Laurie Anderson has a way of holding our lives up to a mirror, reintroducing us to ourselves, in all our ridiculousness and splendor. Now in her late 70s, the curious-minded visionary maintains her impish smile; her incantations — on everything from the American Dream to Amelia Earhart in this Tiny Desk set — seem more sage-like than ever.
The idea of playing music behind an office desk struck Anderson as just another off-beat idea. She's had hundreds of her own. No one can boast being NASA's first artist in residence and performing a concert for dogs at the Sydney Opera House.
Anderson emerged from a hothouse of visual arts, theatre and music that commingled in lower Manhattan in the early 1970s. She hung out at Philip Glass' loft, she once told me, listening to "organs at ear-bleeding levels," while staring at the ceiling. In 1981, she enjoyed an unexpected hit in "O Superman," and since then has created thoughtful, tech-savvy musical meditations on wide-ranging topics.
Coming straight from the Big Ears Festival, where she played with a seven-piece band, Anderson pared down to a trio for this career-spanning set with violist Martha Mooke and multi-instrumentalist Doug Wieselman.
"Let X=X," with its inscrutable references, random yet consequential, is from her debut album Big Science. It might be telling us what you see is what you get, but also that it's OK to let the unknowable be what it is. "The Letter," which follows, is from her latest, Amelia, a moving travelogue following the flight path of the famed pilot. From the desolation of her late husband Lou Reed's "Dirty Blvd.," Anderson shifts to brief moments of beauty — a paean to the stars above and a dream of being a dog.
SET LIST
- "Let X=X"
- "The Letter"
- "Dirty Blvd."
- "The Reason I Love the Stars" (excerpt from "Another Day in America")
- "Dog Show"
MUSICIANS
- Laurie Anderson: vocals, electronics, violin
- Martha Mooke: viola, electronics
- Doug Wieselman: guitar, clarinet
TINY DESK TEAM
- Producer: Tom Huizenga
- Director/Editor: Maia Stern
- Audio Engineer/Mix: Josephine Nyounai
- Host/Series Producer: Bobby Carter
- Videographers: Maia Stern, Kara Frame, Joshua Bryant
- Audio Engineer: Tiffany Vera Castro
- Production Assistant: Alina Edwards
- Photographer: Zayrha Rodriguez
- Tiny Desk Team: Ashley Pointer, Josh Newell
- Series Editor: Lars Gotrich
- Executive Producer: Suraya Mohamed
- Executive Director: Sonali Mehta
- Series Creators: Bob Boilen, Stephen Thompson, Robin Hilton
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