The ambition of Sufjan Stevens! How many composers would attempt a symphony about an expressway? Much less pull it off—BQE is musically varied, hilarious, sometimes stirring, and ultimately joyous. I admit that if I didn’t know the concept and intention of the project, the music wouldn’t hit as deeply as it does. But the cover design, liner notes, and song titles are all part of the art. Surrounded by such signifiers, the music’s evocations are inevitable: traffic snarls, the grand skyline of NYC, midnight quiet, corruption buried under the asphalt. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway makes no one’s list of great public works. It’s just this fact, the American ordinariness of the BQE, its excess and ugliness and bland functionality, that makes the road such a great artistic subject. Maybe things appear banal because the virtue and debasement they’re made of neutralize each other. Stevens’s great achievement is to recover these ingredients and rearrange them in just such a way as to reveal the magic of it all. 9
Sufjan Stevens. The BQE. Asthmatic Kitty, 2007. Reviewed June 21, 2025. Notable tracks: “Movement IV—Traffic Shock,” “Movement III—Linear Tableau with Intersecting Surprise,” “Movement VII (Finale)—The Emperor of Centrifuge.”