Give Me Your Ugly

Most New Yorkers associate the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway with exasperating bumper-to-bumper cab rides to the airport. The idea of rhapsodizing in song about the experience is hardly amusing. So why in the world did Sufjan Stevens, who had carte blanche to mythologize anything in Brooklyn when he was commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the Next Wave Festival, choose the BQE?

Stevens concedes the roadway lacks a certain charm. “It’s really in disrepair. It’s badly constructed, falling apart and always really choked with traffic.” Hmm. Perfect material for a symphony; so much for writing about the rites of spring.

Once upon a time, Sufjan Stevens’ shows didn’t sell out within nanoseconds of their being announced. But his indie rock cachet worked in his favor to attract an audience to hear a 30-minute instrumental piece about a despised roadway: Nary a ticket is left for all three performances of The BQE. The piece will be performed by Stevens and an ensemble composed of a small chamber orchestra and accompanied by a 16-millimeter film shot on the highway. Oh, and a bevy of hula hoopers. The rest of the show will feature songs from his six albums.

Stevens specializes in dramatizing the neglected, the downtrodden and the unpopular in our shared American identity—like John Wayne Gacy, Mary Todd Lincoln—so picking the interstate has a certain poetic justice.

“I think there’s a little more to learn about people through the lack of beauty,” he explains. “I’m not really sure why I’m obsessed with the underbelly of American society, but maybe it’s because of where I come from.” As many fans of the idiosyncratic singer-songwriter know, Stevens hails from Detroit, one of America’s legendary underbellies, although for the last seven years he’s been living in another unheralded treasure, Brooklyn. Although he says he’s still a Midwesterner at heart, his home right now is in Kensington and his studio and record label, Asthmatic Kitty, is smack dab under the bridge in Dumbo. Still, Brooklyn has many more romantic locales than the BQE, no?

Describing it as an ugly concrete, steel and metal expressway, he says: “I guess it’s your least likely national monument. If you were to summarize New York or Brooklyn with an icon, you’d probably choose the Brooklyn Bridge or the Statue of Liberty. Just living here, I find the BQE is a much more interesting subject because it’s so disliked, yet it’s something you’re forced to deal with in your everyday life in Brooklyn.”

Besides championing historical “treasures,” Stevens is a patriotic American preoccupied with delineating who we are as a nation and how we differ regionally. Will New York be the third state in his proposed song cycle for each of the 50 states? He says not. “In order to write an entire album about New York, I’d have to leave the city.” Anyway, lately he’s been vacillating about whether he’ll profile every state, but he says The BQE relates to a greater vision he has of stories about cities and expressways. “I seem to have a strange fascination with cars,” he continues.

As director of the short film accompanying the music, though, he himself drove back and forth on the highway with a camera mounted atop his car, aided by a cameraman. The film is more literal, not a narrative but basically photographs of different vantage points of the expressway, which Stevens describes as “incredibly concrete, very stark, bold, mundane, ordinary.” Most of it was filmed with a 16 mm Bollex camera from the 1960s as well as in Super 8 mm.

When I ask Stevens his favorite thing about Brooklyn, he tells me, “The BQE.” Yeah, right, I reply. More laughter: Stevens is a natural charmer. “There are little sections of the BQE that are sublime. I was kayaking in Newtown Creek under the Kosciuszko Bridge at night surrounded by waste recycling plants. That was pretty fascinating. The water was really dirty, oily polluted water. And I saw on the edge of the river what looked like a little hermit crab, and I couldn’t believe it. It was living and it was happy and well.” Ditto for Sufjan Stevens who, like the little crab, is also happy to be living in Brooklyn, celebrating his adopted urban home in glorious music.

Nov. 1-3, BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, 30 Lafayette Ave., B’klyn, 718-636-4100; 8, $20-$50 (SOLD OUT).