The popular perception is that Laurie Anderson is the quintessential New Yorker: the cropped hair, the somewhat forbidding art-world credentials, her longstanding relationship with that other quintessential New Yorker, Lou Reed. When Encyclopaedia Brittanica went looking for a celebrated artist to write its entry on the city, it chose Anderson.
One small problem, though: Anderson is a Midwesterner. She grew up in Glen Ellyn and attended Glenbard West High School before making her way east, where she attended college, began a career as a mixed-media artist who bridged the worlds of art and pop, and collaborated with the likes of Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel and Reed on albums spanning the last 20 years. Her latest, “Life on a String” (Nonesuch), glows with the kind of personal warmth that belies Anderson’s self-described reputation as the “techno-ice-queen-observer.” On the contrary, it deals with subjects such as death and loneliness with a determination and down-to-earth optimism that are quintessentially Midwestern. Anderson, who headlines Tuesday at Park West, doesn’t disagree.
“David Mamet got Chicago!” Anderson says with mock indignation about her Brittanica assignment. “I guess I do know New York now, but I think I understand Chicago’s mood better than New York. On the absolute surface, Chicago is a lot friendlier. At Glenbard West, we thought we were the coolest things ever, but people were always very open, very welcoming. We had this neighbor named Gordie, a man in his 30s who was a bit unbalanced mentally. He’d always be up in the oak trees with his tool belt and he always seemed to be fixing the telephone lines, except he didn’t know anything about telephones. But people would thank him for fixing their phone lines, anyway. It was a really generous place that way. Going to L.A. immediately after that, you realize that this is not a place where people wish each other well. New Yorkers aren’t happy when you fail, but it is a competitive place. I couldn’t resist it, though.”
Drawn to that competitiveness, energy and glamor, Anderson, 54, moved to New York in 1967, and has lived there ever since. She studied sculpture and helped pioneer the downtown mixed-media art scene of the ’70s, blending film, music, art and theater. It was a world for which she was well prepared; while in Glen Ellyn she played violin in the Chicago Youth Symphony and toured Europe as a member of a student talent troupe, representing Illinois at civic events across the continent.
“Other kids would sing or tap-dance, so I thought I’d tell stories and make it sort of casual,” she says. “So I did something I called `chalk talk,’ where I would do these off-the-cuff drawings of things like really big hamburgers, and use that as a starting point to talk about my country. We wore these dreadful red blazers and white skirts, and if that’s not performance art, I don’t know what is. That was probably the first time I thought I could get up in front of an audience and talk about stuff, and there was a certain tone I invented to do this.”
Anderson gives good tone — her phone voice is the best in the business, and the one she uses in her concerts and albums isn’t bad either. It’s deceptively deadpan, as it brings a lilting musicality to the tics, pauses and off-kilter cadences that inform everyday speech patterns. Words are central to her art, a chronicle of the commonplace in all its absurdity, comedy and heartbreaking poignancy.
The best of failure
Another high school story illuminates the humanity that underpins her stories: “One of my hobbies was keeping track of who the 10 greatest people in the world were, and I’d keep lists of who they were and why they were. These weren’t historical people, but people in my school, who were a year or two older. I would watch them and write down what they did, and try to determine what makes these people great. What I paid attention to mostly is what they did when they failed. It’s so easy to be nice when things are going your way, and not so easy when things fall apart. If they crumpled up, they fell of the list. But if they made something of it, I thought that was so fantastic. For me, the best stuff comes out of failure, absolute failure.”
Anderson has used that principle as a guide on her albums: “When I’m really in trouble, I know it’s not a bad sign. I know I’m going to crack the problem somehow, and I don’t mind feeling a little nervous about it. But if a composition comes too easy, like it’s too automatic, my attitude is, `I know how to do this, and it sounds like it.’ And I start over.”
On “Life on a String,” Anderson pushed herself into some of her most personal songwriting, never more so than on “Slip Away,” about the death of her father in 1999. The song is notable for its understated tone, the way it finds the heart of private, vulnerable moment without resorting to melodrama.
“He knew he was dying, and he didn’t know what to do: How does a person die?” she says. “So he rented a lot of cowboy movies, to see how brave men die, I think. And he figured out what to do, without anybody telling him. He talked to everybody [Anderson is one of eight children] and it was not about regret or self-pity. I got to spend his last day with him, and I was sad, but I was also inspired. I was learning from someone who died with an enormous amount of grace, and I wanted to write a song as dignified as he was in death.”
Making her violin cry
The prelude to the song is a rare instrumental, the meditative “Here With You,” in which Anderson’s violin substitutes for her voice. It is the first time Anderson has played the instrument on one of her records in two decades. A pioneer of electronic instrumentation, she is returning to a more organic sound on her album and current tour, in which she will play with a band for the first time, eschewing the elaborate lighting, video treatments and high-tech gimmickry so central to her past solo tours.
“I picked up the violin, and I could carry it around, and I could make it cry — you can’t make computers cry,” she says. “There are a lot of extremely pristine, clean sounds in the digital stuff I use now, and it’s getting frustrating. Because I love raunchiness, sounds with snarly things in them. A lot of that has been edited out of the new programs, and I was trying to put some of that back in. Now that every song and every piece of music can be perfectly in time and in tune, it’s so deadly. Everybody knows technology is fast and efficient, but it’s so hard to make it mean anything.
“As people get more dependent on computers, they get fooled into thinking there is some sort of intelligence going on, when in fact computers have the IQ of a table. Speed and processing don’t interest me. To me the important thing is to make sure that the things we do really well don’t atrophy. You give up that control to a machine, you stop being human.”
