Laurie Anderson

About Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson is one of America’s most renowned—and daring—creative pioneers. Her work, which encompasses music, visual art, poetry, film, and photography, has challenged and delighted audiences around the world for more than 30 years. Anderson is best known for her multimedia presentations and musical recordings. Anderson’s first album, O Superman, launched her recording career in 1980, rising to number two on the British pop charts and subsequently appearing on her landmark release Big Science. She went on to record six more albums with Warner Brothers. In 2001, Anderson recorded her first album with Nonesuch Records, the critically lauded Life on a String.

Anderson’s tours have taken her around the world, where she has presented her work in small arts spaces and grand concert halls—and everywhere in between. She has numerous major works to her credit, along with countless collaborations with an array of artists, from Jonathan Demme and Brian Eno to Bill T. Jones and Peter Gabriel. Anderson is recognized worldwide as a groundbreaking leader in the use of technology in the arts: she was appointed the first artist-in-residence of NASA in 2002. Anderson was also part of the team that created the opening ceremony for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. More recently, she received the prestigious Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for her outstanding contribution to the arts.

Laurie Anderson’s new work Homeland presents the vast landscape that is contemporary American culture through the lens of one of the world’s foremost and critically acclaimed artists. The piece—part political dialogue, part poetry song cycle combining words, electronics and live music—has received critical praise from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, The Times of London, and others following Anderson’s tour with Homeland in concert halls and theaters across the globe.

The foundations of Homeland were created on the road through a series of performances and improvisations at venues ranging from small clubs to an ancient theater on the Acropolis in Athens. The piece draws on an array of influences collected along the way—Tuvan throat singers, jazz improvisers, and New York experimental artists contribute voices to what has become one of Anderson’s most political works to date. Her recent sonic experiments with the violin, along with groove-oriented electronics and traditional instruments such as the Chinese erhu, shape the piece as well. Homeland is as much a process as it is a statement, as each version is unique.

The themes Anderson explores with Homeland cover a breadth of contemporary issues, from the war and the media to America’s growing surveillance culture and the environment. In 2004, while making a film commissioned for the World Expo in Japan, Anderson began to contemplate the meaning of place via the short stories she was using in the work. One of the stories touched on losing things, or the feeling of losing things. “‘I knew I had lost something but I just couldn’t put my finger on it,’ was one of the lines in the story,” Anderson explains. “Like when you feel bereft and you don’t know whether it’s because you lost your keys or your job or because your grandfather just died,” she continues. “But I started to think about when I wrote that story and I remembered that it was when we began the invasion of Iraq. And what I’d lost was my country.” Anderson applies that notion to Homeland’s thematic threads.