens with “Death With Dignity,” the one whose most memorable chorus is a whispered “we’re all gonna die.” And yet I kept returning to the record player, flipping the album over and over. The album functioned as the bleakest kind of prayer, the one that doesn’t even ask for things, just offers a beseeching glance skyward: Notice me. Feel me.

In the myopia of my shock and early grief, I barely registered the complicated and brutal autobiographical truth of the record. Yes, it’s an album with a Polaroid on the cover, clearly from a personal collection, paired with two first names. Yes, the lyrics are so specific to one man’s experience as to approach the forensic: “When I was three, three maybe four….” And yet the thumbprint of tragedy, the outline and silhouette of grief, was all I needed from Carrie & Lowell. I gulped at it, greedily, again and again. My relationship to an album has rarely been more intense. Until this month, I couldn’t bear to put it back on. To me, it had become like a death march, or a funeral mass: music for use.

But Carrie & Lowell, newly reissued by Asthmatic Kitty with a modest addendum of bonus tracks and a gorgeous 40-page photo album, survives my bloodshot fixation because it is so formally perfect. The arrangements feel inevitable in the way the harmonic motion of a Bach suite feels inevitable. There isn’t a single breath on the album that doesn’t feel drawn with specificity. Play the opening of “Death With Dignity” while staring at a creek, and the rhythms of the opening guitar figure will naturally match up with the flow of the water.

There aren’t many artists who can capture and preserve this intimacy and intensity. There is an obvious comparison to Elliott Smith, who similarly matched up a shaky and tender vocal with arrangements that felt like you could stare straight through them. But not even Smith bared his soul as directly, simply, and plainly as Stevens does here. Smith was often obfuscating or misdirecting in his lyrics even when it seemed he was confessing, but Stevens lays it all out: times, places, dates, car models. The familiarity that I get from these songs is the same I get from a short story collection rooted in a specific setting—the Nevada of Claire Vaye Watkins’ Battleborn, the Wyoming of Annie Proulx’s Close Range. Stevens’ memories become sacred the more granular they become.

Sufjan Stevens is embarrassed by this album. Mortified, even. He has been commemorating its re-release by disavowing it point-blank. In the essay that accompanies its packaging, he calls it “painful, humiliating, and an utter miscarriage of bad intentions.” He went on NPR recently and stood firm in this rejection in the face of the host’s hesitant probing. Didn’t he find some pride, comfort, or peace in the fact that his album reached so many people? No, he could only say. He attempted to write the story of his mother, another human being whom he never truly understood, and who had taken whatever secrets she held with her. He was just a lost boy, making patterns in the air from his grief. “I don’t have any authority over my mother and her life or experience or her death,” he said. “All I have is speculation and my imagination and my own misery… I still don’t feel good about myself for making these songs.”

Watching Stevens castigate himself for self-loathing by performing more of it in public is poignant and painful. He captured the essential hopelessness of making art to replace a person in fewer lines on the album itself: “Nothing can be changed/The past is still the past/The bridge to nowhere,” he sang on “Should Have Known Better.” “What’s the point of singing songs/If they’ll never even hear you?” he asks on “Eugene.” Lurking inside Stevens’ refutation of Carrie & Lowell, deep beliefs insist themselves: The dead keep their secrets. We are left with nothing when they go save for a handful of cherished misconceptions. Death is real, and it’s not for making into art.

And yet: What if we belong to other people as much or more as we belong to ourselves? What if our real secrets are not a palmful of baubles we keep inside some protected box, but the stories the loved ones who followed us with their eyes, who lavished their wondering love on us, told themselves? In this view, we don’t take secrets with us when we die; we scatter them upon the earth in our passing like a flower releasing pollen. Maybe Sufjan holds more of his mother’s secrets than he takes credit for.

Or maybe the dead do abscond with all their mysteries intact, and we’ll always be outside, in the cold, yearning for the warmth of what they know. Maybe the songs Stevens wrote and recorded with his mother’s name and face on them represent the only way those of us left living generate warmth for ourselves. Stevens’ voice was the only sound I allowed to follow me into the darkest cavern. Even if his story was only ever for us, and never for his mother, we are transformed immeasurably, and for the better, by it.