Laurie Anderson Biography

Laurie Anderson (born Laura Phillips Anderson, on June 5, 1947, in Glen Ellyn, Illinois) is an American experimental performance artist and musician.

Anderson was born in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. She attended Mills College in California, and eventually graduated from Barnard College magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, studying art history. In 1972, she obtained an MFA in sculpture from Columbia University. Her first performance art piece -- a symphony played on automobile horns -- was performed in 1969. In the early 1970s, she worked as an art instructor, as an art critic for magazine such as Art Forum, and illustrated children's books.

She performed in New York through the 1970s. One of her most-cited performances, which she conducted in New York and other cities around the world, involved her playing violin while wearing ice skates and balancing on a block of ice; the performance ended only when the ice had melted away.

Two early pieces, "New York Social Life" and "Time to Go," were included in the 1977 compilation New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media, along with works by Pauline Oliveros and others. Many of Anderson's earliest recordings remain unreleased, or were only issued in limited quantities, such as her first single, "It's Not the Bullet That Kills You (It's the Hole)". That song, along with "New York Social Life" and about a dozen others, were originally recorded for use in an art installation that consisted of a jukebox that played the different Anderson compositions.

Photographs and descriptions of many of these early performances were included in Anderson's later retrospective book, Stories from the Nerve Bible.

During the late 1970s, Anderson made a number of additional recordings which were released either privately or included on compilations of avant garde music, most notably releases by the Giorno Poetry Systems label run by New York poet John Giorno. In 1978, Anderson performed at The Nova Convention, a major conference involving many counter-culture figures and rising avant garde musical stars, including William S. Burroughs, Philip Glass, Frank Zappa, Timothy Leary, John Cage and Allen Ginsberg.

Anderson became widely known outside the art world in 1982 with the single "O Superman," originally released in a limited quantity by One Ten Records. "O Superman" reached number two on the national pop charts in Britain and the sudden influx of orders from the UK (prompted by British DJ John Peel playing the record) led to Anderson signing with the Warner Bros. label, which re-released the single.

"O Superman" was part of a larger stage work entitled United States and was included on her following album, Big Science. Prior to the release of Big Science, Anderson returned to Giorno Poetry Systems to record the album, You're the Guy I Want to Share My Money With; Anderson recorded one side of the 2-LP set, with Burroughs and Giorno recording the rest. This was followed by the back-to-back releases of her album Mister Heartbreak and United States Live, a five-LP recording of her stage show.

She next starred in and directed the 1986 concert film, Home of the Brave, and also composed the soundtracks for the Spalding Gray films Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box. During this time she also contributed music to Robert Wilson's "Alcestis" at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge MA. All of Anderson's albums from the 1980s sold very well despite being labeled "avant garde". She also hosted the PBS series Alive from Off-Center during this time, for which she produced the short film, What You Mean We?.

Release of Anderson's first post-Home of the Brave album, 1989's Strange Angels, was delayed for more than a year in order for Anderson to take singing lessons. This was due to the album being more musically inclined (in terms of singing) than her previous works. Strange Angels was critically acclaimed, but fans were divided over whether they preferred the non-musical Anderson over the musical Anderson.

Her varied career in the early 1990s included voice-acting in the animated film The Rugrats Movie. In 1994 she created a CD-ROM entitled Puppet Motel which was followed by Bright Red, co-produced by Brian Eno, and another spoken word album, The Ugly One with the Jewels.

An interval of more than half a decade followed before her next album release. During this time, she wrote a supplemental article on the cultural character of New York City for the Encyclopædia Britannica. and created a number of multimedia presentations, most notably one inspired by Moby Dick.

One of the central themes in Anderson's work is exploring the effects of technology on human interrelationships and communication.

Anderson has collaborated with William Burroughs, Arto Lindsay, Ian Ritchie, Peter Gabriel, Perry Hoberman, David Sylvian, Jean Michel Jarre, Brian Eno, Nona Hendryx, Bobby McFerrin, Dave Stewart, Peter Laurence Gordon, Hector Zazou, and Lou Reed. She also worked with comedian Andy Kaufman in the late 1970s (with a romantic involvement hinted at in some of her spoken word performances about him). In the 1990s, Anderson became romantically linked with Reed, and the two subsequently collaborated on a number of recordings, such as "In Our Sleep" from Bright Red which was released as a single.

The first new Laurie Anderson album in years, Life on a String, appeared in 2001, by which time she had moved from the main Warner Bros. label to its subsidiary, Nonesuch Records. Life on a String was a mixture of new works (including one song recalling the recent death of Anderson's father) and works from the Moby Dick presentation.

Anderson, who rarely revisits older work (though themes and lyrics occasionally reappear) went on tour performing a selection of her best-known musical pieces in 2001. One of these performances was recorded in New York City only a week after the September 11, 2001 attacks, and included a performance of "O Superman". This concert was released in early 2002 as the double CD, Live in New York, which remains her most recent album release.

In 2003, Anderson became NASA's first and so far only artist-in-residence, which inspired her most recent performance piece, The End of the Moon.

Rumors emerged of a possible new album release in the fall of 2004, but this turned out to be false as Anderson was possibly too busy mounting a succession of themed shows, as well as composing a piece for Expo 2005 in Japan.

On September 16, 2005, Laurie’s exhibition The Waters Reglitterized opened at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York City. According to the press release by Sean Kelly [1], The Waters Reglitterized"is a diary of dreams and their literal recreation as works of art. This work, created in the process of re-experiencing or re-working her dreams while awake, uses the language of dreams to investigate the dream itself. The resulting pieces include drawings, prints and high definition video. The installation ran until October 22, 2005. In 2006, she contributed a song to Plague Songs, a collection of songs related to the 10 Biblical plagues.



(with U.S. chart positions)

Formal music videos have been produced of:

Anderson has invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performances.

Laurie Anderson, Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Twenty-Year Retrospective (HarperCollins, 1994, ISBN 0060553553).