Sufjan Stevens tells Laura Snapes how one of New York’s many infamous bridges inspired his most ambitious project to date.

“I drove to New York in a van, with my friend, I don’t mind, I don’t mind,” sang Sufjan Stevens on ‘Chicago’. “I was in love with the place, in my mind, in my mind.” It’s an easy sentiment to grasp for those of us who have only experienced New York as the homey cupid of Nora Ephron’s films or Woody Allen’s nonchalant show-stealer, and the mildest lyrical evidence of Stevens’ meticulous obsession with psychogeography. Somewhat infamous for what’s become the ‘Chinese Democracy’ of the indie pop world, around the releases of ‘Michigan’ and ‘Illinois’ he announced that he’d be embarking on a project to chronicle the lore of all 50 American states. The project appears to be on an unofficial hiatus (as much as a potentially tongue-in-cheek concept can be seen as fitting a definite schedule), but his interest in the minutiae of human relationships to places is alive in ‘The BQE’.

A seven movement, predominantly classical yet eccentric dissection of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, Stevens’ typically blustering and intensely detailed titles have been replaced by quasi-theoretical terms like ‘Isorhythmic Nightdance with Interchanges’ and ‘Liner Tableau With Intersecting Surprise’, but the project is by no means a by numbers approximation of his previous work. Amidst ‘Fantasia’-like bursts of barely containable flute and skittering belches of ‘Enjoy Your Rabbit’ era electronica sits a composition that peals through the colour spectrum with the adult naivety of Wes Anderson curating a particularly fanciful coronation. What with a comic book detailing the adventures of the “Hooper Heroes” (a trio of extra-terrestrial superhero sisters, naturally) and a Viewmaster reel accompanying the release, its cinematic vibrancy makes it hard to fathom Stevens’ motivation to accept the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s invitation to compose a piece for the dull weather-coloured concrete slump, a film of which will accompany the release. Only the introduction, ‘Prelude on the Esplanade’, echoes the chaotic drone of the road.

Built between 1939 and 1964, the BQE was part of the manifestation of planner Robert Moses’ governmentally enabled vision of “lungs for the city”; the opportunity to equip New York with the roads to facilitate the notion born in the 1920s of driving as a leisurely pursuit rather than a necessity. However, his decadently utopian vision has been blamed for the ghettoization of New York’s outer boroughs. Biographer Robert Caro implied that Moses was racist, building bridges too low for public transport buses to drive under, thus excluding the poorer communities who couldn’t afford cars from travelling to the pleasure parks and beaches of NY’s surrounding islands. The 12.7 mile stretch of road is plagued with fatal accidents arising from its confusing entrances and exits, and is widely considered an eyesore – each year sees several plans to cover parts of it over.

“The BQE is a physical, literal impediment, in actual concrete terms, and a terrifying obstacle in psychological terms,” Stevens told Epigram. “One must walk around, below, above it. There is no give and take with these mammoth urban roadways that interrupt our ordinary lives in the city. Such a mess it’s created of multiple neighbourhoods: Carrol Gardens, Redhook, Williamsburg, Astoria.”

The beauty of Stevens’ perfectionist composition is quite at odds with the construction of the concrete nightmare, mirroring little in circumstance other than meeting their respective creators’ grandiose ends and coming to fruition in the wake of an economic downturn. Though neither of these aspects seem particularly consequential to Stevens’ work. Instead, ‘The BQE’ seems to share certain artful genes with Steve Reich’s ‘Different Trains’ piece. The Kronos Quartet commissioned Reich in 1988, and the resulting composition explored instruments performing the canonical repetition of human voices (a technique which surely prefigured Charles Spearin’s ‘Happiness Project’ and features instrumentally in ‘The BQE’) including Holocaust survivors ruminating on the single journeys millions of Jews were forced to take to Auschwitz.

“I travelled back and forth between New York and Los Angeles from 1939 – 1942 accompanied by my governess,” Reich once explained. “Whilst these trips were exciting and romantic at the time, I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride very different trains.”

That’s absolutely not to say that Sufjan’s well-documented Christianity could have had the possibility to negatively impact on his life in the same way – to suggest so would be an insult to the memories of the millions of Jewish lives lost, and to imply prejudice against his faith. Rather, the comparison questions whether he accepted the invitation to compose ‘The BQE’ – which encompasses a number of jazz influences – as a comment on the racial divide that the road originally, and by all accounts intentionally, provoked?

“A road doesn’t compete, symbolically, with the Holocaust,” he says. “Of course this project should not be measured on those terms. It’s not genocide. It’s not life or death here [although the road is a frequent site of fatalities]. But road building in the modern tradition (landscaping nature with highways, etc.) is most certainly an assault on humanity. We’ve destroyed the natural sequence of events with our love of the automobile.”

Stevens has a history of making the extraordinarily ugly into a beautiful artefact – take ‘John Wayne Gacy, Jr.’ from ‘Illinois’, the tale of a serial child molester and murderer made ever more devastating by his faintly trembling half whisper – and complex instrumentation and theories aside, the allegories he uses to describe his relationship with the bridge suggest that the same simple and unerring faith in beauty lives on in ‘The BQE’.

“I no longer see this road as a means of funneling traffic. I tried to make sense of it, but it's only grown larger, taking the shape of Ahab's whale; I've been devoured by it. I reside in bowels holding fast to the memory of Jonah. “

Laura Snapes