I have no qualms about admitting 'Fifty States' was a gimmick

When Sufjan Stevens was asked to write a symphony for New York, he turned to a miserable stretch of road called the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway for inspiration. He tells ANDREW PURCELLwhy

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 of banjos, horns, oboes and glockenspiels.

According to Metacritic, a website which collates press reviews, Stevens’s concept album Illinois (the second in his Fifty States Project) was the most critically praised record of 2005. When New York Times columnist David Brooks decried hipster parents who “force-feed Brian Eno, Radiohead and Stevens” to their toddlers, it was proof he had reached the mainstream – despite releasing his records on Asthmatic Kitty, a tiny label he founded with his stepfather.

When we meet, Stevens has been driving up and down the hated road all day. His BQE symphony, just released as an album, forms the soundtrack to a film he made about the expressway. Shot on 8mm and 16mm film, it has the warm look of an old home movie. The score has echoes of Debussy, Gershwin and Copland; it’s the unabashedly optimistic sound of an earlier era, a time when New York’s skyscrapers sprang up and one of the world’s most famous skylines was born.

“It’s excessively romantic, with lots of dramatic, sweeping gestures,” Stevens says of the work. “I wanted it to be overblown, a little heightened – transforming an object of resentment into an object of beauty.”

Stevens cites Stravinsky and Strauss as inspirations, adding modestly that he stole from every composer he studied at Hope College in Michigan, for his arts degree. “I don’t have an incredible facility for composing and arranging. I’m really slow and clumsy. All I have is my ear, and all that time spent obsessing, writing with piano and guitar.”

As he produces and arranges his own albums, playing most of the instruments himself, this humility rings a little false, but Stevens certainly had an unconventional education.

His name was chosen by the leader of a religious community called Subud, which his parents briefly belonged to. His first school, following the principles of philosopher Rudolf Steiner, taught him to sew before he could count: Stevens still makes his own stage costumes.

He later rebelled against this permissive upbringing by becoming a Christian. His faith has informed many of his best songs, particularly on his 2004 breakthrough album Seven Swans, which closes with a description of the transfiguration of Christ.

During his recent US tour, Stevens was swooned over by men and women alike, particularly when at his most vulnerable, singing ‘Casimir Pulaski Day’, about the death of his teenage sweetheart. It was an odd gig, in which he tested out some new songs. These turned out to be sprawling, unexpectedly noisy progressive rock. At one point, he even disappeared into an extended guitar solo.

"The new songs are definitely more aggressive," he says. "I've been trying to challenge myself to be more explicit. I've always liked punk rock and Sonic Youth. I make that music privately, but I've never released it." His Fifty StatesProject, which he announced in 2003 as an epic song cycle about every American state, hasn't quite got off the ground. It began with Michigan, then came Illinois, but there it stopped. "I have no qualms about admitting it was a promotional gimmick," he laughs.

His next two projects are an improvised synth-based album called Musicfor Insomnia and a string-quartet version of Enjoy Your Rabbit, his electronica record about Chinese zodiac signs. "I've feverishly, consistently, obsessively recorded," he says. "So now I've begun this self-imposed hiatus, where I'll stop releasing records and focus on writing. It's healthy for me to shake off all these pretensions and these epic conceptual endeavours."