People are apparently still waiting for more installments in Sufjan Stevens' mythical “Fifty State” album series. This surprises us, that people are getting together and speculating about what's next for Sufjan and the US of A. In fact, it's sort of the hipster equivalent of Linus from Peanuts awaiting the arrival of The Great Pumpkin. It's nice to think about Stevens composing album-length odes to Delaware and Oklahoma. Just like getting presents on Halloween. But, realistically, neither is ever going to happen. And, by now, when people in purple Urban Outfitters kefiyahs approach you at Panda Bear shows and say, “Dude, I heard that Sufjan is completing work on the Rhode Island album,” it probably fills you with the same sickly pity you feel when Lucy discovers that her little brother is still passed out in a damn pumpkin patch at four in the morning.

Ask yourself: who makes fifty full-length albums? In his forty year career, David Bowie, The Thin White Duke his own damn self, has only made 25 full-length studio records. Daniel Johnston, if you count his works with Danny and the Nightmares and his collabs with Jad Fair, has dropped close to thirty. But you know what? Daniel Johnston is an idiot savant, desperately in need of a chromatic tuner, who composes songs about McDonald's and Caspar the Friendly Ghost. He also intentionally crashes airplanes and actively believes that the Devil is going to get him. If he weren't famous, and he lived in your hometown, you would be scared of him -- or at least very annoyed.

Fifty albums is a Herculean feat, no matter how you slice it, and the kind of obsessive drive that such prolificacy requires would flash fry anyone's cerebral cortex¹. If Stevens did one album per state, it'd turn him into a babbling idiot. Anyway, wasn't anyone reading music journalism a few years ago, when Stevens specifically stated that the Fifty States project was a joke? When he admitted that perhaps the concept was more of a promotional gimmick? When he cited Texas as a specific example of a state he would probably never, ever do²?

All the fact cataloging, the arduous work involved in discovering, selecting, and arranging an entire state's anecdotal material into one perfectly representative musical mosaic takes a lot of time and energy. “I think maybe I took it too seriously,” Stevens said. “I started to feel like I was becoming a cliché of myself.” So, when the opportunity to try a completely different type of project appeared, Sufjan jumped at it. However, it would be this new endeavor, and not the theoretical “Fifty States” that would end up musically waylaying Sufjan Stevens.

Enter Joseph Melillo, executive director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, who had seen Sufjan perform Illinois in concert. “He was the one artist who as a singer/songwriter impressed me the most. I wanted to invest in his creative imagination.” When the BAM wanted to celebrate the 25th anniversary of its Next Wave Festival, Melillo approached Stevens with a very simple commission to compose a piece about Brooklyn. Anything having to do with Brooklyn, which in some ways would be very accommodating to a storyteller of Stevens' acumen.

Brooklyn is home to such notable figures as chess champion Bobby Fischer, seminal American poet Walt Whitman, and serial weirdo Mike Tyson, among others. How many people out there would like to hear Sufjan sing a song detailing the feats and exploits of one Ol' Dirty Bastard? We know we would. Brooklyn is the borough that lays claim to Coney Island, and it is the site of a floating British POW camp in which more American patriots died than as battle casualties in the whole of the American Revolution. Sufjan had tons of material to work with.

He chose the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

He chose the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway?

The controversy surrounding the expressway must have aroused Stevens' attention. Its construction displaced thousands of New Yorkers during the 40's and 50's. It's regarded as generally dangerous, with its narrow roads and sharp curves. It's also really ugly. In fact, no one seems to have anything nice to say about that particular stretch of road. However, Stevens saw something more than a road. “Everyone’s always complaining about it, but it’s interesting that it runs through the entire borough, sort of the one thing that is constant,” Stevens said. “I just liked that it seemed to be a running theme physically and conceptually, and it has beautiful views of Brooklyn and of Manhattan.”

Stevens went to work on a composition, to be titled quite simply The BQE. By “went to work,” we mean of course that he pretty much let the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the composition it was inspiring dominate the entirety of his existence for a little while. Melillo called Stevens occasionally to monitor his progress. “I think he surprised himself...he was was eating, drinking, and sleeping The BQE.”

The result of this Brooklyn-Queens Expressway-centric lifestyle is nothing if not ambitious -- grandiose even. The BQE ostensibly serves as a soundtrack accentuating footage of the highway. However, this is a soundtrack that, in live performance, utilizes thirty-five musicians, strobe lights, interpretive hula-hoopers³ and not one single breathy note from Sufjan's vocal chords. This is a soundtrack that moves seamlessly from elements of noise and post-rock to the type of gladiatorial fanfare worthy less of a hated highway and more of Emperor Nero. It is part Ira Gershwin, part Steve Reich, with elements of Vince Guaraldi and Brian Wilson. In fact, perhaps not since the release of Wilson's Smile has a pop musician done anything like The BQE -– that is to say, “symphonic."

Nearly two years after its initial performance, The BQE was released last month on Asthmatic Kitty records. The record itself is accompanied with a veritable cornucopia of media, including a DVD of the footage, a comic book, and a 3-D Viewmaster(TM) Reel – all meant, not as incidentals, but rather as attempt at Wagner's concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work."

Yet for all of its stunning achievement, nouveau-classical splendor, and multi-media, The BQE has had adverse effects on Stevens. “In all honesty, that piece is what really sabotaged my creative momentum,” he says. “I suffered sort of an existential creative crisis...I no longer knew what a song was and how to write an album. It overextended me in a way that I couldn’t find my way back to the song.” Stevens is also questioning the validity of the album in an age where technological advances have allowed audiences to avoid “The Album” altogether and just download individual songs that they dig. “Why are songs like three or four minutes, and why are records 40 minutes long? They’re based on the record, vinyl, the CD, and these forms are antiquated now. So can’t an album be eternity, or can’t it be five minutes? I no longer really have faith in the album anymore. I no longer have faith in the song.”

Attempting to rekindle his love affair with music, Stevens did a few gigs in September and October, working with new forms – 10 minute-plus pieces, some instrumental, some accompanied with words. He is, however, quite certain that returning to the kind of songwriting featured on Illinois would be an unthinkable regression, one that would negate the experience he had composing and performing The BQE.

Melillo is a little bit less surprised. “It’s the magnitude of what he accomplished … he allowed his creative imagination to just unfold. It’s almost like Wagner—it’s so big that you think about what is going to happen next in his creative life. Like any artist who creates a work of significance, it simply takes time to regenerate.“
According to Stevens, the next phase in his artistic metamorphosis has not manifested itself before him. At this point, it is anyone's guess what path he will next take. This is good. It is this kind of uncertainty, this questioning of even the most basic forms of one's art that leads to discovery, invention and redefinition.
Some musicians are content to keep it simple – verse-chorus-verse, guitar, vocals, bass, drums and sometimes keys. Strings or horns, if a pop musician has something to prove. Keep it between three and five minutes, unless the song contains some decent crescendo. And that's perfectly acceptable. It works. It sells records. It captures hearts and imaginations, and there are some musicians that are akin to great athletes, who consistently make the pop-rock formula as captivating and awe-inspiring as a last-second swish from half-court, or the penetrating crack of the bat as it sends another ball rocketing into the nosebleeds.
There are other musicians, however, that are more comparable to Edison than Erving, who look at composition in the way that the great men of science look at invention. Make no mistake, discovery and invention can be deadly processes. Marie Curie discovered radium, only to die of radiation poisoning. In a more hilarious example, Franz Reichelt fell to his death off the top of the Eiffel Tower, while testing his newly-tailored “coat-parachute.” And like these unfortunate men and women of science, there are some artists who will tax themselves to the point of strain while trying to reinvent and redefine their medium. Or at least alienate a lot of their patrons and fans. But both groups acknowledge the simple truth that a person can be safe in the groove carved out for them or a person can diverge, can break new ground.

It would appear that Sufjan Stevens is choosing the latter. If such is the case, then we should lay to rest all hopes of Sufjan doing a record about Montana or Missouri. We might even be wise to not even expect another singer-songwriter piece from him, at least not for a while. The era of Illinois is over. Wherever Stevens takes us next, it will be probably be a bizarre, unfamiliar landscape. But such journeys are the exact reason why we keep artists around.

¹ - Lope De Vega (1562-1635), The Shakespeare of the Spanish Golden Age who wrote over 1800 plays in his life, was nicknamed by Cervantes “The Monster of Nature." A lot of scholars think that this handle was born out of Cervantes' jealousy for De Vega's output. But the psychological pressures of producing that much work – about one full-length play a week for years - probably just made Lope De Vega the kind of weirdo who bites the heads off stray kittens and screws trees.

² - This is just straight up bullshit, probably a not so subtle, very short-sighted protest against Texas because George Dubya happened to hail from there. The Lone Star State has just as much folkloric weirdness (The Lake Worth Monster, Marfa Lights) just as many serial killers (Charles Albright, Joe Ball The Alligator Man, Elmer Wayne Henley) and just as many larger-than-life/infamous figures (Davy Crockett, Willie Nelson, David Koresh, Clay Henry Jr. The Beer Drinking Goat/Mayor of Lajitas) as the Land of Lincoln. All that, and NASA.

³ - What could they possibly be doing? The mind boggles!