Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson, a musician, composer, performance artist, and technology enthusiast, achieved wider public recognition than nearly any other experimental creator of her generation after her fleeting 1981 breakthrough into mainstream pop with the hit "O Superman." Beyond occasional pop excursions, she stayed rooted in performance art, where her large-scale multimedia works integrated music, film, visual projections, dance, and spoken and written language—the foundation of everything she produced. Following her first album Big Science, which contained "O Superman," her subsequent recordings spanned an eclectic range, blending spoken word, postmodern classical minimalism, vanguard rock, airy jazz, and ambient textures. Through varied combinations of these elements she earned praise for releases such as the wide-ranging Mister Heartbreak in 1984—the same year that saw the five-album live document of her epic United States—and the politically charged Home of the Brave that appeared two years afterward. Anderson frequently incorporates instruments of her own design, among them the tape-bow violin, the Talking Stick, and voice filters, the last of which figured prominently on 2010’s Homeland. Five years later she issued the award-winning documentary film and accompanying soundtrack Heart of a Dog, which traces the life and passing of her piano-playing dog Lolabelle alongside reflections on mortality and her own experiences in lower Manhattan after 9/11. In 2018, working with the Kronos Quartet, she released Landfall, the score for her multimedia piece examining Hurricane Sandy and its consequences. In 2024 she brought out Amelia, a composition drawn from the final days of pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart.

Born June 5, 1947, in the Chicago suburb of Glen Ellyn, Illinois, Anderson played violin during her teenage years before moving to New York City at age 20. She later studied at Barnard College, where she received a B.A. in art history in 1969. After completing an M.F.A. in sculpture at Columbia University in 1972, she taught art history and Egyptian architecture at City College and presented her first public performances the following year.

By 1976 Anderson was appearing regularly in museums, concert halls, and art festivals across North America and Europe. Although she has stated that every project rests on the power of words and language, her work equally foregrounds visual imagery and advanced technology, as in the 1980 piece "Born, Never Asked," scored for orchestra and electronics. A year later she cut "O Superman" for the small New York imprint 110 Records. The eleven-minute single, constructed around electronic drones and half-spoken, half-sung lyrics sometimes processed electronically, improbably reached number two on the British pop charts. Warner Bros. promptly signed her for a full-length album, resulting in 1982’s Big Science, material extracted from the seven-hour multimedia work United States.

With 1984’s Mister Heartbreak Anderson created her most explicitly pop-directed recording, enlisting collaborators including Peter Gabriel and Adrian Belew; the album climbed into the American Top 100. That same year she also issued United States Live, a five-LP set documenting the complete performance. Her next undertaking, Home of the Brave, emerged first as a concert film; the year after that she composed the score for the Jonathan Demme/Spalding Gray picture Swimming to Cambodia. A new studio album, Strange Angels, did not appear until 1989. The ensuing period centered on performance tours such as 1990’s Empty Places, 1991’s Voices from the Beyond, and 1993’s Stories from the Nerve Bible. In 1994 Anderson joined producer Brian Eno for Bright Red, which also featured her then-boyfriend Lou Reed, whom she married in 2008. The following year she released the album The Ugly One with Jewels together with the CD-R Puppet Motel, underscoring her continuing engagement with emerging technology.

In 2001 Anderson delivered Life on a String, drawing songs from her large-scale theater works Moby Dick and Strange Angels. Also in 2001, just over a week after the World Trade Center attacks, she recorded a live set at Town Hall in New York City whose cover carried the words “New York City, September 19-20, 2001”; the recording appeared in 2002 as Live at Town Hall NYC. Anderson maintained a busy performance calendar yet did not release new music for another seven years, when she began Homeland, issued by Nonesuch in 2010. She continued multiple projects while pausing to care for her husband during his 2012 illness. Following Reed’s death in October 2013, Anderson resumed work on her second feature film, Heart of a Dog, a meditation on love, loyalty, and loss filtered through the death of her dog Lolabelle; both the film and its soundtrack album appeared in October 2015. Earlier, in 2013, Anderson had begun a collaboration with the Kronos Quartet on Landfall, prompted by her experiences during Hurricane Sandy. The piece premiered at the University of Maryland that year and subsequently toured worldwide; a recorded version developed from those performances was released by Nonesuch five years later.

In 2019 Anderson joined Jesse Paris Smith and Tibetan musician Tenzin Choegyal for Songs from the Bardo, an eighty-minute improvisatory work based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Smith and Choegyal first met at the 2014 Tibet House benefit, where they began discussing the project; a shortened version was performed with Anderson at the following year’s event. The recording includes Choegyal, Smith, cellist Rubin Kodheli, and percussionist Shahzad Ismaily, who supplied accompaniment to Anderson’s narration of the central text. Songs from the Bardo appeared in 2019. In 2000, Dennis Russell Davies of the American Composers Orchestra invited Anderson to contribute a piece for a program of new music on the theme of flight. She wrote “Songs for A.E.,” inspired by the life of Amelia Earhart. Although dissatisfied with the initial performance, Anderson revised the work extensively at Davies’s encouragement, and the expanded version became the 2024 album Amelia, centered on Earhart’s final flight. The LP features vocals from Anohni, who had previously worked with both Anderson and Reed.