Charting the endless evolution of a counter culture visionary
Laurie Anderson on life, music, death, and why late husband Lou Reed is ‘actually always around’
A‘I’m hoping I can remember how to do everything – I’m very rusty’
s a musician, author and performance and visual artist, Laurie Anderson has been one of the most original talents of the last 50 years. Her collaborators read like a who’s who of what used to be called the counter-culture. Figures such as Frank Zappa, Allen Ginsberg, William S Burroughs and Lou Reed. After working with the former Velvet Underground singer in 1992 they became a couple, married in 2008 and remained together until Reed’s death five years later. Her instrument of choice is a violin but she has invented her own instruments. She became Nasa’s first and so far, only artist-in-residence in 2003.
Anderson first came to the attention of the world beyond the avant garde in 1981 when O Superman became the unlikeliest of top three hits. If she sometimes seems an otherworldly presence, then talking to me this week about The Art of Falling, the show she will bring to the National
Concert Hall later this month, Anderson was warm, down to earth, as horrified as most of us are at the war in Ukraine and also quite nervous about her upcoming performance.
‘To tell you the truth, I’m hoping I can remember how to do everything – I’m very rusty, I have to say,’ she laughs. ‘It’s been a couple of years and I hope I can remember why I would walk out on to a stage to do what I do. I was hoping I would learn some things from these two years and I did but I don’t know if I can express them yet.’
Anderson was born in Illinois in 1947. She was one of eight children. She says she can perhaps trace her unusual approach to the arts as a way of getting attention from her siblings and parents. ‘What’s she doing? ‘Oh okay, that’s different,’ she laughs.
The theme of her latest show is falling in its various forms – in love, in line and asleep among them. She says she will improvise certain elements of the performance.
‘Improvisation has become more and more important to me when I perform,’ she says
‘I performed a few nights ago in a benefit concert for Ukraine. We raised money to go to people to try to get food and shelter in the war zone; you have to try to do good and practical things. I went to lunch with a friend today and the war in Ukraine was all we talked about. I’m actually trying to resist talking about it anymore.’
But she asks if people in Ireland are as obsessed with events in Ukraine and I tell her
yes, and daring to hope that the worst of the Covid pandemic is finally behind us.
Anderson was meant to perform at the National Concert Hall in March 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic. Part of that show was called Lou Reed Drones, using guitars that belonged to her late husband. I ask her, as one who has contributed to the evolution of the arts in so many original ways, what it was like to be married to someone who did the same.
‘I learned a lot of things from Lou,’ she says.
‘Also when you are married to someone who does something similar to you, it makes life a lot simpler, “I have a tour, I know it’s
your birthday but I’m going to be away”. The other one goes, “Okay, that’s fine”. So, on that very practical level it is great to have a partner who knows what you do and also can help you.
‘Lou helped me a lot with things. We helped each other. It’s wonderful to be with someone who you can talk about anything with. It becomes an ongoing conversation that never stops until it does. That was an incredible thing to be inside their mind the way they are inside yours.
‘It was a unique crazy experience that lasted up to that point, a third of my life. I was not for one second ever bored. Not one. That was also a big plus.’
I remark that it must be terrible when you lose someone who you love but who is also a loss to the wider world.
‘Lou Reed wrote so many wonderful songs and said so many funny, great things that are out there in the world that to me they don’t leave,’ she says.
‘He gave so many gifts to the world. People really do appreciate that, you know. They sing his songs and listen to his music. What more could you want? It is perhaps too late in this conversation to be saying this but I really don’t believe that people die. I think they are actually always around.’
‘I was not for one second ever bored with Lou. Not one. That was a big plus’