Released in 2016, Andy Shauf’s fifth album, The Party, marked the moment when the Saskatchewan-reared singer-songwriter ceased to be one of Canada’s best kept secrets by earning him a wide release through Anti- Records, nominations for the Polaris Music Prize and Juno Awards, and accolades from indie icons like Jeff Tweedy. A wry storyteller in the tradition of Randy Newman and Paul Simon, with a McCartney-esque flair for ornate yet irreverent arrangements, Shauf designed The Party as a concept album where each song served as an eavesdropping portal into different micro-dramas playing out between the attendees. And like all visionary directors, Shauf revised a number of his scenes—and cut some altogether—en route to finalizing his masterpiece. the afterparty compiles a number of demos that highlight both the melancholic soul of Shauf’s songs (like an early pass at “the magician” stripped of its signature strings) and his determination to continually sculpt his songs into their optimal shape: Somewhere on its way to the finish line, “begin again” lost this demo’s chiming introductory refrain to thrust us right into the action mid-conversation. But beyond providing these glimpses into Shauf’s creative process, the afterparty introduces us to some characters that got left off the guest list the first time around, like the globetrotting would-be girlfriend he’s pining for on the jaunty, clarinet-sweetened “angela the traveller” and the loutish loudmouth at the center of “the interrupter,” an atypical post-dubstep experiment that suggests Shauf was tuning into James Blake as much as James Taylor. Our Favorite Track: The previously unreleased “losing,” which chronicles Shauf’s narrator on his drunken stumble home to a partner who’s pretending to be asleep so that she doesn’t have to deal with him. The song reaffirms Shauf’s gift for crafting folky soft-rock ballads as pristine as his characters are messy.