Laurie Anderson (person)

Gratuitously quoted from the Laurie Anderson FAQ:

Who is Laurie Anderson?

A poet, writer, visual artist, and social commentator, she is perhaps best known as a recording artist, one whose technical wizardry and live shows have earned her a reputation as one of the most eccentric performers in the business.

She's a lot of things. In general she's known as a "performance artist." A performance artist is an artist who works in the medium of live performance. Laurie's performances use a bewildering variety of media, including film, electronic and acoustic music, slides, costumes, and other weird effects that don't even have names.

She has made several albums, and all of them are more or less "avant-garde." She began to actually sing starting with the Album "Strange Angels." Otherwise the vocals were primarily spoken.

Some common themes in her works are airplanes, dogs, family, the United States, dreams, and language.

• 1947 Born June 5 in Chicago, Illinois to Mary Louise Rowland Anderson and Arthur Anderson, the second oldest in a family of eight (four brothers, three sisters).
• 1965-6 Mills College, Oakland, CA.
• 1966-9 Barnard, graduates magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, in art history.
• 1970-2 Columbia University, MFA in sculpture.
• 1970-4 Teaches art history at City College, New York; Staten Island College; and Pace University. Her courses include Egyptian; Assyrian architecture; survey of art history.

She's basically one of the most interesting musicians and artists out there right now. Her boyfriend is Lou Reed and she has contributed to a few of his albums, as well as vice versa Here's an incomplete discography:

• Big Science (1982)--wonderfully bizarre.
• United States I-IV (1984)--a quintuple live album (well, quadruple on cassette or CD) of performance pieces of an 8 hour concert. Stunning.
• Mister Heartbreak (1984)--the track Excellent Birds on this album later became This Is The Picture on Peter Gabriel's So
• Home of the Brave (1986)--a soundtrack to a live concert movie
• Strange Angels (1989)--an almost mainstream album of really good songs.
• Bright Red/Tightrope (1994)--a bit more avant guarde yet still mainstream.
• The Ugly One with the Jewels and Other Stories (1995)--a spoken word album largely with extremely weird background music.
• Life On A String (2001)--a bit like Strange Angels, with some songs from a traveling show she created about Moby Dick, but more an album of songs about New York City. It was released pre-disaster, and now is particuarly poignant.

You owe it to yourself to listen to a Laurie Anderson album now.