Laurie Anderson: New Album Out Today
It is available from today “Amelia”, released by Nonesuch Records, the new album by Laurie Andersonthe first of new material from the 2024 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winner, following 2018’s “Landfall.”
The album includes twenty-two songs that tell the tragic last flight of the famous aviator Amelia Earhart. Anderson wrote the music and lyrics for this subjective narrative work.
On the album the artist is joined by the Czech orchestra Filharmonie Brno, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies and by Anohni, Gabriel Cabezas, Rob Moose, Ryan Kelly, Martha Mooke, Marc Ribot, Tony Scherr, Nadia Sirota and Kenny Wolleson.
Amelia Earhart was an avid aviation pioneer who became famous for being the first woman to fly across the Atlantic in 1932.
Five years later, he embarked on a round-the-world flight. Before he could complete the journey, his plane disappeared without a trace and has never been found. “The words used in Amelia are inspired by her pilot diaries, the telegrams she wrote to her husband and my idea of what a woman flying around the world might think”says Anderson.
First presented at Carnegie Hall in 2000, the updated piece has recently been performed throughout Europe.
Laurie Anderson is one of America’s most renowned and daring creative pioneers. Her work, which spans music, visual art, poetry, film, and photography, has engaged audiences around the world for more than four decades. In a recent 60 Minutes profile, Anderson Cooper said that she “is a pioneer of the avant-garde, but… that doesn’t begin to describe what she creates.”
Laurie Anderson released her first album on Nonesuch Records in 2001, the critically acclaimed ‘Life on a String.’ Her subsequent releases on the label include ‘Live in New York’ (2002), ‘Homeland’ (2010), the soundtrack to the film ‘Heart of a Dog’ (2015), and her Grammy-winning collaboration with Kronos Quartet, ‘Landfall’ (2018).
Additionally, Laurie Anderson’s virtual reality film The Sandbox, starring Hsin-Chien Huang, won the 2017 Venice Film Festival Award for Best VR Experience, and in 2018, Skira Rizzoli published her book All the Things I Lost in the Flood: Essays on Pictures, Language and Code, the most comprehensive collection of her artwork to date.
Laurie Anderson’s recent exhibitions and installations include ‘Habeas Corpus’ at the Park Avenue Armory in New York; her largest exhibition to date, ‘The Weather’, at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum of Modern Art in Washington; and ‘Looking into a Mirror Sideways’ at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, which was her largest European exhibition.
Anderson recently toured with Sex Mob, where she performed her piece ‘Let X=X’. Earlier this year, she was awarded the 2024 Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication, alongside Christopher Nolan and David Attenborough, and the International Astronomical Union named a minor planet in her honour: Asteroid 270588, Laurieanderson.
Nonesuch released a remastered edition of Anderson’s landmark 1982 album Big Science in 2007 for its twenty-fifth anniversary, followed by a vinyl LP reissue in 2021. Her signature single, “Oh Superman“, became a surprise viral hit on TikTok earlier this year.
