Tag: cyrobaptista

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, Strange Angels

In which a performance artist leans into the musical side of her art and finds emotional resonance.

Album of the Week, July 11, 2026

Laurie Anderson might have started the 1980s as the definitive performance artist who also happened to sing, but her last album of the decade posited her as a singer who also happened to be a performance artist. Like Kate Bush’s The Sensual World, released just a week before Strange Angels, the album centered Laurie the person in an emotional space that she had never really occupied, showing her with fewer electronic tricks and more heartfelt songwriting in an album adorned by a stunningly intimate cover portrait.

That cover was taken by famed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who near the beginning of his career had captured the great Patti Smith for her first album Horses. In the earlier photo he portrayed someone both confrontational and delicate in a way that played with gender conventions. Here, near the end of his life (Mapplethorpe died several months before the album’s release, of AIDS), he imbued Anderson, previously careful to present herself through a sort of hip androgyny, with a sort of uncanny beauty, presenting her in a way that was still undeniably artistic and avant-garde but somehow unavoidably feminine.

The cover photo was a good metaphor for the music contained inside, as an artist who had previously relied on an electronic pitch-shifter to give her “The Voice of Authority” now leveraged a new voice, an unexpectedly clear and beautiful soprano. She has told a story about realizing that a song needed to be actually sung instead of talked, going to take voice lessons, and discovering that voice had been waiting for her the whole time. And while there are certainly familiar collaborators, including producer Roma Baran and percussionist David Van Tieghem, most of the musicians on the record are most familiar for having collaborated with someone else: the Golden Palominos’ Anton Fier; trumpeter Earl Gardner, trombonist Steve Turre, drum programmer Leon Pendarvis (Janice’s husband) and accordionist Tom “T-Bone” Wolk from the Saturday Night Live band; session drummer Steve Gadd (“50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”); Tony Levin; guitarist Ray Phiri and bassist Bakithi Kumalo (Graceland); minimalist tape loop composer Scott Johnson; bassist Mark Dresser (Anthony Braxton); drummer Joey Baron and percussionist Cyro Baptista (John Zorn); and a host of well-known voices lending backing vocals including Meat Loaf, Bobby McFerrin, outsider artists The Roches, and Lisa Fischer (Rolling Stones, Luther Vandross).

“Strange Angels” begins as a classic Laurie Anderson lyric: “They say that heaven is like TV,/A perfect little world/That doesn’t really need you.” But it’s sung, not wryly spoken, and the combination of instruments that joins as she intones “here they come” – guitar, accordion, bass, crisp percussion – tells us we are in for a different sort of experience. I always loved the lyric that leads off the second verse: “Well it was one of those days / Larger than life / When your friends came to dinner /And they stayed they night/ And then they cleaned out the refrigerator / They ate everything in sight / And then they stayed up in the living room / And they cried all night.” Possibly I feel this way because the first time I heard the album was in the living room of a Mount Holyoke choir member, where I was crashing overnight on the floor while we were on tour. I don’t make friends easily but that night we stayed up until two, and would have cleaned out the refrigerator had there been one. (Some of these reviews are not impartial.) Perhaps, though, I like the tune so much because, as the chords swing from major to minor, the band creates an undercurrent of melancholy underneath the main story, and we understand that we’re looking backwards at a visitation from the angels that can never occur again.

“The Monkey’s Paw” is a different thing, a fable about not messing with Mother Nature in the form of a song. The setup—Laurie going to a retail establishment and requesting modifications—is not particularly novel, but the salesman pushing back on her warning of the unintended consequences is: “Please. There’s no guarantee. Cause nature’s got rules, and nature’s got laws, and if you cross her look out — it’s the monkey’s paw.” The musical track is light, thanks to Ray Phiri and Bakithi Kumalo, and the gorgeous falsetto vocalise of Bobby McFerrin.

“Coolsville” is a song built over an effect, a delayed reverb circuit providing a sort of call and response effect behind Laurie’s vocals. That’s the gimmick, and on the initial listen when she intones “Coolsville” into this thing it can be overwhelming. But the song itself, with its longing for perfection that doesn’t exist, is somehow deeply moving nevertheless.

That brings us to “Ramon,” which for me is the emotional center of the album. Opening with a deceptive drum pattern that always makes me think the beat is dislocated by half a measure, Laurie is back to clouds of angels: “Last night I saw a host of angels, and they were all singing different songs/And they sounded like a lot of lawnmowers/Mowing down my lawn/And up above kerjillions of stars spangled all over the sky…” But the visitation of angels leaves us and there’s a man fallen on his back in the snow. Laurie’s verse centers this man in the broader cosmos: “some people walk on water/some people walk on broken glass/some just walk round and round in their dreams/some just keep falling down.” There’s something deeply human, almost a humanist form of Christian ethics, in these lyrics: regardless of which kind of person you’re dealing with, when you see a man who’s broken, pick him up and carry him! To put this into context, this was coming at the end of an eight year period where the culture had encouraged a kind of spiritual self-centeredness, amid the rise of televangelism and the rapid removal of societal support for the homeless, as well as at the end of a period where the Reagan administration’s refusal to do anything about the AIDS crisis had meant the loss of tens of thousands of people, with the population of artists in New York with whom Anderson collaborated (including Mapplethorpe) hit especially hard. So for me, hearing these lyrics against this context, it came as a sort of moral call to arms. For Anderson, this isn’t an explicitly Christian moment, more a humanist one, since we are all in this together: “We don’t know where we come from/We don’t know what we are.”

The first side closes out with “Babydoll,” which is for me one of the songs on the album that would have done better as spoken word. The concept, about a brain that stops functioning on behalf of its owner because it wants to have fun, is pretty good, and the music is rich, but they somehow don’t seem to reinforce each other. Still the song is worth it for its extremely 1989 moment, in which the brain says, “Take me to your leader/And I say: do you mean … George?”

“Beautiful Red Dress” flips the tropes of women’s roles (shrill, decorative, emotionally unstable, dependence) on their heads, starting from the first chorus: “I’ve got a beautiful red dress/And you’d look really good/Standing beside it…” Lenny Pickett gets to play some spectacular 1980s saxophone all over the track, and there’s a great moment in which Laurie quiets the track down with the observation, “You know, for every dollar a man makes, a woman makes 63 cents. Now, fifty years ago, that was 62 cents. So, with that kind of luck, it’ll be the year 3,888 before we make — a buck.”

“The Day the Devil” flips the script on blaming external forces for your problems, with the devil being blamed for knowing you inside out before sneering, “Don’t come banging your Bibles/Cause you’ve been laughing all the way to the bank.” It’s not, to my hearing, entirely coherent, but the gospel chorus covers a multitude of sins in this song for me: “Give me back my innocence… ‘Cause when I get on up to heaven Lord/You can have it all back.”

The other emotional center for me comes next. “The Dream Before” is an unvarnished story of dashed hopes and unhappy outcomes. Hansel says, “I’ve wasted my life on our stupid legend/When my one and only love was the wicked witch.” The second half of the brief functions as sort of an ultimate Zen koan, with Anderson and Bobby McFerrin laying down some high-grade philosophy: “History is an angel being blown backwards into the future… and the angel wants to go back and fix things, to repair the things that have been broken, but there is a storm blowing from Paradise … and this storm, this storm, is called Progress.” Really listening to this as an about-to-graduate college student did something to the wiring of my brain. (I centered this song on a mix tape in 1993.)

“My Eyes” is somehow the perfect blend of Laurie’s tart observations and her new musical fluency, all the more so because there’s no pat moral or punchline. She confronts the enormous night, the kerjillions of stars, the “ocean, so deep, so old,” and simply exists in it: “Everything’s shaking in strange delight.” The track is underpinned by that spectacular one-two combo of Bakithi Khumalo’s fretless bass and Ray Phiri’s guitar.

The album ends with a valediction for the departed in “Hiawatha,” as Laurie invokes the spirits of Elvis, JFK, and Marilyn Monroe to welcome newly departed souls: “Well, starlight, starbright, we’re going to hang some new stars in the sky tonight.” The combination of Scott Johnson’s guitar and the understated backing vocals of the Roches turns the overall effect into a simultaneous groove and valediction.

Laurie’s experiment with leaning more fully into the musical side of her art was well received by the critics, with Robert Christgau giving the album an A. After the album it took a while for her to find her next voice, but find it she did after about five years, and we’ll hear that sound another time. Next week, though, we’ll swerve back over into what was being called “world music” to hear the next album from one of Peter Gabriel’s other collaborators.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Here’s Laurie performing “Strange Angels” live in San Remo in 2001, during an award ceremony in which she was awarded the Premio Tenco for songwriting:

BONUS BONUS: “Strange Angels” soundtracks a moving moment in the William Hurt/Elizabeth Perkins 1991 film The Doctor, in which the characters, playing cancer patients, embrace a moment of grace:

BONUS BONUS BONUS: Laurie originally didn’t pursue the traditional music video route to promote the album, instead opting to produce a series of short videos, called “Personal Service Announcements,” in which she did her version of stand-up comedy. A few of these have surfaced over the years, including these: