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Laurie Anderson 

Interview by Will Hodgkinson
Friday July 20, 2001
The Guardian 

Ever since she made her professional debut back in 1973 with The Life 
and Times of Josef Stalin, a 12-hour audio-visual interpretation of the 
life of the great dictator, Laurie Anderson has taken an uncompromising 
path. "I don't really consider myself an artist," she states. "I think 
I'm more of a spy. That's really what I do. I look at the stuff in other 
people's lives." 
Quietly-spoken, gamine and composed, Anderson is a Chicago native who 
now operates out of the New York apartment shared with her partner, Lou 
Reed, and her terrier, Lolabelle. Recent projects have included a 
touring multimedia show made up of songs and stories from Moby Dick, the 
building of a pavilion in Switzerland, and a stretch working on an Amish 
farm ("They can't admit to being dissatisfied because their lives are 
meant to be perfect, so they have arguments in which they just give each 
other looks.") 

She's just about to embark on her latest one: working as a cashier in a 
McDonald's in Manhattan's Chinatown. 

"I'm really scared about it. I had to have an interview and give them my 
résumé, and I forgot even to ask how much I'm getting paid. But there 
are a lot of similarities to making CDs and making hamburgers, in the 
way they're both mass-produced, and packaged to appear palatable." But 
what if you're too good at it? "There are ways to get fired, huh?" 

That doesn't leave too much time for kicking back and enjoying records 
at home, especially as she doesn't listen to music when working on her 
own material. There were, however, the musicians she admires who she 
drafted in to work on the soon-to-be-released album Laurie Anderson: 
Life on a String, including Dr John, Bill Frisell, and Van Dyke Parks, 
the composer, scorer and sometime Brian Wilson collaborator. 

"When I wrote the songs, I had never seen them as being orchestrated, so 
it was weird for me when he put things like bluebird songs on them," she 
explains. "At first I thought, What have I done? The original song he 
worked on was quite gloomy, and he turned it into this Technicolor, 
Hollywood thing. But I've since realised that it's quite interesting." 

Before and after the recording, Anderson has been checking out some of 
New York's own. "Anthony Hagerty is a singer who we just went to see, 
and he gets a real groove going with some orchestration, a basic trio of 
guitar, bass and drums, and an amazing voice. It's so wonderful to hear 
a real voice as opposed to just more technology. I mean, I like techno, 
but it gets so repetitive. Beautiful lyrics and a really nice, simple 
sound - when you hear him you feel something." 

As a teenager growing up in Chicago, it was the "word-jazz" poet and 
lyricist Ken Nordine who first opened up Anderson to possibilities 
beyond pop music. Nordine, a 78-year-old who Anderson brought over to 
London a few years back when she was curating Meltdown, had his own 
syndicated radio show on the Chicago station WBEZ, which he filled with 
surreal poems augmented by tape-splicing, multi-tracking and home-made 
sound effects. 

"First time I heard that, I thought he was so wild and so different. He 
did a beautiful piece about having a midnight snack. I heard this on the 
radio after all these love songs and thought: who is this guy talking 
about raiding the fridge in the middle of the night? He's one of the few 
people who writes songs about things other than the usual subjects." 

Brian Eno remains an inspiration, and an occasional collaborator. "He's 
always at the top of my list of things to listen to - when I first hear 
his records I always think there's not enough there, then I listen to 
them again, and before I know it I've played them 20 times in a row. You 
can enter into his music at any level." 

While Anderson can never listen to her own work at home, Lou Reed is 
just the opposite. "Oh, he enjoys it," she says. "He has a much more . . 
. open ego than I do. He's pleased that The Velvet Underground 
eventually got their dues, but I mean, he's written literally hundreds 
of songs, so he's not as possessive about his music as I am, or as 
critical. He's more generous with other people's music as well as his 
own. He will put on one of his own tracks and say: 'That's genius! 
That's the best thing I've ever written! Let's listen to that bassline 
one more time.' And I really admire that. I listen to my music and I can 
only hear the mistakes. It's really sad, I wish I was another way, but 
it's not the kind of thing you can work on. You can't artificially 
appreciate it, after all." 

When both are at home, Reed acts as Anderson's most valued critic. "Most 
of the feedback comes from him. He mostly tells me not to use so much 
metaphor. 'Just say what you think! Why does everything have to be like 
something else?' I normally beg him to allow me at least one or two 
metaphors. But he's right. You've got to be honest."