Tag: adrianbelew

Laurie Anderson, Bright Red

A brilliant work that coalesces personal and global tragedies into a searing song cycle, this 1994 record stands among Laurie’s best.

Album of the Week, September 19, 2026

For all the brilliantly trenchant observations that Laurie Anderson made in her 1980s recordings, there was one topic that was rarely the focus of her songs. Though “O Superman” had the military-industrial complex and the doomsday clock wired into its synthesized “ah ah ah,” the United States had not been in outright war during the entirety of her recorded career. That changed abruptly in January 1991 with the commencement of Operation Desert Storm and what eventually became known as Gulf War I.

That conflict, and the questions it immediately posed about the lethality and morality of technological war, looms at the heart of Bright Red, alongside reflections on more personal types of grief and loss. Accordingly, Laurie chose a more stripped down sound with fewer instruments; the record is made with a relatively smaller number of collaborators, including percussionist Cyro Baptista, drummer Joey Baron, bassist Ben Fenner, guitarists Gerry Leonard, Greg Cohen, Jamie West-Oram, Adrian Belew, and Marc Ribot, and accordionist Guy Klucevsek However, producer Brian Eno, whose electronics amplify, stretch, and alter the sounds on the record, is the single biggest influence on the sound of the record, even factoring in a special guest on Side 2.

“Speechless” sets us down in martial territory right away, with Laurie’s voice accompanied only by a sharp snare roll as she tells the story of a woman out for a fast, hard joyride with her lover. We gradually get the feeling that this isn’t a happy relationship: “You did all the talking and me / I didn’t make a sound / If I open my mouth now / I’ll fall to the ground.” Laurie names her reference in the chorus, a short story by Annie Dillard about an eagle who was found dead with the skull of a weasel hanging onto its neck. Like Dillard, Laurie imagines the weasel hanging on for dear life even in death as she contemplates the narrator’s place in the relationship: “And me? I’m going in circles / I’m circling around / And if I open my mouth now / I’ll fall to the ground.” The music circles ominously around the tonic throughout the whole song, never getting off the ground.

“Bright Red” floats its narrative over a bed of electronics, as Anderson and Arto Lindsay alternate the words of each verse: “Did” “she” “fall” “or” “was she” “pushed.” There’s a menace in the song, especially in the second verse: “Come here, little girl, get into the car. It’s a brand new Cadillac, bright red.” There is a sense of non-specific threat underpinning the song, and the quotation from Isaiah, about the desolation of Babylon, does not clarify it:

“Puppet Motel” is built off a nasty riff, snare and bass distorted and edgy under Laurie’s manipulated vocals. The lyrics play out a series of dystopian future images, with the “puppets” “having virtual sex, eating virtual food/no wonder these puppets/are always in a lousy mood.” The theme of alienation induced by modern technology is clear, but I’ve always connected this song to a more specific literary dystopia, William Gibson’s cyberpunk Sprawl stories. The puppet parlors like the House of the Blue Lights, in which humans serve as prostitutes disconnected from their bodies via neural cutouts, seem like a clear forerunner to the Puppet Motel. And if we are the puppets, Anderson seems to ask, what are we allowing ourselves to do while our conscious minds are dulled and distracted by technology?

“Speak My Language” is one of two songs on the album to have previously appeared, in substantially altered earlier forms, on the soundtrack to Wim Wenders’ Faraway, So Close! The album version is built atop a spare percussion loop, with timpani and snare building the foundation for the bass to slide ominously beneath Laurie’s vocals and a wistful accordion: “Daddy, daddy/It was just like you said/Now that the living/Outnumber the dead.”

“World Without End” lands its anxiety in both an apocalyptic landscape (“I remember where I came from/There were burning buildings and a fiery red sea”) and a more direct grief, the death of a parent. The lines “When my father died we put him in the ground/When my father died it was like a whole library burned down” locate both a deeply specific grief and a broader civic mourning. It’s tempting to read this now as a response to the unthinking “patriotic” embrace of high-tech warfare in Gulf War I, especially given the “fiery Red Sea” reference. 

By contrast, “Freefall”  is a more figurative disorientation, with the narrator pulled into a vortex, “drowning in the deep.” This one seems a more personal disconnection, a literal alienation: “I got your letter, I couldn’t read it / It was a cryptogram / Did you say ‘take me with you’? / Or ‘take me as I am’?” The Brian Eno ambient soundscape below again builds from percussion, with thin threads of guitar and spare synths building out the landscape underneath. The conflation of disasters physical and personal carries into the last track on the first side. Two years after Hurricane Helene, I still have trouble listening to “Muddy River”; its evocation of an apocalyptic flood is both uncomfortably vivid and wholly inadequate compared to the devastation of the real thing. Laurie’s sudden cut to the human scale—“But when the muddy river starts to rise / It covers us all / And when I look into your eyes / Two tiny clocks, two crystal balls”—locates us away from the global apocalypse and into the mere tragedy of a human landscape ending. As though there is anything “mere” about the end of relationship, of “the known world.”

As the record flips, Laurie thankfully lightens the mood in “Beautiful Pea Green Boat.” Though the alienated mood persists, the alienation is relocated from personal relationships to childhood, as she muses “I’m lying in the shade of my family tree / I’m a branch that broke off.” She recalls her mother reading her stories, and then quotes almost the entirety of Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat,” omitting only the three couplets regarding the marriage of the Owl and the Pussycat and their dining on “mince and slices of quince.” Omitting or perhaps forgetting, as the lyric says during the introduction: “I can’t remember now / What happened then / Dear Mom, how does it end?” The narrator can’t allow her childhood memories to surface a happy ending, even the ending of Lear’s story. But the arrangement subverts Anderson’s glum mood, particularly Guy Klucevsek’s accordion. (And yes, the insanely distorted guitar sound that closes out the song is courtesy none other than Adrian Belew!)

“Love Among the Sailors” tells the story of a “hot wind blowing… [that] moves across the oceans and into every port / A plague.” Laurie’s song mourns the loss of the love among the sailors, who, Walt Whitman-like, are referred to as “hombres. Sailors. Comrades,” and who are taken by the plague. Laurie continues to process the death of artistic colleagues from AIDS, angrily challenging the fundamentalist Christian view of the plague as divine retribution: “And if this is the work of an angry God/I want to look into his angry face.” The anger continues on a more interpersonal level in “Poison,” as the narrator marvels at her anger over a lover who leaves her to move in with her downstairs neighbor: “I can hear the two of you playing records / Moving furniture and fooling around / Did I drink some poison that I don’t remember now? … Did I do something in another lifetime / that was really, really mean?” The narrator reflects on the pain and anger that stay deep within her: “A small bullet, a piece of glass / And your heart just grows around it.”

“In Our Sleep,” by contrast, brings us into a new relationship, a new heartbeat, as mantralike Anderson repeats “In our sleep, as we speak/Listen to the drums beat/As we speak” in duet with the guitar and voice of Lou Reed. The two had met in 1992 at a festival curated by John Zorn and had started to collaborate; this record represented the first of their joint performances to be issued, the year Lou’s divorce from Sylvia Morales became final and a full fourteen years before Laurie married him.

The moment of peace transitions into the electronic cricket noises of “Night in Baghdad,” which borrows sounds from earlier in the record (the sighs of “Speak My Language”) as well as from earlier in her career (the bass line of “Sharkey’s Night”) as the heartbeat underneath a journalist’s report from the Gulf War. “It’s so beautiful/It’s the Fourth of July/It’s like a Christmas tree/It’s like fireflies” the narrator says of the explosions in the sky, before turning “I wish I could describe this to you better/But I can’t talk very well right now/Because I’ve got this damned gas mask on.” She transitions from the war to the personal as she asks: “Did you ever really love me? Only when we danced. And it was so beautiful. It was like the Fourth of July. It was like fireflies…”

The heartbeat slows and transitions to “Tightrope,” the longest of the songs on the record and the most evocative. Over a Brian Eno soundscape, Laurie opens the song with a dream of death, in which the narrator’s life is represented as a theme park with a boardwalk and a massive Ferris wheel that sweeps its passengers (Laurie’s old boyfriends, “with their new girlfriends”) under the water as it turns. She is herself perched high above on a tightrope, above her relatives, and fears that if she takes a wrong step, “if I fall / I’ll crush them.” She feels keenly the temporariness and thinness of her connections: “This long thin line. This song line. This shout / The only thing that binds me to the turning world below… This tightrope made of sound / This tightrope, made of my own blood.” This precarious image would seem to be a likely place to end the song—and in fact, in the first version on Faraway, So Close!, the song ends here. But this version carries on, having founds some peace with the precariousness of existence and with the ending of her relationships, as Laurie paraphrases the William Percy French poem, “Remember me is all I ask / And if remembered / Be a task / Forget me.”

The album closes with one more glimpse of the challenges of technology, here more humorous, in “Same Time Tomorrow.” She ponders the question of progress, describing a clock stuck blinking twelve noon and asking “Is time long, or is it wide? What I really want to know is, are things getting better or are they getting worse?” A live version of the song then recapitulates apocalyptic quotations from the “Bright Red” side of the record, but on the record, she cryptically quotes the seventeenth-century poet George Herbert: “Now I in you without a body move,” adding “and in our hearts, we fly,” leaving us to decide whether the apocalypse has a happy ending.

Bright Red channels all sorts of images—the death of a parent, the AIDS epidemic, war, flood, the eagle and the weasel—into a convincingly powerful portrait of lost love that bristles with connections to the universal. It’s a body blow of a record and one that may stand as an artistic high point among many in Laurie’s discography. She continues to record—I particularly enjoy the follow-up to Bright Red, her spoken-word recording The Ugly One with the Jewels—but for me these first four albums are the heart of all her output. Next week we’ll hear a milestone album from another Peter Gabriel collaborator.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: A different version of “Tightrope” was featured in the film Faraway, So Close, Wim Wenders’ sequel to Wings of Desire. Like his Until the End of the World, the soundtrack is a marvel and worth seeking out on its own merits. (The soundtrack also features an alternate version of “Speak My Language” which I can’t find on streaming services).

BONUS BONUS: Laurie’s touring show in 1994-1995 was “The Nerve Bible.” There was a companion book, Stories from the Nerve Bible, that was a retrospective of her entire career to that point. I took my wife Lisa while we were first dating to see the show at the Kennedy Center, which is how we discovered her dislike for Laurie Anderson performances. (It was a great show.) This video purports to be a recording of the full show from its 1995 date in Kansas City, Missouri:

Laurie Anderson, Home of the Brave

A soundtrack of a concert film of a performance art show, with wild technological magic under its skin.

Album of the Week, May 30, 2026

Following Mister Heartbreak, Laurie Anderson continued to develop and tour shows based around her unique combination of performance art and music, as well as technology. In 1986 that led to an unexpected place: a theatrical release of a movie capturing the touring show that she mounted in support of the 1982 album. The movie flopped, grossing only $1.25 million at the box office, but it spawned a video release and a soundtrack, which provide a fascinating picture of how her art evolved alongside the technology she used to produce it.

The tour featured a subset of the musicians who had contributed to Mister Heartbreak, including Adrian Belew on guitar, David Van Tieghem on percussion, and William S. Burroughs as himself (he appears on stage only in a brief nonspeaking role); they were joined by keyboardist Joy Askew and backing vocalists Dolette McDonald and Janice Pendarvis, fresh from performing with Sting on his Dream of the Blue Turtles tour. Five of the soundtrack’s eight tracks were drawn directly from the performance captured in the film; the other three were recorded in the studio and featured additional musicians including Bill Laswell, Nile Rodgers, and others. Only “Sharkey’s Night” repeats from Mister Heartbreak, here in a greatly extended form; the rest of the songs are new.

“Smoke Rings” starts with a descending synth line slightly reminiscent of “From the Air,” but quickly veers into surrealist territory with a Spanish game show establishing what is more macho. This idea, while promising, is quickly abandoned for a dream about “a little town… and all the girls in town were named Betty.” As she moves past the humor of the opening image, though, we get to the song’s serious core: “Ah, desire! It’s cold as ice and then it’s hot as fire… And every time I see an iceberg it reminds me of you.” The music itself is driven by a pulsing drum + synth groove and punctuated by the gorgeous backing vocals of McDonald and Pendarvis and the high reverberating sampled soprano note, as well as the sounds of dense beasts from Belew’s guitar. It’s a dizzying introduction to the album.

After this we get a quiet moment, driven by a skittering synthesizer line, in which Laurie asks “What Fassbinder film is it? The one-armed man walks into a flower shop and says: What flower expresses Days go by / and they just keep going by endlessly / pulling you into the future… and the florist says, ‘White Lily.’” As gnomic moments, this one is high on the list of Anderson’s most quotable aphorisms, but it’s married to a texture that’s mostly throwaway.

The same can’t be said for “Late Show,” a hypnotic 9/8 riff over which Laurie plays an electric violin, first with a conventional bow and then with something very different. She had been experimenting with the idea of a “tape bow,” a violin bow in which a length of recorded tape replaces the hair of the bow and passes over a magnetic pickup on the violin to play fragments of the recorded sound, since the late 1970s. Here, this instrument acts instead as a MIDI controller, playing back a sample of William S. Burroughs’ voice at different speeds and timbres as he intones “Listen to my heart beat.” You kind of have to see it to believe it.

“Talk Normal,” one of the tracks recorded in the studio. is a scene of pure chaos, with a doo-wop backing vocal behind different improvisations: a wild saxophone line, screeching Adrian Belew guitar noises played on a guitar with a flexible neck, and a set of odd stories from Laurie, including my favorite: “I turned the corner in Soho today and someone / Looked right at me and said: / Oh No! Another Laurie Anderson clone!” I like the idea that there is an alternate reality version of the 1980s in which the streets of the world were full of Laurie Anderson lookalikes — at least elsewhere than in SoHo. The version in the movie is even more extended and surreal, with jugglers, weightlifters, and a giant projected head of Laurie behind the stage. (There’s an image of that on the back of the album cover.)

“Language is a Virus” is another studio recording, this one produced by Nile Rodgers, who also contributes guitar, keyboards and Synclavier to the track. The track riffs off William Burroughs’ line “Language is a virus from outer space,” and Laurie plays with the disconnect between words and intentions throughout: “I was talking to a friend/And I was saying: I wanted you / And I was looking for you / But I couldn’t find you. I couldn’t find you / And he said: Hey! / Are you talking to me? / Or are you just practicing / For one of those performances of yours?” But the stories here feel a little flip, a little forced, as though the words have been squeezed to fit the pop song format. (Though I do confess to quoting the last stanza to myself whenever visiting a tourist attraction: “And there was a beautiful view / that nobody could see / Cause everybody on the island / Was saying Look at me! Look at me!”)

“Radar” is a brief snippet of wordless song against a crashing synth chord; if Laurie didn’t have another piece called the “Difficult Listening Hour,” the first minute of this would be a contender. But a synth melody punctuated by birdsongs provides an achingly beautiful bridge into “Sharkey’s Night,” here performed by Anderson using the Voice of Authority1 filter. This version loses the unforgettable William S. Burroughs “Paging Mr. Sharkey, white courtesy telephone please” tag from the original, but remixes in the vocal harmonies from “Talk Normal,” a bit that sounds a lot like a Prince song, an extended saxophone solo from Richard Landry, and a riff on World War III accompanied by an Adrian Belew guitar freakout that will upset your dog. Anderson gives us a backslapping moment with the “Big Boys in room 1003” who are “talking Big B, little O, little M, silent B” and then moments later asking “Hey, what’s that big noise from the sky? … It’s just those angels walking / They’re clomping around again / Wearing those big clumsy shoes we got for them.” Sharkey’s closing “ah, ah, ah, you’ve already paid for this / listen to my heart beat” feels at the end more like a threat, an implied standoff with the bomb as the payoff.

The song ends in a haze of klaxons, segueing into “Credit Racket,” an instrumental that harmonizes its guitar and synth parts from the sound of the sirens; the same track played over the closing credits of the film.

For me, part of the wonder of revisiting Laurie’s work is the ways in which her art, though undeniably limited by the technology available at the time, embraced those limitations (for example, the use of the Mac bitmapped system font Chicago as the title type for the record).2 As Anderson’s art evolved, the technology got more integrated into the work and the musical parts stepped forward more, leaving questions: was she a performance artist who sang or a singer who told stories? Her next album would deepen that confusion in strange and interesting ways. But first we’ll hear from another artist exploring the collision between technology and music with a completely different outcome.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: The full concert film is available on YouTube, somehow. Watch it for Laurie’s tape bow, the waltz between her and Burroughs, the drum dance, the “¿Que es mas macho?” game show, and more:

Footnotes

  1. Years later, Lou Reed, who married Laurie in 2008, named the persona that she adopted with the Voice of Authority filter “Fenway Bergamot.” ↩︎
  2. There are a variety of free revivals of the original bitmapped Chicago font, which is a good thing because the scalable vector TrueType version was pretty awful. ↩︎

Laurie Anderson, Mister Heartbreak

Anderson’s second studio album expands her sonic palette, producing a hypnotic record full of the rich and the strange.

Album of the Week, April 18, 2026

Laurie Anderson had made an album that had a high-charting single. She had gone from performing conceptual art pieces on the street to a major-label contract, with an album that sold over 100,000 copies. Many artists would have rested on their laurels, or tried to pander to a broader audience. Instead, she took her art to somewhere rich and strange… and sold many more copies in the process.

It helped that she had a budget. Artistic choices allow you to make great songs. A budget lets you get a Synclavier II, a then-new digital synthesizer that supported multiple voices with a single keypress as well as digital sampling. It lets you hire a Who’s Who of guest musicians, including guitarist Adrian Belew (cf: Lodger-era David Bowie, Talking Heads, David Byrne, King Crimson), drummer Anton Fier (Golden Palominos), bassist Bill Laswell (Brian Eno, John Zorn, Sonny Sharrock, Material), Nile Rodgers (Chic, Diana Ross, Debbie Harry, Let’s Dance-era Bowie), and William S. Burroughs, as well as her collaborators Roma Baran and David Van Tieghem.

While on tour with her United States show in the spring of 1983 , she also met Peter Gabriel. Later artist Nam June Paik suggested that Gabriel and Anderson collaborate on a song and music video that could become part of a PBS special she was curating called Good Morning, Mr. Orwell; the song, recorded under time pressure in Anderson’s studio, became “Excellent Birds.”

“Sharkey’s Day” has almost all of that sound coming at you all at once; as my former Tanglewood Festival Chorus conductor James Burton would say, it “sounds expensive.” There are layers of Synclavier flutes, Adrian Belew guitar, Bill Laswell bass, Anton Fier drums, bata drums and shekere courtesy Cuban-American jazz percussionist Daniel Ponce, and Laurie’s violin all stirred up together, with a healthy dollop of female backing singers courtesy of the group November, consisting of Michelle Cobbs, Brenda Nelson, and none other than a pre-Sting Dolette McDonald. Anderson’s protagonist Sharkey wanders through this sonic landscape in a spoken-word reverie, alternately fascinated and frightened by both the natural world and the artifacts of modernity (“All night long I think of those little planes up there flying around/You can’t even see them, they’re specks!/And they’re full of tiny people going places/And Sharkey says, You know? I bet they could all land/On the head of a pin.” The wildness in the discoveries of Sharkey are reflected in the instrumentation, as Sharkey hypothesizes that all life “comes from some strange lagoon.” Laurie Anderson is no longer ironically commenting on the future being a place about 50 miles from here; she’s reveling in it.

If “Langue d’Amour” feels a bit more like the material from Big Science, that may be because it doesn’t feature the cast of thousands—it’s just Laurie and her Synclavier. It may also be because the track originated in the same place much of Big Science did, as part of her United States show, as a spoken word track called “Hothead.” Here, the work is transformed into something hypnotic—and erotic—thanks to the stumbling bass line and the vocal-like synthesizer chords, as well as the air of unreality added by the harmonies on Laurie’s voice (as well as Peter Gabriel’s subtle backing vocals). The story, about a restless Eve-like character who falls in love with a snake through his stories, ends with an extended section in French declaring: here is the language of love. Here is the language of my heart. And it is revealed to be a meditation on the power of language to upend everything—a theme Laurie would return to later.

“Gravity’s Angel,” named after Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow,1 is a full band track with some of the space of Laurie’s solo work, telling the story of the end of a love affair (“You can see in the dark/But I’ve got one thing: I loved you better”). The hypnotic percussion, loping bass line, and the chorus vocal (again with Gabriel) all combine to produce a meditative space in which magic happens, as when “this ghost of your other lover walked in/And stood there. Made of thin air. Full of desire” and reveals the collapse of the relationship. At the end Laurie pulls the lyrical camera way back to the big picture, then zooms in tightly on the scene of the ending: “ Why these mountains? Why this sky? This long road? This empty room?” The entire work reveals itself in this compressed journey from the broad to the hyper-specific, but still leaves the listener in a fog of mystery.

“Kokoku” had also originated in United States, but is here given a sparse reading on the Synclavier with Fier and Laswell providing the rhythm section, accented by Japanese (and Korean) backing vocalists and a solo on the kayagum (performed by Sang Won Park). Coming after “Gravity’s Angel,” it reads as a song of loss and regret: “They say the dead will rise again/ And here they come now, strange animals out of the Ice Age/ And they stare at you, dumbfounded, like big mistakes. And we say:/ Keep cool. Maybe if we pretend this never happened, they’ll all just go away.” The spoken English words alternate with brief poems in Japanese, which Laurie translates in the liner notes: “Mountain with clouds. A cry. My voice. Home of the brave. I’m here now. And lost.” Laurie’s echoing of “home of the brave” from “Mister Heartbreak” suggests another common thread through the songs, as her narrator’s loneliness and alienation is grounded in American soil (despite the dislocating Japanese affectations of the song.)

“Excellent Birds” comes as a gear-shift, Anderson and Gabriel accompanied only by Nile Rodgers’ guitar, Bill Laswell’s bass, and Gabriel’s Linn drum machine. Both sing and play Synclavier as they tour a strange landscape full of “excellent birds… excellent snow… excellent words,” finding motion and activity in looking out onto an empty landscape, surrounded with pictures of people who seem poised to some unspoken action. But the heart of the song is in the groove, not the words, and in that Synclavier bass line made of a sampled voice that seems to provide the wordless root of everything that happens.

“Blue Lagoon,” by contrast, is an opera in a song, driven by the relentless Synclavier in a stumbling waltz pattern underscored by that sampled-voice bass. But Adrian Belew’s guitar and Bill Laswell’s bass, as well as more Synclavier, build additional layers on top of the ground until we are taken away by Laurie’s gentle spoken voice to a strange desert island. At first it seems like a vacation, but little clues (“Days I remember cities… Days, I dive by the wreck”) suggest a more sinister imprisonment. As the wordless cries of the guitar rise up, there’s an extended quotation from The Tempest (“Full fathom five thy father lies…”) that ends with “Call me Ishmael,” invoking both shipwreck and death. Anderson says, “Always used to wonder who I’d bring to a desert island,” but as the sounds of bamboo and steel drum (played by Van Tieghem) rise, she ends accepting her loneliness: “If you ever get this letter, thinking of you.” The piece is hypnotic, mesmerizing, utterly distinctive.

The album closes with “Sharkey’s Night,” which revisits the chorus and bass line of “Sharkey’s Day” with a darker, more cynical Sharkey read by William Burroughs: “Hey, kemosabe, long time no see! … You connect the dots. You pick up the pieces.” We are left with Sharkey’s assertion that he is “deep in the heart of darkest America, home of the brave… Listen to my heart beat,” as Laurie pulls back the focus a final time to show the loneliness mixed with determined forward motion at the heart of the world.

Remarkably, the album cracked the top 200, rising to number 60 in the US. Anderson continued to evolve the songs in her live performances, eventually creating a full show out of her exploration of the alienation and joy of living in the technology-rich present. We’ll visit that another time. Next week, we’ll see another film project in which Gabriel found himself involved following the completion of Security, one whose soundtrack may sound both familiar and strange.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Anderson produced videos for several of the songs on Mister Heartbreak. The video for “Sharkey’s Day” combines animation, green screen dancing, and a generally phantasmagoric artistic statement into a blender:

BONUS BONUS: Here’s the music video for “Excellent Birds,” also produced by Laurie over a green screen. Interestingly it seems to use the version of the song that Peter later released on his 1986 album (about which more later):

BONUS BONUS BONUS: Anderson would revisit much of the music for Mister Heartbreak live, making a concert movie called Home of the Brave after the lyric in “Sharkey’s Day.” Here’s that live concert version:

BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS: While on tour behind Mister Heartbreak, Laurie was booked on Late Night with David Letterman, where, rather than performing one of the numbers from her album, she opted to do “Walk the Dog” (!). Here’s that little piece of television history:

Footnotes

  1. Laurie famously asked permission from Pynchon to compose an opera based on Gravity’s Rainbow. To her surprise, the reclusive novelist wrote back with his agreement, with one stipulation: that it be scored for solo banjo. She has said, “Some people have the nicest way of saying no.” ↩︎