Tag: laurieanderson

Peter Gabriel, So

The bestselling 1986 album seamlessly melds art and pop and marks Peter’s transition to a top tier star.

Album of the Week, May 16, 2026

It’s a challenge to approach an album like So. Easily Peter Gabriel’s most popular album, arguably one of the most talked about and best albums of the 1980s, and it’s not like it’s obscure. But, like the songs themselves, the album is made of layers upon layers, and that’s where our tale begins.

In fact, let’s begin at the beginning. Following the 1982 release of Security and the subsequent tour, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Peter took some time off, save for the soundtrack to Alan Paton’s film Birdy. In fact, he was recording the whole time. The years 1983–1985 were surprisingly fertile given that there was no official album released. In fact, there’s a rich batch of soundtrack appearances from this period, as well as non-album studio tracks: “Walk Through the Fire” (from Against All Odds),1 the studio version of “I Go Swimming,” “Across the River” (a collaboration with Indian violinist L. Shankar and Stewart Copeland), his song “No More Apartheid” from the 1985 Sun City compilation, and of course “Out Out,” Peter’s contribution to the Gremlins soundtrack.2 Unfortunately, around this time Peter’s long-term UK label, Charisma, was being acquired by Virgin Records. Ultimately the acquisition settled out and Charisma/Virgin continued to release Peter’s albums in the UK while Geffen handled releases in the rest of the world, but in the dust of the acquisition some of the wind went out of the sails of a new album.

But his creative juices were still flowing. So in February of 1985 Peter retreated to the recording studio at Ashcombe House, where he had recorded since 1978, and began laying down tracks. He considered working with a number of producers for the album, including Bill Laswell (whom he had crossed paths with in the making of the Laurie Anderson collaboration “Excellent Birds”) and Nile Rodgers, but ultimately decided to stick with Daniel Lanois, his collaborator from Birdy. It would prove a fruitful choice; not only was Lanois an expert in producing the combination of organic and atmospheric sounds that Peter was striving to produce, but he was also surprisingly adept at forcing the famously digressive Peter to finish work. My favorite anecdote: at one point Lanois resorted to locking Peter inside the studio so that he would finish a vocal. Peter wrote the core tracks of the songs with Lanois and guitarist David Rhodes from sketches that he produced using the Prophet-5 polyphonic synthesizer or his Yamaha piano, along with a Linn drum machine. Using this method, Peter built songs up from melodic ideas with nonsense vocal syllables to fully fledged songs, having the trio improvise with his rough demos in their headphones, bouncing the trio recordings into the headphones to bring in the larger band, and so on.

The larger band was built around familiar collaborators—Tony Levin, Jerry Marotta—and French drummer Manu Katché (who would follow this session with Sting’s …Nothing Like the Sun). A host of others would make appearances on the album, most on one or two tracks: Chris Hughes, fresh off producing Tears for Fears’ Songs from the Big Chair; Copeland; Shankar; trumpeter Wayne Jackson from the Stax Records backing band the Bar-Keys; saxophonist Mark Rivera from Billy Joel’s band; pianist Richard Tee, whom we’ve previously seen playing with Hubert Laws and Ron Carter on CTI Records; and guest vocalists Laurie Anderson, Kate Bush, and Youssou N’Dour. The last was a superstar in his native Senegal, but was yet to break out in the consciousness of the broader world; that was about to change.

“Red Rain” opens the album on a massive note, with an indelible riff on the hi-hat from Stewart Copeland and an echo of a keyboard line, then a massive chord through which Tony Levin’s indelible bass snakes. Peter’s apocalyptic lyrics sing of a dream of a rain that covers all those around, imagery that dates back to some of his earliest writings; in fact, the image is the one of the last remnants of the Mozo mythology that had previously informed “Down the Dolce Vita,” “Here Comes the Flood,” and “On the Air.” But Mozo aside, the song also features some deeply personal writing. His marriage to Jill Moore was falling apart—strained by his touring, she was unfaithful, and the resulting divorce sent Peter into a deep depression and to six years of therapy. It’s hard not to read lines like “I come to you, defenses down / with the trust of a child” and “Red rain is coming down all over me / I’m begging you” knowing this context without thinking of metaphors for accusations and retribution.

From the sublime to … “Sledgehammer,” easily Gabriel’s most-remembered song, thanks in no small measure to its innovative Claymation video and unsubtle but good-natured phallic imagery, as well as to the horn section, a first for a Gabriel album. Peter has explicitly called out the song as an homage to Stax-Volt soul singles, an early source of musical inspiration for him, to the point that he asked Wayne Jackson, who as a member of the Mar-Keys played behind Peter’s hero Otis Redding, to assemble the horns for the track, which included Rivera and trombonist Don Mikkelsen, who had played with Ann-Margret and in Louie Bellson’s band. There’s what sounds like a Hammond B-3 organ on the track, which is actually played on Peter’s Prophet-5 synthesizer, and a weird synthetic flute sound, which Peter plays on the E-mu Emulator II, a sampling synthesizer beloved by acts as diverse as Stevie Wonder, Belgian electronic band Front 242, Depeche Mode, and the Pet Shop Boys. The track is tremendous fun, thanks in no small part to its bouncy rhythm section courtesy Levin and Katché, who was literally getting on a bus to the airport when Peter encouraged him to stick around and help re-record the track from its original foundation, which had featured drummer Chester Thompson.

“Don’t Give Up” is another complete stylistic pivot, a hard-luck song constructed in response to Dorothea Lange photographs of starving farmers from the American Depression. It was built around a rhythmic part that Peter transferred from tuned drums to a Tony Levin bassline; Tony achieved a more muted sound by the expedient of placing a diaper that he had packed in his gig bag for his two-month-old child beneath the strings. The track is moving enough, but when the chorus comes and Kate Bush sings “Don’t give up, you still have … friends,” it enters spine-tingling territory. The song changes lives; both Elton John and the late Matthew Perry at different times credited the bridge’s lyric “Rest your head, you worry too much / It’s gonna be all right / When times get rough, you can fall back on us” with encouraging them in sobriety. And Richard Tee’s gospel piano on the second bridge similarly elevates the song to a different place. It was always conceived as a man-woman duet, though originally Peter had Dolly Parton in mind; now it’s hard to imagine the song without Kate’s contributions. This is particularly true with the video, which features Peter and Kate embracing each other and singing the song for the entire video as the sun rises and falls in the background. Though Peter asked Jill’s permission before embarking on the shoot, the video ultimately did not help their marriage.

“That Voice Again” has its origins in Peter’s efforts to write the soundtrack for Martin Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, believe it or not. Originally the lyrics were written about judgment and Christ’s commandment “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” but over several rewrites it became about the inner judgmental voice that “either helps or defeats us.” It is also the very last Mozo song, with the judgmental voice somehow fitting into Peter’s alchemical narrative. Twelve-string guitar from Lanois (the first time that instrument appeared on a Gabriel album since “Solsbury Hill”) and an elaborate drum part from Katché fill out the arrangement.

“In Your Eyes” is a pure love ballad, a form that Peter rarely essayed prior to So. It has several key features in the arrangement: Richard Tee’s piano, a soaring pre-chorus (that “I reach out from the inside” segueing into the wordless vocal bridge always hits me right in the feels), and Youssou N’Dour. That a previously-unknown-to-Westerners Senegalese vocalist would be the secret weapon of this track would seem unusual, especially given the Who’s Who of backup singers also appearing on the track—which included Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr, The Call’s Michael Been, and doo-wop singer Ronnie Bright, who performed the bass vocals on the classic song “Mr. Bass Man.” But that’s only if you don’t reckon with Youssou’s voice; a soaring, resonant instrument with bright edges that spans multiple octaves with heldentenor intensity and is comfortable in Wolof, French and English. More than any other track on the album, the arrangement for “In Your Eyes” is fluid, and live versions and remixes play with the running order of the song; we’ll hear an example of that another time. As a listener who fell in love with the album in 1986, the song sits at Number 5 in the running order for me, but Peter originally intended it to end the album; the limitations of the vinyl format, which made reproducing the low bass tones in the inner grooves a challenge, switched it to start Side Two.

“Mercy Street” is another of the songs on the albums about which I have difficulty being objective. The song introduced me to the writings of Anne Sexton, whose poetry (particularly 45 Mercy Street and The Awful Rowing Toward God) inspired the song. The song is built around a track by Brazilian percussionist Djalma Corrêa, who provided surdo, congas and triangle in a traditional Brazilian forró rhythm. (A different set of track by Corrêa provided the basis for “Don’t Break This Rhythm”, which became the b-side to “Sledgehammer.”) The arrangement, though uncluttered on the album, was painstakingly constructed, with piano parts from Richard Tee added and then removed, a Fairlight CMI-based melody played by Peter by hand instead of sequenced for a more human feeling, and double-tracked vocals, with the lower octave achieved by having Peter stay up all night at the studio and doing a single take at 7am when he was at his most fatigued. All this is in support of a jewel of a song, with bits of Sexton’s poetry turned into a stream-of-consciousness lyric full of confessional details, anchored around the desperate search for home: “Dreaming of Mercy Street / Wear your inside out / Looking for mercy / In your daddy’s arms again.” The final coda lends finality to the searching and despair in the song as Peter turns to images from Sexton’s posthumous book: “Anne with her father is out in the boat / Riding the water, riding the waves / On the sea.” A slightly extended version of the track was used for the official video.

“Big Time” is the other “overtly commercial” track on the album. The horn section from “Sledgehammer” returns over a rhythm track that was notoriously difficult to record; Tony Levin’s bass part was achieved by having Tony finger the notes on the fretboard while Jerry Marotta hit the strings with his drumsticks to achieve a percussion effect, while Stewart Copeland’s ingenious hits and fills didn’t exactly line up with the drum machine, so engineer Kevin Killen sampled his track and created the percussion from the samples. Former Ikette P. P. Arnold led the backing singers, and Peter’s Prophet-5 faux-Hammond organ returned. Where the phallic imagery in “Sledgehammer” is playful, here it’s sardonic, as Peter dismantles the consumerist mentality of the 1980s and ties it to the drive to overcompensate, a point brought home by the closing lyric: “Look at my circumstance / And the bulge in my big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big.”

The transition into “We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37)” is abrupt and icy. The song, reminiscent of “Lead a Normal Life,” is mostly constructed around Peter’s synthesizers, with David Rhodes’ guitar and L. Shankar’s violin contributing to the texture over a beat from Jerry Marotta; many of the sounds, including Peter’s vocals, were processed through the Fairlight for extra texture. Peter wrote the lyrics as an attempt to process the results of Stanley Milgram’s experiments in authoritarian behavior, in which 37 of 40 participants continued to administer higher and higher levels of electric shocks to unseen subjects when encouraged to do so by their peers. The repeated “We do what we’re told” lyric repeats like a mantra, expressing the impulse to conformity that drove the awful behavior of the participants. Some listeners found this song the only part of So to their tastes; however one felt, it’s undeniably a direct link to the themes and preoccupations of 1980’s Peter Gabriel 3 (Melt), and in fact the song originated in those sessions.

“This is the Picture (Excellent Birds),” which appears on modern LP versions of the album but not the original, is a re-think of Peter’s 1984 collaboration with Laurie Anderson from Mister Heartbreak, with the groove (including an added talking drum from Manu Katché) brought to the fore and some elements (like Laurie’s idiosyncratic synth line) removed. My poor mother could never get Peter’s word choice in the song; hearing it in my childhood home as I was listening, she asked me not to listen to it again as the line about “bitches of evil” made her uncomfortable. (This was, of course, a mondegreen for “I see pictures of people.”)

It’s hard to overstate how huge So was. Quintuple platinum album sales, Number One on the UK album chart and Number Two on the US, a number one Billboard Top 200 spot (“Sledgehammer”) and nine MTV Video Music Awards (also “Sledgehammer”), number one on Billboard’s Album Rock chart (“In Your Eyes”), top 10 singles in the UK (“Don’t Give Up”) and US (“Big Time”), and number 3 on the Mainstream Rock chart (“Red Rain”). It launched Youssou N’Dour to worldwide fame, further raised the profile of Kate Bush, and most of all completed the transformation of Peter Gabriel from a niche artist for fans of progressive and experimental rock, to a pop artist with serious artistic and experimental bona fides. Because of the album’s long gestation and long singles cycle, many interesting tracks were released alongside as b-sides; we’ll linger in this album’s shadow a bit next week to listen to some of those.

You can listen to this week’s album here, in the original 1986 track order but including “This is the Picture (Excellent Birds)” in its spot on the original CD running order. This is controversial. Ever since 2002, Peter has preferred a revised running order that puts “In Your Eyes” last on side two.

BONUS: Peter’s So sessions sprawled across many months and there were a few songs that were recorded that never made it to the album, or even as a b-side. When the 25th anniversary of the album was released as a box set in 2011, Peter polished up a few of these songs. “Courage” is pretty great! It was released as a 12″ 45 single in the box set, with “Sagrada” and an alternative mix of “Don’t Give Up” as b-sides.

BONUS BONUS: There are a lot of live performances of these songs; they essentially form the core of Peter’s touring repertoire for the rest of his career. But the ones featuring the original performers, such as this 1987 live version of “Don’t Give Up” with Kate Bush, are special. Even if it is an audio-only cleaned-up bootleg:

BONUS BONUS BONUS: “In Your Eyes” was made newly famous through its use in the John Cusack/Ione Skye movie Say Anything, in a scene that is engraved in the hearts of otherwise-cynical GenX kids everywhere:

BONUS X4: The version of “Mercy Street” that was performed in Peter’s 1987 concert in Athens, Greece has always pierced me to the heart, with Peter singing from curled and crouched positions to echo the anguish of the lyrics:

Footnotes

  1. I know that I probably just put the Phil Collins title song from that movie into your head. You’re welcome. ↩︎
  2. We’ll talk about some of Peter’s other soundtrack work another time. ↩︎

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”:

Anderson/Giorno/Burroughs, You’re the Guy I Want to Share My Money With

A dip into the wild world of performance art and avant-garde writing from the dawn of the New Wave.

Album of the Week, March 21, 2026

The name of this segment of my album reviews was originally going to be “art rock.” But while that term has been used to apply to Peter Gabriel’s work, it’s impossibly undefinable, and didn’t really cover the work of one of his collaborators whose story we’ll begin to discuss today. Though Laurie Anderson is undeniably an artist, the “rock” part is an ill-fitting label, and none of her recordings illustrates the challenge as much as today’s recording, a compilation of spoken word, performance art, and poetry that pairs her with two other challenging artists over a year before the release of her debut album.

Laurie Anderson was born in Chicago and grew up in the Illinois suburbs studying art and playing in the Chicago Youth Symphony. She drew comics, made sculpture, and did performance art: her first public performance was a symphony for automobile horns, and one of her best-known pieces from the 1970s, “Duets on Ice,” involved her playing violin against a recording of herself while wearing ice skates that had been frozen into blocks of ice—the performance ended when the ice melted enough to free her skates.1 Also in the 1970s she connected with New York poet and performance artist John Giorno, on whose Giorno Poetry Systems label she released some of her earliest recordings (including some for his groundbreaking “Dial-A-Poem” system).2

Increasingly Anderson was drawn to recorded art, though she never abandoned her more visual instincts, and in 1981 she released two important records. One, a single called “O Superman,” was released in October on a small label and had an unusually strong reception (which we’ll discuss another time). The second was a side (er, a side-plus) of this double album on Giorno Poetry Systems, with which Anderson appeared alongside two even more avant-garde poets: Giorno himself, and William S. Burroughs.

The latter had outlived his early tumultuous years—gay, addicted to opiates, accidental murderer—and had built a solid, if solidly weird, literary reputation as the author of works like The Naked Lunch, a science fiction trilogy (The Soft Machine,3 The Ticket That Exploded, Nova Express) and a great many short stories. He also made a number of recordings on a variety of small labels that featured his distinctive reading of his own works, based on the live readings that he was now giving on the lecture circuit. It was in this vein4 that Burroughs appeared on this recording. All three artists had appeared together in a series of readings and performances dubbed “The Red Night Tour.”

Laurie Anderson’s segment of the album is the most straightforward, and that’s saying something. While parts of the performance were recognizably connected to other things happening in music in the early 1980s (“Doctor Miller” is practically a Kraftwerk song, if you subtract the increasingly anxious PA voiceovers calling for the doctor), others are distinctively and uniquely Laurie’s voice, even (“It Was Up in the Mountains”) when the words are spoken by someone else. If I’m honest, “Closed Circuit” is more interesting than listenable, notable primarily for featuring Laurie’s use of vocal effects to create a deeper timbre for her speaking voice—a trick that she would perfect elsewhere, but here is marred by the lengthy lyric that feels more like a shaggy dog story. The end of Side 1 closes with an eerie instrumental played on a Farfisa, a marimba, handclaps, and Laurie’s brilliant violin; “Born, Never Asked” would appear again.

Side 2 is given over to two John Giorno poems, “I Don’t Need It, I Don’t Want It, and You Cheated Me Out of It” and “Completely Attached to Delusion.” Like Laurie Anderson, he plays with vocal effects, but his use of tape delay and pre-recorded alternate readings of the work is by turns disorienting, exhilarating and overwhelming. But it is a committed and fully out there reading, and there’s a direct line to be traced from his work to poetry slams.

Burroughs gets the next side, giving a series of readings from his novels, including the first appearance of his horrifically funny Dr. Benway (“Dr. Benway, ship’s doctor, drunkenly added two inches to a four inch incision with one stroke of his scalpel… ‘Perhaps the appendix is already out, doctor?’ The nurse said, appearing dubiously over his shoulder. ‘I saw a little scar.’”) But listening to the material one after another, one draws the following conclusions: that half the joy in listening to Burroughs comes from the sheer naughtiness of it and the joy he takes in elongating the sneering tones of protagonist and antagonist alike; that beneath that sneer lurks a pointed and deadly serious battle against inhumanity, stupidity and senseless violence; and that the non sequiturs introduced by Burroughs’ “cut up” method of literally cutting and pasting his writing together into new alearic combinations can sometimes be the only defense against a nonsensical and fragmenting world.

The most unusual feature of the album is its tracklist. Each of the performers takes up a side from 1 to 3, but the fourth side is something else again, featuring three independent grooves about five minutes each. Which one you get depends on where you drop the needle. Laurie’s contribution is a montage featuring two electronic percussion numbers (“For Electronic Dogs” and “Drums”) sandwiching an earnest young man reading a short bit over some cheery library music. “Structuralist Filmmaking” is one of Laurie’s most dryly funny bits; I wonder how much of its narrative was inspired by Burroughs’ cut-up method.

Taken together, the two hours of You’re the Guy I Want To Share My Money With are by turns funny, bracing, moving, and occasionally maddening. The connection from Laurie Anderson’s experimental synthesizers and samples to Peter Gabriel’s increasingly rhythmic art-pop sensibility is hard to see at this stage. But in next week’s album, we’ll see the bridge begin to be built, and it starts with that other 1981 Laurie Anderson release.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Giorno was one of a group of artists in Burroughs’ orbit when he returned to New York City in the 1970s, and later lived in the windowless apartment (dubbed “The Bunker”) where Burroughs lived and wrote and shot pistols for target practice (!). Here he gives a tour through the Bunker, which was restored to the way it was when Burroughs lived there after the latter’s death:

Footnotes

  1. For those for whom this sort of stuff is fascinating, her 1994 book Stories from the Nerve Bible offers a great look at all the wonderful weirdness of her performance art days. ↩︎
  2. Somewhat to my amazement, not only is Giorno Poetry Systems still online, but so is the web version of Dial-A-Poem. ↩︎
  3. The Soft Machine later lent its name to an English progressive-rock group that included about twenty musicians among its membership in its lifetime, including Rick Wakeman (later of Yes), Andy Summers of the Police, and Peter Gabriel’s occasional saxophonist Dick Morrissey. ↩︎
  4. Pun intended. ↩︎

Old mix: the bang and the clatter (as an angel runs to ground) (summer 1993)

In the summer of 1993, I was on top of the world. Having finished a great Glee Club season and gotten a literary magazine off the ground, I had just gotten a room on the Lawn and was staying in Charlottesville for the summer as an undergraduate assistant in a physics lab. I had just started listening to the funkier side of James Brown and was starting to discover blues, hip-hop and world music. Plus, I now had wheels, in the form of an incredibly fun but unreliable 1977 MGB.

This mixtape, accordingly, was shaped by all these factors, perhaps not least of all by the last. Most of the selections on this mix were chosen because they sounded great in the MGB with the top down. That was certainly true of “Ocean Size,” the opening track. After ignoring Jane’s Addiction for many years, I finally got into them about two years after they had broken up. This was a version of Los Angeles rock I could get behind—something like heavy metal for art students. And the lead-in to Hubert Sumlin’s slashing guitar on the great “Killing Floor” remains a potent link from the first song to the second. I had first picked up the Chess blues sound from a phenomenal box set of Willie Dixon recordings, and then this 1965 Chess anthology of Howlin’ Wolf’s work, which had just been reissued on CD. (It’s with no shame that I note that my first exposure to the title of this track was in William Gibson’s short story “Johnny Mnemonic,” where he borrows the phrase and puts it to an entirely different purpose.)

On the strength of Peter Gabriel’s early Real World compilation Passion Sources, I started to branch out and find other artists on the label. The African artists on the label, such as Geoffrey Oryema and Ayub Ogada. Oryema’s “Piri Wango Iya” is a great introduction to the Ugandan’s sound, featuring only his voice and the traditional Ugandan lukeme (a gourd with plucked resonating metal strips).

I was still working my way through Suzanne Vega’s phenomenal 99.9 Fº, and “Blood Makes Noise” was just the sort of twitchy dance that I could get behind. Likewise PJ Harvey’s “Sheela-Na-Gig,” which even then struck me as a striking reversal of traditional gender politics, with Harvey’s narrator confidently offering herself sexually to a man who flatly rejects her as an exhibitionist and is terrified of being dirtied by her. We hadn’t explicitly covered Freud’s take on what would now be called the Madonna-whore complex when I read him in my first year, but it was a pretty clear illustration.

Then follows, for some reason, “Englishman in New York,” a track which I love by itself but which doesn’t flow very well here. Then “North Dakota.” I never had listened to much country music, but a friend who came to visit that summer left me with an aching heart, and a mixtape featuring this phenomenal Lyle Lovett song. “If you love me, say I love you” sounds like the loneliest thing ever, and it resonates at the heart of this tape once you peel back everything else.

I wasn’t emotionally mature enough to acknowledge or linger in my feelings, but I was more than capable of irony, and PJ Harvey was always there to help, as was the gently mocking narrator of Laurie Anderson’s “Language is a Virus.” Self-mockery always made me feel better, so it was a good transition from there into “What Goes On” and “Numb,” which may have been the first U2 song that made me laugh. Ditto the over-the-top apocalyptic Western of Nick Cave’s track from Until the End of the World, another third-year frequent rotation CD that I was still digesting.

The end of this summer, when I was starting to put this mix together, was a rough one physically, and I was starting to feel ragged and tired around the edges. When I came home at the end of the summer for a few weeks before school started, I realized why — I had contracted mononucleosis, probably as a consequence of the close living quarters in the student apartment that was my home for the summer. (While I was dating someone that summer, we only spent a few days together as she was off doing her own things, so I’m pretty sure I didn’t get the “kissing disease” the fun way.) “Run That Body Down” accordingly became my theme song. It’s a good thing I didn’t know then how rundown a body could actually get…

More feelings avoidance, more loud rock! I still love “Ain’t No Right,” though not as much as I love the downtempo shift that follows it. I listened to For the Beauty of Wynona for the first time with a good friend and neighbor who had good taste in music and confused my feelings (a common theme of my college years). And Lanois’ country-infused guitar had a natural connection, at least in my mind, to the freaked-out electric blues that Miles and his band pulled from thin air on “Honky Tonk.”

My immature late teenage feelings (okay, I was actually 20) loved getting lost in Elvis Costello’s Brodsky Quartet collaboration, and on no track was this more true than on “Who Do You Think You Are?,” a paean for those with a more active imagination than love life. And again, any time I felt actual feelings getting close to the surface, it was time for a shift of gears. I have always loved “Le Bien, Le Mal” ever since borrowing Jazzmatazz Vol. 1 (and the first Digable Planets album) from a neighbor in that crowded college apartment (thanks, Patrick!), but the name of the transition technique between the Elvis Costello track and this is called “discontinuity.” Once I found that groove, though, it was a logical connection to James Brown, whose “Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine” had soundtracked a memorable party a few months prior in an apartment full of physics students, quality porter and stout, and someone’s incredible record collection (including, oddly, Speak No Evil).

I didn’t always know how to end mix tapes then, so there’s no real through line for the last few tracks. But “En Mana Kuoyo” is a fine closer, a brightly percolating groove from Kenya that transported me to another place. I hope it does the same for you.

Full track listing below:

  1. Ocean Size – Jane’s Addiction (Nothing’s Shocking)
  2. Killing Floor – Howlin’ Wolf (The Real Folk Blues)
  3. Piri Wango Iya – Geoffrey Oryema (Exile)
  4. Blood Makes Noise – Suzanne Vega (99.9 F°)
  5. Sheela-Na-Gig – PJ Harvey (Dry)
  6. Englishman in New York – Sting (Nothing Like The Sun)
  7. North Dakota – Lyle Lovett (Joshua Judges Ruth)
  8. Rub ‘Til It Bleeds – PJ Harvey (Rid Of Me)
  9. Language Is A Virus – Laurie Anderson (Home Of The Brave)
  10. What Goes On (Closet Mix) – The Velvet Underground (Peel Slowly and See)
  11. Numb – U2 (Zooropa)
  12. (I’ll Love You) Till The End Of The World – Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds (Until The End Of The World)
  13. Run That Body Down – Paul Simon (Paul Simon)
  14. Ain’t No Right – Jane’s Addiction (Ritual De Lo Habitual)
  15. Still Learning How To Crawl – Daniel Lanois (For The Beauty Of Wynona)
  16. Honky Tonk – Miles Davis (Get Up With It)
  17. Who Do You Think You Are? – Elvis Costello And The Brodsky Quartet (The Juliet Letters)
  18. Le Bien, Le Mal – Guru Featuring Mc Solaar (Jazzmatazz Volume 1)
  19. Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine – James Brown (Funk Power 1970: Brand New Thang)
  20. I’ve Been Tired – The Pixies (Come On Pilgrim)
  21. Jane Says – Jane’s Addiction (Nothing’s Shocking)
  22. Stay (Faraway, So Close!) – U2 (Faraway So Close)
  23. Every Time I Go Around Here – Frank Black (Frank Black)
  24. En Mana Kuoyo – Ayub Ogada (En Mana Kuoyo)

You can listen to (most of) the mix on Apple Music:

Old mix: An angel being blown backwards into the future

Prodded by yesterday’s post about Pieces of Africa and the mixes it inspired, I was inspired to post about a few of them. These were mix tapes—made well before the advent of Rip.Mix.Burn—and they reflected whatever was going through my brain at the time.

This mix was made early in the summer of 1993. I had just finished my third year at the University of Virginia and was interning in a physics lab, and slowly coming to the painful conclusion that I would not be going on to graduate study in my field. But it was sunny, and I was reasonably happy! So this was made to play in my car with the top down.

Like so many of the mixes I made (and still make), this was a way for me to digest all the CDs I had bought and listened to, whether from Plan 9 or in the BMG music club, which sold classical and other CDs at a substantial discount if you didn’t mind the occasionally blurry reproductions of album art and liner notes they suspiciously sported…

But summer of 1993 was still a pretty good time. Frank Black had just changed his name and released his first solo album; Sting’s latest showed he still had songwriting chops. I had met a singer from a woman’s chorus on a Glee Club tour who moved me deeply, to the tune of a Suzanne Vega song. Peter Gabriel’s Real World was still introducing me to new voices like Sheila Chandra. My friends in the New Dominions had just recorded their first CD, for which I did the jacket and disc design, working around a brilliant illustration by Deepak Raghu. I had heard Tori Amos for the first time in concert at Old Cabell Hall, being lucky enough to score tickets after a Glee Club rehearsal. I was starting to explore jazz beyond Coltrane and Miles and Wynton and Branford. Good times indeed.

  1. Fu Manchu – Frank Black (Frank Black)
  2. 99.9 F° – Suzanne Vega (99.9 F°)
  3. Love Is Stronger Than Justice (The Munificent Seven) – Sting (Ten Summoner’s Tales)
  4. Before You Were Born – Toad the Wet Sprocket (Fear)
  5. Ever So Lonely/Eyes/The Ocean – Sheila Chandra (Weaving My Ancestors’ Voices)
  6. Ava – David Byrne (The Forest)
  7. Tin Man – New Dominions (Salamander!)
  8. Tilliboyo – Kronos Quartet (Pieces of Africa)
  9. Road To Nowhere – Talking Heads (Sand In The Vaseline Popular Favorites 1976-1992)
  10. Precious Things – Tori Amos (Little Earthquakes)
  11. The Dream Before – Laurie Anderson (Strange Angels)
  12. Seven Days – Sting (Ten Summoner’s Tales)
  13. Drawing Room Blues – Joe Henderson (Lush Life – The Music of Billy Strayhorn)
  14. Sassy – Neneh Cherry (Homebrew)
  15. Ed Is Dead – The Pixies (Come On Pilgrim)
  16. Warning Sign – Talking Heads (More Songs About Buildings And Food)
  17. As Girls Go – Suzanne Vega (99.9 F°)
  18. Dirt In The Ground – Tom Waits (Bone Machine)
  19. Death Of A Train – Daniel Lanois (For The Beauty Of Wynona)
  20. Washing Of The Water – Peter Gabriel (Us)
  21. Motorway To Roswell – The Pixies (Trompe Le Monde)

If you have Apple Music, you can listen to the mix here, though it doesn’t include all the tracks… 🙁

Errata: Although “Upside Down” is in the track listing on the j-card for the tape, it wouldn’t fit on the end of Side 1. So I saved it for another mix.

Also noting: I added a page to the blog to track all the articles about mixes.

Linkblog for 8 Jan 2018

Quirkspace: 78 RPM Records. One user’s tips for recording 78RPM records when your turntable only supports 33/45 RPM, including settings in Amadeus Pro.

Stereophile: My Top 10 Jazz Albums of 2017. Fred Kaplan runs down a list of great jazz releases from last year, including both new and historical releases. Totally agree about the Cecile McLorin Salvant release.

Gaffa: Lou Reed og Laurie Anderson: DR Koncerthuset, København. A review of late-period Lou Reed, from 2009, four years before his death, in concert with Laurie Anderson. From the review, this was a true collaborative show. There may be a bootleg of the performance floating around out there…