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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.” ↩︎

Laurie Anderson, Big Science

The conceptual artist’s first major label album is an unliikely, and highly listenable, artifact from an ambiguous future.

Album of the Week, March 28, 2026

Performance artists do art pieces and get grants. They might release recordings of their work on small labels. They don’t, typically, have singles that hit the top of the charts, and they certainly don’t dedicate those singles to a dead French composer. But then, Laurie Anderson has never been typical.

The story of Big Science starts before You’re the Guy I Want to Share My Money With. Laurie had recorded the song and released it as a single in the UK in 1980 on the small label One Ten Records, in a limited edition of 1000 copies. That’s when BBC DJ John Peel changed the trajectory of her career. Putting it in frequent rotation on his show on BBC Radio One, his championing of the song led a British distributor to request 80,000 copies of the single. Laurie signed a distribution deal with Warner Bros. Records and the single went all the way to Number Two in the UK. On the strength of the single, Warner Bros. signed Laurie to an eight-album deal.

The album was released in April 1982. Produced by Roma Baran, who also played keyboards, accordion and percussion, and featuring installation artist Perry Hoberman on reeds, experimental composer Peter Gordon on clarinet and tenor sax, Bill Obrecht on alto sax, and composer David Van Tieghem on drums, marimba and percussion, the album featured a variety of performances drawn from a long-form show that she would eventually perform and record as United States Live I – IV. The material is much more melodic than the numbers on You’re the One I Want to Share My Money With, but still far from traditional song structures; built on loops, repetition, and open-ended chords, the pieces on Big Science feel like alerts from the future.

“From the Air” starts with a blast of keyboards and saxophones against the drums as Laurie Anderson narrates the increasingly unhinged thoughts of an in-flight announcement: “Your Captain says put your head on your knees. Your Captain says put your head in your hands. Captain says, put your hands on your head. Put your hands on your hips! Heh heh. This is your Captain, and we are going down. We are all going down together. And I said Uh-oh. This is going to be some day.” The repetition and music slowly ratchets up in intensity, and the syncopated drum pattern the sense of uncertainty, until the final verse: “Put your hands over your eyes. Jump out of the plane. There is no pilot. You are not alone. Standby. This is the time, and this is the record of the time.” Anderson’s words here (and elsewhere on Big Science) take on an uncomfortable resonance in the shadow of the September 11th attacks, but even without that massive hole in history lending its gravity, the intersection between order and chaos, the apparent power of the captain that is revealed to be illusion, pulls us in.

If “From the Air” has a sense of claustrophobia, “Big Science” and its synthesized lonely howl bring us to a wide empty space, with echoing handclaps and open fifths adding to the sense of anticipatory emptiness. We hear Laurie’s actual singing voice, a pure soprano in contrast to her normally lower pitched speaking voice, which gives an apocalyptic vision of the future: “I said, Hey pal, how do I get to town? And he said, well, just take a right where they’re going to build that new shopping mall, go straight past where they’re going to put in the freeway, and take a left at what’s going to be the new sports center. And keep going til you get to the place where they’re thinking of putting in the new drive-in bank.… And I said, ‘This must be the place.’” The future here is anticipatory but also hostile: “And long cars and long lines and great big signs/And they all say: Hallelujah. Yodellayheehoo. Every man for himself.” Laurie was listening to the same wavelength as William Gibson, who had written “The Gernsback Continuum” a year before about hallucinatory invasions of alternate future universes from 1930s pulp paperbacks: “The Thirties dreamed white marble and slip-stream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming. After the war, everyone had a car—no wings for it—and the promised superhighway to drive it down, so that the sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and pitted the miracle crystal…” But here rather than hallucinatory bleed-through the future is just full of totemic emptiness.

“Sweaters” has all the edge of Laurie’s more confrontational early work, here amped up to eleven by Van Tieghem’s stumbling drum work and Rufus Harley’s screaming bagpipes, playing against Laurie’s nonverbal vocalizations and her drone-like violin, all against a series of aleatory declarations of ended love: “I no longer love the color of your eyes/I no longer love the color of your sweaters.”

“Walking and Falling” is a quieter experimental reading against a looped background, a meditation leading into a straightforward reading of a poem ending with the question: “What is behind that curtain?” Then we get the keyboards and marimba of “Born, Never Asked,” in a new reading that is compositionally identical to the version on You’re the Guy… but with much better sound. A voiceover announces “You were born, and so you’re free. So happy birthday,” providing a non-answer to the question of what lies behind the curtain: it’s up to you, apparently, even if that self determination ultimately leads to the desolation of “Big Science.”

Side two opens with the album’s most enduring work. “O Superman (For Massenet)” is so titled because of Laurie’s cockeyed translation of the Massenet aria (from the opera El Cid) “Ô Souverain, ô juge, ô père”: “O Superman, o judge, o mom and dad.” The music is simple: built on a loop of Anderson’s voice on a single note, the vocal melody destabilizes, going from a major key (with the single note on the third) to a minor key with the repeated note on the tonic. Effects on Anderson’s voice make the sung lines sound at once like a Greek chorus and a robot. Even more than “From the Air,” the stark arrangement and openness of the voices fill the listener with a sense of growing unease, ultimately growing to a real feeling of dread: “Hello? This is your mother. Are you there? Are you coming home? —Well you don’t know me/But I know you/And I have a message/To give to you:/Here come the planes.” Anderson has stated that she wrote the song in the aftermath of the failed rescue of the Iranian hostages, Operation Eagle Claw, and the tragic deaths of eight American servicemen, and it continues the message of dependence and violence: “So hold me mom/In your long arms… In your automatic arms/Your petrochemical arms/In your electronic arms.” Other motifs weave their way through the song, culminating in a crescendo of minor-key chord progressions that echo the melody of “From the Air,” rise like the tide to a crashing climax, and fall away, leaving only the “ah-ah-ah.” Listening to it, you understand what would drive John Peel to play the song over and over, and Warner Bros. to sign her.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, “Example #22” announces itself in German as “examples of paranormal voices on tape” (Beispeile paranormaler Tonbandstimmen), interspersed with ringing phones, saxophones, reeds, and an accordion, accompanying what must surely be Laurie’s brattiest vocal. It’s great fun and completely impenetrable.

By contrast, “Let X = X / It Tango” closes out the record with quotably wry wit. “Let X = X” is practically a quotable aphorism in every line: “And I said, O boy. Right. Again. … You know. It could be you. It’s a sky-blue sky. Satellites are out tonight. … You know, I could write a book. And this book would be thick enough to stun an ox. ‘Cause I can see the future, and it’s a place about 70 miles east of here. Where it’s lighter.” The handclaps and marimba tie the arrangement back to “Born, Never Asked,” only in a much lighter vein; they continue through “It Tango,” a stopping and starting argument in search of an antecedent. She closes with a declaration of utterly failed communication: “Your eyes. It’s a day’s work just looking into them.”

Laurie’s first album immediately established her as a witty, thoughtful, highly listenable artist. And a bankable one: it sold 150,000 copies in its first year of release, smaller sales than a typical rock album but not by much (compare to 100,000 copies of Peter Gabriel (1977) in the UK). Her voice would continue to develop over the next few years, and we’ll check in on her again soon, but first we’ll see what kept Peter busy since the 1980 self-titled album.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: The b-side of “O Superman” was “Walk the Dog,” an exercise in odd narrative that leans into a trope from her shows, the “difficult listening hour,” with barking dogs, a voice shifted high in pitch to the edge of squeak, strummed violin strings, and a bashed drum kit:

BONUS BONUS: Laurie Anderson did a Tiny Desk Concert from home back in 2021, joined by Roma Baran and cellist Robin Kodheli, performing “Let X=X” and “O Superman”: