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Stevens's symphony for New York

Source: The Guardian

Oct 27, 2009

Summary

When Sufjan Stevens was asked to write a symphony for New York, he turned to a hated freeway for inspiration. The musician tells Andrew Purcell why

The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is a miserable stretch of road. The BQE, as New Yorkers call it, has narrow lanes, no hard shoulder, countless potholes, and is usually one long traffic jam. As sources of artistic inspiration go, it's an unlikely one; but when eccentric singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens was commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music to write a symphony about the city he calls home, he immediately turned to this crumbling concrete flyover.

"It inspires loathing, resentment, anger," says Stevens of the BQE. He calls the work "a wilful romance with an object of scorn". If anyone can write a great song about a traffic jam, Stevens can. In the past, he has taken inspiration from the novelist Saul Bellow, the industrial decay of Detroit, the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, and the ghost of poet Carl Sandburg. The results often start as simple folk songs, then flower into ornate chamber pop, with an array

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