‘I Do Love a Doomed Quest’: We’re ‘Going Down’ With Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson can’t deny that she has an obsession with flying, a recurring motif throughout her long career as a recording and performance artist.
More from Spin:
Well… not exactly flying.
“Going down,” she specifies with a laugh on a video chat, making a motion with her right hand, opened flat and descending across the screen, like a plane heading toward the ground, precipitously.
Sitting in the study at her home in East Long Island, Anderson cocks her head and gives a knowing grin, her eyes glinting mischievously beneath her familiar cropped, spiked hair.
Indeed, the first words on her first album, 1982’s still-astounding breakthrough Big Science, are a pilot giving instructions to prepare passengers for an impending crash. And on her latest album, Amelia, Anderson takes the role of Amelia Earhart in a poetic, impressionistic telling of the aviation pioneer’s thoughts through her fatally failed 1937 attempt to circumnavigate the globe.
“I do love a doomed quest,” she says.
And it’s not only flight. There are ships going down too, one notably in her sprawling, hallucinatory opera Songs and Stories from Moby-Dick, which premiered in 1999. All through her work we find humans against nature, humans fighting against the power of gravity, fighting against the power of the ocean. Even a simple stroll, she spoke-sang in another Big Science piece, “Walking and Falling,” is a step-by-step defiance of gravity, both noble and unsustainable.
“Not to mention the thing I’m doing now, The Ark,” she adds. “Which is doomed before it even sets sail!”
That project, she explains, will be a stage performance set to premiere in England in November, billed as Part V of her United States series. The first four parts date back to the early ‘80s, launching her to the top of the avant-garde world, where she built bridges into classical and pop. Combined into a massive performance piece exploring the nature of communication (and miscommunication), the promises and perils of technology, the original United States saw Anderson seeking to create her own languages of art, a driving impulse of much of her work.
“It will be opening right around the elections in Manchester at [the famed arts complex] the Factory,” she says of the new project. “And it’s a very long piece with lots of visual things in it and stories. It’s about a 21st-century ark, how to save the world.”
Talk about doomed quests.
“It’s eerie,” she says. “This is not something I’ve ever planned, you know, about sinking ships. But I do find missing boats and these kinds of things really dramatic and intense. And also just thinking about the ocean is always really inspiring to me. Especially the Atlantic. The mighty Atlantic is one of my favorite oceans.”
She shrugs a little. “It’s just because it’s the one I know best.”
Amelia, she says, seemed doomed too when she was launching its first incarnation, an orchestral piece commissioned in 2000 by conductor Dennis Russell Davies, who also conducted the orchestral parts of the new album.
“When I did it first at Carnegie Hall for a full orchestra, it was a mess,” she says. “I didn’t know what I was doing at all. Dennis is rehearsing and I’m just like, ‘Oh, I did everything wrong. Oh, that bassoon is playing what the flute should be playing.’ It was an absolute train wreck or plane wreck and everything.”
But, looking back, she loves that mess too.
“Well, hard times are good things,” she says. “I mean, one of the things I’ve realized is that I only really learn anything when things are just disastrous. It’s the only time I’m able to actually be vulnerable enough to learn anything.”
She laughs again.
“Because the rest of the time it’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s good. I’ll do this. I’ll do that.’ It’s fun and exciting, but, you know, whenever everything just falls apart—it’s not that I look forward to it now, but I almost do.”
This has evolved over the last couple of decades.
“I’ve learned not to be afraid of it,” she says. “I’ve learned to appreciate it just as much as some kind of thing that works very well. So if it doesn’t work at all, well, that’s okay with me now in a way it didn’t used to be. And maybe the biggest change for me is that I—it’s not that I don’t care, although I don’t care as much about what people think. I used to care more. And now I care about making something that communicates things. But not really. I’m not doing it so that people think in a certain way. You know, it’s like I’ve always been a snob.”
One thing in that time period, of course, shadows everything else: the 2013 death of Lou Reed, the two of them having married in 2008 after being together since 1992. Though to hear her talk about it, that experience illuminates everything else.
“Well,” she says, “like with every loss, I think it makes…” Her phone interrupts her, with an audio announcement that it’s a call from artist-filmmaker Julian Schnabel, a neighbor and close friend.
“One second,” she apologizes as she answers.
After ending the call, she explains that in a few hours she and Schnabel were appearing together at a nearby gallery exhibiting his art. She would be performing a short piano piece inspired by one of his paintings and giving a short talk about the languages of art.
Then she resumes her thought about the loss of Reed. “Any time that happens, things that you lose, I think creates empathy, for sure,” she says, reflecting on her long-time Buddhist practice. “A lot of people go, ‘Why me?’ On the positive side, you go, ‘Why not me?’ It’s a beautiful, mortal experience. And I felt it was a great, great privilege to get to experience that. It was a real honor.”
And as she’s changed, as her life has changed, so has Amelia.
“The first version, the orchestral version, was in the realm of experimental music,” she sys. “It wasn’t something that was about emotion, really. It was about experimentation and having these sounds that were thrilling to me. I loved trying to make it, but it wasn’t about a defined thing. It didn’t have propulsion that I put into it of just…take off and…” She laughs at the obvious analogy. “… and crash.”
Indeed, the new album version opens and closes with the sound of an airplane motor. But this is not a literal audio depiction of Earhart’s experience. Rather the music portrays the feelings of the trip. With a mix of full orchestra, the Trimbach string trio, and a small electric ensemble with vocalist Anohni and guitarist Marc Ribot among the featured performers alongside her own viola, keyboards, and electronics, Anderson takes us through the excitement, the fear, the physical and mental strains, the hope and despair. And while it retains a sense of experimentation, it’s not lacking in earnest emotion.
Vocally, Anderson moves between speaking and singing, some first-person and some third-person narration, some lyrics adapted from Earhart’s pilot’s log, telegrams and interviews along the way, some imagined by Anderson, supplemented by a couple short archival recordings of Earhart’s own voice. There’s the excitement of departing in her Lockheed Electra, eastward from Oakland, California, tensions as she meets the press eager to get some quotes (she complains that she doesn’t even have a name—“Lady Lindy” she gets called, diminishingly, in reference to Charles Lindbergh). There’s the tedium, disorientation of flying over vast expanses of the Atlantic and the African deserts. And as she heads across the Pacific the increased stress and fatigue, with her navigator much of the time passed out drunk in the seat behind her, bring on a clearly deteriorating mental state.
Creating this project gave Anderson deep empathy and fascination for Earhart. She cites a strong admiration for Earhart’s role-model advocacy for young women.
“She said that if she survived that last flight, she’d like to start ‘shop for girls,’” she says. “And I thought, ‘How amazing!’ because in the ‘30s, shop was of course motor engines, carpentry, and all that in high school for boys, and girls did home economics, which was cooking and cleaning. She said girls want to know how engines work too. It’s 87 years later and I’m looking at what girls get to do now. They’re still not very welcome in fields of engineering, not to mention government, finance, health. But she rang that bell a long time ago.”
But wait, let’s go back a bit. While talking about that 2000 orchestra rehearsal she used the term plane wreck unironically?
“Yes,” she said, smiling that smile again. “You’re on to me.”
The fact is, irony, once a key part of Anderson’s off-beat observations, is nowhere to be found in Amelia. For that matter, irony has been less a part of her work for a bit now, there to dig a bit deep in her exploration of the American psyche in 2010’s Homeland and absent entirely from 2018’s profoundly affecting Landfall, a collaboration with the Kronos Quartet inspired by her experiences in and the impact of Hurricane Sandy. And Heart of a Dog, her 2015 film and soundtrack album, openly mix the celebration of the life of and mourning for her and Reed’s dog Lolabelle, who also died in 2013, with a larger look at death and grief. Following that was 2019’s Songs From the Bardo, a collaboration with Tibetan musician Tenzin Choegyal and musician-composer Jesse Paris Smith (Patti Smith’s daughter), which is described in the liner notes as “a guided journey through passages from the Tibetan Book of the Dead.”
The Amelia album is in many ways a piece with those in sound and tone. But it also stands apart, if for nothing else for being in just the one voice of Earhart. (This is the third straight album with no appearances from Fenway Bergamot, her oft-taken male alter-ego involving her electronically lowered voice, the name bestowed by Reed. She assures his fans, though, that he turns up again in The Ark.)
While she didn’t really know a lot about Earhart before the commission, the connection that developed creates an intimacy on the album, as she was dedicated to honoring the life of her subject, to show her in a fair light, something galvanized in her by reading recent biographies of Reed that she says don’t resemble the real him at all.
“I was really tiptoeing, like, ‘Who am I to tell her story?’” she says. “I tried to make it very clear that it’s just faithfully saying where she is and what she said about what she did, and once in a while me saying, ‘I wonder what it would feel like growing up in L.A. and [falling] in love with the air?’”
There’s a piece near the end of Amelia in which Earhart is attempting to communicate via radio with a ship assigned to escort and guide her to an intended landing on Howland Island in the middle of the Pacific. But, unknowingly, she was broadcasting on the wrong frequency and was not heard. In Anderson’s telling, she even tried whistling to get her signal through.
That image of a daring explorer on a personal mission, going out on a signal that no one can hear—is that something to which perhaps a daring artist, dedicated to creating her own forms of communication, might relate?
“You know,” she hems and haws a bit. “I personally… yes… of course, sometimes I feel like that. Generally I don’t. In the medium of live stuff, I’m very aware that you don’t have a long time to make it work. But if people don’t get it now, if it’s interesting they’ll think about it later. But to resonate is really immediate or nothing for me.”
One more laugh. “So I think about that a lot,” she says. “How do you get on that frequency with people?”
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
