Sufjan Stevens Can Make an Expressway Beautiful

It was, for all intents and purposes, a masterpiece. As the second installment of what he promised to be a series of albums about the fifty states, in 2005, Sufjan Stevens gave us Illinois, and the world took notice. In the album, Carl Sandburg haunts Stevens in a dream, there are strange, self-comparisons to a serial killer, and of course, some New Age Christian musings. Illinois instantly became one of the greatest albums of the decade, and as fans, we eagerly awaited his next dispatch.

For almost five years, we got basically nothing. Save for a Christmas album with some songs that predated Illinois. It was a reason to worry. How would the young artist create beautiful albums about Oregon, Montana, and Mississippi, if he could go four years without releasing anything but a holiday album? Was he maybe in hiding, soon to reveal a series of albums? Was this simply a quixotic quest, the ramblings of a huge ego, or a great publicity stunt? Recently in an interview, we found out that it may have indeed been the latter, and Stevens’ grand ambitions to sing of hula dancers in Hawaii, or Chinese immigrants that helped build the railroads, may never have even been in the pipeline. So that brings us to the question, what was Sufjan working on all that time?

We got the answer as Stevens unveiled an even more idiosyncratic project in the form of The BQE, a grandiose love letter to the 11 mile expressway that goes through the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. Commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Stevens took the helm as director, co-cinematographer, amateur photographer, liner note writer, and of course, composer for the soundtrack of this rolling, wordless documentary that takes something as mundane, and often times, nerve wracking, as the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and turns it into something that is living, breathing, and utterly breathtaking. For those of you unable to catch it in it’s live presentation, Asthmatic Kitty has released it as a DVD with a companion CD. It’s well-worth your time and money, because whether we are zooming into the night, or caught in gridlock, Stevens does something on par with the opening sequence of Woody Allen’s Manhattan; he sets the beauty and the grit of New York City against a sonic backdrop that is at some points an homage to Leopold Stokowski’s musical direction in Fantasia, and at other points, Steve Reich or Philip Glass’ minimalism. It is flashing lights, Isuzu and GMC grills, beautiful girls hula hooping, the greatest city in the world, and Sufjan Stevens once again proclaiming that he is a fucking genius.

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