Flying into the sun

If there was a question about Anderson’s otherworldliness, it might’ve been posed when she was five-years-old. She classically trained in violin which felt as familiar to her as an old friend from a time before. It became more obvious, perhaps, when she went on to orchestrate car horns in Vermont.

Or when she wore ice skates frozen in blocks of ice in New York City, performing a duet with herself on a distorted violin until they melted; bow hair swapped with pre-recorded audiotape, strings with a tape head. But with the release of "O Superman" in 1981 - an eight-minute, self-sampling odyssey about how technology cannot save you - there could be no doubt. In its music video, Anderson is an elfin creature androgynously suited with cropped, shocked hair – a curious oracle for the state of the world. Championed by John Peel, she found herself an avant-garde artist in possession of a commercial, chart-climbing success. The world has watched Laurie Anderson with fascination ever since.

In the following decades, her life and career have been defined by exceptional circumstances. She helped design the opening ceremony of the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens and served as the first – and, so far, only – official artist in residence for NASA. She pioneered “audio drag” with electronic pitch-shifting, invented experimental instruments, published ten books, contributed music to films by the likes of Wim Wenders and composed a 98-minute techno opera based on Moby Dick. She was the fascination of Warhol’s New York, a collaborator and close friend of William S. Burroughs, and the one to walk her husband, Lou Reed, to the end of the world.

It must be exhausting having to recite these things about yourself, I say as Anderson and I talk over tea at London’s Langham Hotel, a venue which has a grandeur at odds with her no-frills, Midwestern manner. “Oh, I’m not being myself,” she smirks. “Don’t worry.”

Anderson’s face is imbued with remarkable freshness, a kind of youth measured not in years but in curiosity. She lives by the conviction that this lifetime is not enough to find the answers to all her questions. Her interest has alighted, for the moment, with new album, Amelia – the first to succeed 2018’s Grammy-winning Landfall. It’s a story of the American death drive toward speed and progress, but also of reality aligning with once-impossible ambition and the woman who dared to dream it.

“She was very ambitious and kind of out of her mind…” says Anderson of the album’s muse, Amelia Earhart. A copy of the record is propped between us. She invites me to look at Earhart’s eyes, a woman long-absent who is now the third figure in the room. Earhart was a pioneer of American aviation who set many flying records, chief among them being the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. In 1937, during a flight to circumnavigate the globe, she disappeared without a trace. Lost to the Pacific, her plane wreckage has never been recovered; the circumstances surrounding her disappearance remains to be one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the twentieth century.

The artwork for Amelia captures the optical phenomenon of ‘Pilot’s Glory’, an aircraft haloed by a rainbow – but in the right-hand corner is a clipped image of Earhart’s face. A precocious, wide-eyed expression; one you might recognise in Anderson. It’s a story told in 22 acts, executed with the Czech orchestra, Filharmonie Brno. Though it is inspired by her last flight, it focuses not on Earhart’s fatal descent but the miracle of a woman being airborne. “It’s not human, but she did it,” says Anderson. “She’s a bad ass woman, you know? It’s a very American story. A woman who loves speed, loves technology… One of the things she said she would do if she survived the flight – and it was an iffy thing – she said, ‘I’m going to set up shop for girls’. 87 years later, girls are still not encouraged to learn about engineering, or even that much technology. I’m making a gross generalisation here: I think women are really good programmers - but generally, we are not running the world. Government, medicine, law… I thought things would be so much further along than when I started out.”

The optimism Earhart represented in the field disappeared with her. “One of the reasons I put very big engines in one of the songs was because aeronautics became, through the next decades, heavily militarised – and now it’s basically about missile delivery. Speed is about war, which is our third national economic category; pharmaceuticals being number one, because everyone feels ill, right? Number two is insurance, because everyone feels scared. Number three is bombs, because that’s just what we do; we’re the number one arms dealer in the world. So, it’s a very mixed story. But she just wanted to fly, always dreamed of flying. She spent a lot of time in LA at the air fields watching pilots do crazy stuff in the air, and she was like, ‘I’m gonna do that.’ I felt the same way as a kid. I just wanted to fly, to get out of here.”

When I meet Anderson, it's the anniversary of Earhart being reported missing. “I have real feeling for her today,” she confesses. The thrill of Earhart’s achievements, she believes, is outweighed by the cannibalistic way we have dissected the nature of her death. “We’re ghouls, we’re rubberneckers,” she insists, before remarking on how flight – a miracle, really – has become a devalued experience. “We get on a plane today, and it’s like checking into the hospital. You’ve got your food on a tray, you’re medicated. Sit down, shut up. You don’t feel a thing, you don’t feel the take-off.”

Then, she offers: “I was in a plane crash once. It’s funny, I haven’t talked about this in a press thing - maybe it’s because of today that I’m thinking about it more. You never do forget what it’s like to fall out of the air… so I imagine that also drew me to her.” In Anderson’s own crash, a third of the people onboard died. Does she remember how it felt? “Like it happened four minutes ago,” she tells me. “You don’t forget that. It took a long time, ten minutes, from the time the first engine started sputtering to crash. It sounds like nothing at all, ten minutes, and yet when you’re in a situation like that and you can’t move, it feels like the longest time imaginable. I wondered what it was like for her, because she was running out of fuel; her engine was sputtering and she’s trying to find a place to land, and there was nothing but water.”

Anderson conjures this peril, this hopelessness, without melodrama. For that, she relies on orchestral justice. “I talk to the part of you that never speaks,” says Anderson. “And that’s where this comes from as well – the part of me that I can’t exactly put into words… Language is a very fragile way to communicate, and so that’s why a lot of these lyrics are telegraphic. They’re fragments, because fragments are one way to have it mixed with the music and leave it up to the listener to imagine it. I think the images that people create while they listen are far more interesting than any movie.” Earhart’s hallucinations are shown, not told, on "Road to Mandalay" which draws on pop songs of the era, playing out like a nursery rhyme as the story begins its descent

But she insists that though Amelia is faithful to real events, it is not a biography. “I don’t know who she was, and I don’t pretend to know who she was,” Anderson tells me. “I don’t like biographers. I don’t like people writing about other people and pretending they know them. You don’t even know yourself, so how do you think you’re going to speak for someone else? I really like what Oscar Wilde said about biographies: they’re the body snatchers of literature. If anything, that was my challenge. I didn’t want to make up something and stick it on her. I just wanted to stick to the facts, and then, once in a while make it very clear that it was just my interpretation of what it would be like to be a woman flying over the Atlantic. I tried to make it cinematic because it was a cinematic thing. She was flying at low altitudes, and so she could see houses, trees, laundry, animals, tents, waves… these very visceral things. She could feel hot wind in her face.”

The presence of an orchestra is something Anderson describes as “oceanic”. She elaborates, “The orchestra was for me, in this case – and I haven’t articulated this before – was the ocean, it was the unfurling of the landscapes. It was just a wild, variegated thing.”

The motif present on Amelia which unifies Anderson’s sprawling ventures across her career is the breakdown of technology. This strikes more fear into a listener than the crash itself, which isn’t portrayed explicitly beyond the calm, lapping waters of the final track, "Lucky Dime". “I often use the inability of technology to save us as a theme, because that is my belief,” Anderson insists. “A lot of people think, ‘Oh, don’t worry, we’re going to solve the climate crisis because technology will step in and fix things’, and I’m like, ‘You’re dreaming.’ I always liked this quote from a cryptologist, ‘If you think technology is going to solve your problems, you don’t understand technology – and you don’t understand your problems.’”

The world is getting hotter, faster and more technological, she believes, and this story is about the progress, speed, technology – and a crash. Often, when people interview Anderson and ask her to prophesise about the future, she will dismiss them with the same comment: “It’s too soon to tell that story.” But this time, I needn’t ask. “I’m not optimistic, frankly, about what’s going on,” Anderson volunteers. “I wish I was, and I am on the surface, but actually, when I think about the reality of what’s going on, I’m terrified."

Naturally, this admitted terror leads us to a conversation about the US election. Of Donald Trump, she says, “He’s vengeful and he wants to punish people. It’s not looking good here, but it’s looking good for [the UK]. Congratulations, I thought you were never going to come back from Brexit. That was a sad case, but I’m encouraged by being here now. It seems like there’s a good energy.” The day following our interview, Anderson is travelling to Paris, but even as she passes through, the border restrictions are notably more defensive and the world is a less welcoming place. “That’s the message of [Trump], that the people crossing the borders are criminals who will take your jobs. Spreading this weird paranoia should be criminal, scaring people like that. People move because they have to. Immigration is a fact of life.”

Another threat which has stoked similar paranoia is the development of AI. Initially, Anderson embraced it, creating an AI chatbot to emulate her late husband Lou Reed, who died in 2013. Her feelings toward it have always erred on the side of caution, however, anticipating the catastrophe of when intellectual property is aped and unprotected, as expressed in an interview on Q with Tom Power. “It’s a real new fear for me,” she shares, “because I’ve always loved working with AI, but now it’s biting into our world. We have no choice. They’re going to take you and use you. The dark side of it is disinformation – it can have your name on it but you didn’t write it, and you don’t have a lot of recourse in many cases. It happened to me, and I was very angry because they talk your voice, they take your style. You think, ‘It will never happen to me’, and then it does. I was quoted in a book about my husband, direct quotes and really intimate details of things I’d never said. What do you do about that?”

But still, there are blessings. Anderson’s involvement in pioneering electronic music to offer opportunities for self-invention can’t be overstated. Pitching and distorting vocals, something that has allowed trans artists like SOPHIE and 100 gecs’ Laura Les to articulate who they are, is something Anderson experimented with in the late 1970s with her male alter-ego, Fenway Bergamot (christened by Lou Reed). She developed a vocal filter which deepened her voice into a bass profundo monotone, and from there, Bergamot became Anderson’s longtime collaborator: greasepaint moustache and eyebrows in the spirit of Groucho Marx, at first pompous and then later, melancholic. “It’s boring to be yourself all the time,” she says. “So you think, ‘Could there be any escape from that?’ I’ve always used filters to try and get out of my own little view of the world.”

“You know, young artists sometimes say to me, ‘I’d really like to call myself an artist but I’m not Van Gogh, so who am I to say that?’ And so I was like, ‘I have to tell you, nobody really cares what you call yourself – so knock yourself out. Call yourself an artist, call yourself the trans queen of the world. Good. Have fun.’ I’ve always loved moving around and being another person, and it’s not for everybody, but fluidity in terms of gender is really important because many of us are trying to fit into a mould that wasn’t made for us. We’re complicated people.”

She recalls giving a commencement address at a university in Nova Scotia earlier this year where the majority of the students are trans. “So it’s all lipstick and beards,” she jokes, “and that’s what their art is about. I was really impressed that so many people were like that. It was a great feeling to be with a people who were moving across the scale, in terms of gender and sexuality. Artists are often ahead of their time, and so I look to art schools to see the future – and that’s the future, right there.”

I wonder what Anderson sees laid out in front of her. How the terrain of the world has changed and how it feels to find herself here, right now. “There are more rules about how you’re supposed to behave,” she says. “There was a time where we were insulting people non-stop, and now it’s kind of taboo. You shouldn’t hurt anyone’s feelings and everyone has to win. Sometimes, it’s good to lose. You’re gonna learn a lot when you lose. That’s what Bob Dylan taught everybody, the romance of losing. I’ve learned the most in my life by far at the worst times in my life when things really fell apart, when my life was just a total mess. Maybe that’s because you stop worrying about your ego and you become more open to things.”

That’s the most striking thing about spending time with Laurie Anderson. She has practised a detachment from airs and graces her whole life, and maybe that is why she feels so beyond us. “I have many of the same problems that I had when I was five years old,” she says. “Each time I start something, I feel like a total beginner. I don’t remember how to do it. In Buddhism, it’s called ‘Beginner’s Mind’. It’s something people strive to have. I’m in the category of ‘experimental artist’, and it sounds like I work in a lab. I don’t work in a lab. I just feel like an idiot every time I start something, and then I try to tell myself, ‘Okay, stop thinking about yourself. What are you trying to do here? What material are you using? What are you trying to make it do?’ Your material teaches you things. Try to listen more than shape. I think it's the one thing I keep learning and then forgetting.”