I knew from repeated experimentation — and subsequent disappointment — that Van Morrison records had stopped being worth owning sometime between Veedon Fleece and Wavelength — and even that mid-70s block was a marginal, iffy period. To have a truly psychedelic experience with Van required a large supply of candles and a Mexican Talavera candlestick, a painful breakup or some other source of profound melancholy, and an evening or two of total, incense-drenched immersion in Astral Weeks or a few of the more floaty tracks from Moondance or The Bang Masters. Van at his apex was a powerful force - the passion of Joe Cocker, mind-melded with the mysticism of Nick Drake.

Creem Magazine rock writer Lester Bangs on a live Van performance from the Astral Weeks era:

Just those words, repeated slowly again and again, distended, permutated, turned into scat, suspended in space and then scattered to the winds, muttered like a mantra till they turn into nonsense syllables, then back into the same soaring image as time seems to stop entirely. He stands there with eyes closed, singing, transported, while the band poises quivering over great open-tuned deep blue gulfs of their own.

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Becoming the favorite banjo-playing Episcopalian geography expert and Halloween costume inspiration of NPR listeners apparently wasn’t ambitious enough for Sufjan Stevens. Today at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival—whose lineup also includes firebrand harpist Zeena Parkins— Stevens will present “The BQE,” a symphonic testament to that fount of poetic inspiration, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. But why stop there? In what follows, I’ll list some of my own favorite urban planning disasters, with accompanying theme music for each.

As a fan of absurdly overconceived projects, I’m glad to see Brooklyn-based Stevens providing a soundtrack to one of his borough’s least-loved eyesores. The traffic-clogged BQE is a soul-numbing, neighborhood-dividing monument to master planner Robert Moses’ unchecked ego. But since it exposes the tension that comes with having a sense of place, it seems like an ideal subject for Stevens. Maybe his take on Moses will even surpass Alex Timbers’ surreal play “Boozy,” which portrayed Moses’ arch-nemesis—urban gadfly and community activist Jane Jacobs, a hero of mine—as a femme fatale time traveler who stalks Moses with an angry gang of rolling pin-wielding housewives.

Sufjan Stevens’ mannered chamber-folk divides the indie world into Sufists who hail his genius, and anti-Sufists who want to slap him silly. He’s too clever by half and could use an editor, as on The Avalanche. But I’d challenge the haters to write a song as moving as “Casimir Pulaski Day” or a rocker as fierce as “In the Words of the Governor,” Stevens’ Polvo-meets-White Stripes barnburner featured in The Believer’s summer 2007 CD compilation. The preview snippet of “BQE” below doesn’t suggest Stevens is the new Steve Reich, but I’ll give the piece a chance. Did I mention that “BQE” has hula-hoopers?

After the click-through, I’ll provide music for some equally soul-numbing missteps in urban planning. If you have your own stretch of paradise that’s been paved for a parking lot, tell us about it, and give us some music to get through the madness.

Sufjan Stevens, “In the Words of the Governor”:

Sufjan Stevens, “BQE, Part 6″:

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