Friday, August 26, 2011
Video: Looking at Laurie Anderson's Nonesuch Debut Album, "Life on a String," Ten Years Later
![Laurie Anderson: "Life on a String" [cover]](http://www.nonesuch.com/files/imagecache/section-artists-image/media/images/anderson-life-on-a-string.jpg "Laurie Anderson: \"Life on a String\" [cover]")
It was 10 years ago this week that Laurie Anderson, the most heralded multimedia artist of her generation, made her Nonesuch Records debut with the release of her seventh studio album, Life on a String. In the decade since, Nonesuch has released three additional albums from Anderson, including 2002's Live in New York, which captures her unforgettable performances at New York's Town Hall immediately following September 11; the reissue of her landmark debut album, Big Science, upon its 25th anniversary in 2007; and last year's release of the Homeland CD/DVD, her first new studio album since Life on a String. With Life on a String, Anderson offered a plainspoken and personal set on which she returned to playing violin on record for the first time since Big Science. The 2001 album, co-produced with Hal Willner, includes guest turns from her now-husband Lou Reed, Bill Frisell, Van Dyke Parks, and Dr. John, among others.
"I tried to make the language plain and observational," Anderson has said, in describing her lyrical approach to the album. "I tried to be simple. Just to say what I saw."
Rolling Stone says of the album that “the overall tone is sparse, haunted, intimate ... Laurie Anderson is a singer-songwriter of crushing poignance.”
In conjunction with the August 2001 release of Life on a String, Nonesuch commissioned filmmaker Steve Lippman, aka FLIP, to create a short film showcasing songs from the album. The film—featuring the album tracks "One Beautiful Evening," "Here With You," "Washington Street," "Dark Angel," and "Statue of Liberty"—went on to screen as an official selection of the Berlin, Cannes/Directors' Fortnight, London, Sao Paolo, Denver, Athens, In-Edit/Barcelona film festivals, among others. Watch it again here:
Laurie Anderson "Life on a String" - a music short film from Steve Lippman/FLIP on Vimeo.
To pick up a copy of Life on a String as high-quality, 320 kbps MP3s, head to the Nonesuch Store now.
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a beautiful film for a beautiful album. . . I saw Laurie at BAM in 2000 performing Songs and stories from Moby Dick and one of my life highlights! . . .my first time in New York and my first time seeing Laurie live. . . I was so overwhelmed, I wrote a stupid letter to her, in pencil on a scrappy piece of paper, and posted it through her door! I wrote things like "Hi, how are you doing?" and then explained that I always imagined her to be taller than she appeared, and so on. . .and because I met someone who knew her in a bar next to where I was staying, and I was decorating at the time, I finished with a line from the comedian Stephen Wright, "It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to paint it". . .
These lines appeared in the track Dark Angel and I like to think I may have had something to do with that! A nice thought . . . Dark Angel, is that Beeston Grace? Maybe. . . I like to think so. . .
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