 I'm Colleen Cosma Murphy, founder of Classic Albums Sundays, and welcome to another one of our collaborative events with the British Library. At our worldwide events and on our Classic Albums Sundays website, we tell the stories behind our favorite classic albums, revealing a better understanding of the artist's intention behind the music, so that fans can approach the album with enhanced context, a new framework that inspires a fresh approach when listening to an album they may have heard hundreds of times before. At our live in-person events, we follow the interview with a replay of the album on our own world-class audiophile sound system, so that listeners can fully immerse themselves into the music and hear details they've never heard before. Well, we can't do that today, so instead, I encourage you to take a moment for yourself after this interview and listen to the entire featured album uninterrupted on whichever format available to you, following our Classic Album Sundays guidelines. Turn off your phone, turn down the lights, refrain from conversation, turn up the volume, kick back, and give yourself over to the music. Today, I'm speaking with an artist whose creativity is expressed in myriad disciplines, sculpture, visual artists. He's a performer, filmmaker, poet, philosopher, an electronic pioneer, an inventor, and a composer, vocalist, and musician who has released albums for the past four decades, Laurie Anderson. We're going to talk to her about her 1986 soundtrack to the concert movie of the same name, Home of the Brave, taking a look at the story behind the album, but also re-appraising it with a fresh perspective and looking at its relevance today. Hi, Laurie. Thank you so much for joining us. Hi, Melanie. It's great to be here. Oh, thank you. Now, you're a prolific artist who seems to always be creating, and in the 80s, you produced a few studio albums and live albums, Big Science, Mr. Heartbreak, the United States Live Boxet, Home of the Brave soundtrack and Strange Angels. So, a good jumping off point is the story of how Home of the Brave came about. Why did you decide to put together a staged concert film with an accompanying soundtrack, and how did it draw upon your previous recordings? I was just talking about that with my co-producer, Roma Baron, last night, and neither one of us can remember why. We just liked being in the studio, and so we were looking for stuff to do. I guess that's the reason. I mean, what is the reason you do anything? So, I, in live shows, used a lot of visuals, so I thought, you know, just for once, I'll try to make a film with the music at the same time. So, that was the reason for doing the concert film, and then after we did that, we thought, there was so much music generated in that, let's make another record. So, we can't remember exactly how that happened, but it was roughly like that. And then, didn't you tour to promote the concert film as well? So, didn't you have a natural history tour afterwards? Yeah, I mean, they were all sort of mixed into one long thing that just had kind of random names attached to them, just whatever I was doing at the time. I wish I, you know, like, painters can do this. They can just call their next show recent work, you know, but musicians can never do that. They have to come up with a label for each thing they're doing. So, this is all just, it was all recent work. It was just one long thing. Now, why the title, Hum of the Brave? And for the viewers watching who are not aware of this phrase, it is part of our United States National Anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner. There's a phrase, Hum of the Brave. Why did he use this as the title? Well, I had used lots of U.S. slogans and works and one of my subjects is portraits of the United States. I did a long eight-hour series of things called United States Parts 1-4. Just, and you know, really why I started doing that was, I was basically an ex-pat. You know, I, in the late 70s, a lot of us didn't have so many opportunities to work in the United States. We had more opportunities to work, particularly in Germany and Italy. Those are the places that we went. And so, we'd be sitting around after doing a concert, usually like in an art gallery, it was kind of that sort of thing. And people would go, how could you live in a country like the United States? I mean, that just like, how do you manage that? And I, you know, the answer was a very long one and turned out to be an eight-hour answer. So, many of the subjects of my songs have been what it's like to be an American. I'm, I got the pin on. The pin isn't back on. Actually, I never wore a pin before, but I thought I'd wear a pin today. I just wanted to mention, too, that something that I just realized, our new administration is kind of in high gear right now. One of the things that didn't get mentioned. So, so much during, or at all during the elections was our vice president, Kamala Devi Harris. Her name means, Nihindi, Kamala is Lotus, and Devi, her middle name is Goddess. So, now that she is presides over the U.S. Senate, her official name is Madam Lotus Goddess. Love that. You need to do a song about that, Laurie. You know, and now officially she's Lotus Vice-Potus. And I think, you know, if she ever does rise to the top, it would just be Lotus. I would like to have someone, I would be very happy to be part of a country led by Lotus. That's my hope. I do have a lot more hope for this place now. Home of the Brave was, it had a lot of cynicism and irony in it because that's often how many of us felt at the time. It was, you know, the Reagan era had really dug its, you know, claws into the country and there were a lot of things going on. I'm, here's a New York siren for you in the background. I've missed that sound. Oh, well, you know, now with the virus coming back, with more force, I'm very nervous about it. So, we're trying to be as safe as possible, you know. Absolutely. Well, this past inauguration last week, it was a much happier inauguration. I know in 1981, you had an anti-inauguration party when Ronald Reagan took the oath. But are you feeling a lot more positive? Seems like you're feeling a lot more positive right now. I'm always a skeptic. So, I'm not like, it's going to be very hard here because this is a very deeply divided country as we just saw. So, I'm not, but given the choice between being pessimistic and optimistic, I'd rather, I guess, just be a naive optimist. For a change, feels good. Back to Home of the Brave. Are there any songs in particular here? I mean, I'm thinking of Sharky's Night. Are there particular songs on Home of the Brave that help paint your portrait of America at that time? Probably Sharky's Night, although when I listened to this record and I did sit down and listened to it full volume, and I, wow, I thought the bass is great. It's got a really punchy, especially the low end of Smokings. It's a boom, you know. And Sharky's Night, it was a little hard to understand the words. I was using a filter that I didn't realize at the time was so kind of hard to understand the lyrics. So, there were a lot of, there were some things that I would redo, but that was, Sharky's Night was a bit of a dark thing, and I guess really it is dedicated to William Burroughs because he was such an amazing poet who kind of showed up in the 50s in the United States when everyone was kind of like, here he is, over here, yeah. Everyone's just mowing their lawn and trying to make everything really average and perfect and blank, and he came in and he was like, it's Uncle Bill, you know, it's Uncle Bill Hyde, he's here, you know. So, he showed up and he was just saying things that people had never heard before, and they were dark, and they were also hilarious. I mean, I am a huge Burroughs fan because, well, he made me laugh, you know, and and that he's just irresistible that way. So, yeah. Did you first meet him at the Nova Convention in 1978, or did you, had you known him before? I'd seen him around, I'd seen him around, and but when we met at the Nova Convention, I was using that voice, and I think just because it was dark and backstage, I was sitting on a desk, I guess, and wearing a tuxedo and and I had been talking like that, and so he came up from behind me and it's going so much, what's your name, and I after three or four lines into this conversation, I realized he's hitting on me, oh my god, he thinks I'm a boy, and so I was like, I'm not a boy, and I didn't want to embarrass him, obviously, but he he he laughed at that, actually, fortunately. So we became friends, we toured together, I mean, I loved him, but also, you know, I had two difficult things with Bill, I mean, he didn't like women, really, which is a downside for me. Just personally, you know, didn't like women, that's half the people, and he liked guns, so he would go out when we were in touring, and I'd be sitting in the agreement, and he'd be out in the back, you know, doing target practice, so. Yeah, well, interesting man nonetheless, and he's certainly revolutionized so many different types of, you know, creative disciplines, even music has cut up method, kind of being, you know, forecasting music sampling in a sense. Now, William S. Burroughs narrated the first Sharky's Night, which came out on Mr. Heartbreak, but on this version on Home of the Brave, it's a different version of Sharky's Night with different lyrics that you narrate. First of all, who is Sharky? You know, it's, I started trying to find names for people in songs, and then people would say, is that based on anyone? I would just, you know, that's a character in a song, so I just, it really came out of, you know, being sick of myself, and I guess always looking for ways to be someone else, and so, for example, now that I can do that in video form, I can just invoke somebody like Dogen, a 13th century Japanese Zen philosopher, who wrote a beautiful book called Enlightenment Unfolds, and the basic question of this text is, are mountains aware? What in nature is aware and what has no awareness? So it was also, hang on, it was also a question in, as I noticed in Home of the Brave, this sort of mix of dreams and consciousness, and in songs like White Lily and I had forgotten that that, those kind of ideas were kind of winding their way through at that point, so I was kind of surprised to hear that. Yeah, I would love to talk about the dream work that really inspires a lot of your work as well in a minute, but Sharky just has a hold on me, those big white teeth, and I was just wondering, is Sharky someone who's kind of, might have a more conservative approach to life, who maybe sort of oversimplifies things? Is it in someone you're playing devil's advocate with? When I first invented that voice, and it was a digital low voice, I called it the voice of authority just because it was fun to, it was fun to poke fun at pompous tech people, you know, who, you can see plenty of them around now too. I'm technology, and so I've got the future under my thumbs, you know, and you're like, one of my favorite quotes about technology is that if you think technology is going to solve your problems, you don't understand technology, and you don't understand your problems. I think that it was just pushing on that, you know, pomposity, and then later, this became a voice that was much different and much more melancholy, and abstract, and I loved writing this, and my husband, Lou Reed, also was very interested in that voice, and he came up with a name for him, he called him Fenway, like the ballpark, and he would sit around while I was writing Fenway talks, which was the Fenway was the descendant really of the voice of authority, and he liked this character a lot. Lou was, most of his songs were about people with names, you know, and they were Shakespearean in a way, they were just like all of these great stories about characters, and so that was my, another thing that I was interested in, when I listened to this record, and I completely had forgot about it, that was an influence of Lou was the, and it's really corny, but the girl chorus in Smoke Rings, and I didn't know Lou then, but they're singing, another version of it, but I'm sure that was in the back of my mind, and it never hadn't occurred to me at all before listening this time, so it was really different to hear that this was done in 86, and I met Lou in 91, and yeah, I had a very sketchy idea who he was too, I thought he was British, really, I'm not proud to say that, but I was in a different musical world, you know, and I just, there were so many worlds revolving around each other at that time, the fashion world, the music world, the avant-garde world, the experimental world, the rock world, the pop world, all these worlds, we call them in New York, they're just scenes, you know, we're so pompous, you know, the financial world, you know, it's just the Wall Street down there, there's a bunch of guys, the whole world's in New York though, isn't it, Laurie? It's the world, sorry to say, everything else is just like, you know, satellites, so anyway, I think that that was, though I was probably thinking about that, because that was a song that I kind of knew. Well, it's interesting that, you know, you have these characters like Sharky, and I can see the storytelling is such a big part of your work, no matter which discipline or format that you're working in, but from what I understand, you grew up in a big family, and your siblings and parents would share stories with one another around the dinner table. That sounds a lot nicer than it was. Was it more arguing? No, it wasn't arguing, it was posturing, it was like, what did you do today that was any good at all, you know, that was notable? What did you achieve? It was really about achievement, so yeah, it was, and it was also the kind of place where it was like, if you don't have anything good to say, you can leave. So it was a very, let's say, yeah, achievement oriented, exhausting exercise every night. Wow, it seems like it must have motivated you in some way. There are many positive things I got out of that. My mother who would say goodbye to me in the morning as a kid, she wouldn't say goodbye, she'd go, win! I was like, win, win what? What are you talking about? On the other hand, she loved books and she taught me how to read in ways that I had never imagined. So she was a great teacher, so I'd have to say I'm grateful to all of them. Well, you talk about reading and I can see language is also a big part of your work. Of course, there's the William Burroughs quote, language is a virus from outer space. You have a song called language is a virus on this album, which is fantastic and so funky as well. Why this fascination with language? I mean, you speak and use Japanese words and Spanish words as well. Why this fascination with language? Well, it's a code that we use that's very inadequate often for what we're trying to do. And I was just remembering in that dream section, there's this in Home of the Brave, and I forget which song it is, but anyway, it's like going on about a dream and it's just getting more and more ridiculous. And then I realize, oh, I can see the person writing the dream. And then that person is spinning some more and I just go give me that pen. I think you can rewrite, language is powerful and predictive so that you can also, if you can shape it in another way, that's your reality. We just went through and are still in a war that is about reality in the United States. What's real? What's fake? You'd think that that was, you know, remember the culture wars? It was like, I like this and you like that, but it became a sort of like a war. And you think that could never become a real war? Well, we just saw how that could happen. Words can create a war. It was Freud who said, you know, civilization began when somebody, the first person throughout a word instead of a rock. What we just saw is that, you know, the words can also start a war. I'd call this a war because things look very war torn now, you know. You walk around New York and things are still so shuttered and dark and all our cultural institutions are closed except for museums. And places we would meet are closed. It looks like there was a war. And people are sick and a lot of people are dead. It looks like a war. And of course, people don't call it a war because our state is more just a war that's, you don't even mention it. It's always in the background. We used to declare war, have an enemy, have, you know, coherent story war. Now just war is just happening all the time. And so it fails to be a very useful metaphor, you know. I mean, Susan Sontag used it all the time as a metaphor. And now it's just the ground of our life. So anyway, languages of virus, I wrote for Burroughs because he said that was a quote that he said languages of virus from outer space. And I was like, whoa, what does that mean for a writer to say language is a disease communicable by mouth? Very weird thing to say. And then I, in thinking about it later in other contexts, especially now, you realize that it's a very hard code to crack. And when people start using it more as tweets and slogans and, and you, it's very hard to crack that code and get back to a different kind of thinking. And it's why, why poets like Jack Kerouac are so successful, I think one reason, because his name rhymed Jack Kerouac. Jack Kerouac said that. I remember Jack Kerouac. Anyway, you can, all these little, little language things that Burroughs knew very well how to use were part of that idea that language is a virus. And of course, then we, we can see that it is and has become a Burroughs world language is completely viral and, and works that way and, and gets into your mind that way. And of course, now we realize also that virus is a language. And one of the reasons we're in this situation is that's a code is very, very hard to crack. And the experience are coming up and those are even harder to crack. So we are stuck in this loop like situation of, of, of trying to catch up with the code. So I guess that codes are, are really interesting to me. I've tried to design a few different kinds of languages. And they're some of them are written graphic things. And some of them are ways that you can use new merges. Let me see if I could maybe do this. I wonder if I can do this, this different command. Hang on. So for example, what I'm saying to you now was something that my dictionary recommended. And the cadence and beats of what I'm saying are represented in this way as cadence and beat as cadence. So, so when you can make various hybrids with language systems, it's, it reminds you that you, you have no idea who's talking. You know, what, what are you parroting right now, you know, things you've heard and things you think I think you should say or, you know, you know, where language comes from is, is so mysterious. And so that's why once in a while using silence in, in the middle of some of those situations is can be very, can be very revealing. I wanted to go also just back to the song language as a virus too, because that's it's such a funky song. It reminds me a lot of Bill Lazwell's material, that kind of anger. Yeah, fantastic, fantastic work he did and still does. But it was produced, co-produced, I should say, by Nile Rogers, formerly a chic. He had just finished producing David Bowie's album, Let's Dance. He had just produced also Madonna's Like a Virgin. How did he come about to work with Nile, Nile Rogers on both smoke rings and languages of virus? I think it was because I was talking to Roma about that last night, how that happened. And I think it was just we were hanging around the same studios. And everybody's record was happening sort of at the same time often. And, and the studios were very busy. And so you would, you'd see a bass player over there and he just finished a session. He was like, can you play in my thing? And I think that's how I met Bill, that's probably how I met Nile. In, we were studio rats, you know, we just spent all our time in the studio. This is one of the things that I, that, that one of the great technological innovations that's wiped out a lot of camaraderie with musicians is the studio scene doesn't exist. Everyone's in their home studio doing it. And it gets very solipsistic. It's, it's, it was a lot of fun to go to studios and be part of this big network of music. So that was, that was how and why that happened. Well, it's interesting because you started off as a more of an avant-garde, you know, sculptor, performer in the 1970s. And then you recorded this song, oh, Superman. And it was on an independent label and it actually reached number two here in the UK. Yeah. And that helped, I believe you get your deal with Warner Brothers, which you did, you did many albums throughout the 1980s. Well, you know, Warner Brothers was coming to my shows for a couple of years before that. And they would say, do you want to make a record? And I was like, no way. I'm not a pop artist. I have no interest in that. I really don't want to make a record. And they were like, no, you could make an interesting record. It was Karen Bergen, Barbara Gear would come to my shows. And, and then what happened was I put this song out on little label. And when people would order it, I would just get the order usually by the phone. And then I'd wrap up the record, I take it down the street to the post office, and I'd send it to that person. So then I got a call from, oh, what's his name? Wonderful British. He had such a great radio show. John Peele. So I got a call from John Peele and he said, I'd like to order some of your records. And I said, great, how many would you like? He said 20,000 now and 20,000 by Friday. I was like, okay. So then I did call Warner Brothers. I said, listen, can you press some records for me? I've got a big order here. And they were like, that is not the way we do things at Warner Brothers Records and Tapes. You sign an eight record deal where we own everything for the rest of your like sound good. I was like, God, that sounds awful. But the thing about it was that I did like the idea that people could get artwork for cheap. Because right at that moment, those two moments collided when the New York art world, it was exploding. And it was becoming all about money. And that was just the beginning. And I mean, now it's like completely about money. You're not part of the art world. You're part of the art market. It's a market. It's huge. And so is the record business too. And so is the concert business. And I'm such a snob. I just wish it was a niche thing again. So I have very mixed feelings about that. But it was fun. Anyway, I called them up and they said, okay, we came to some terms. And, but it wasn't like, you know, this record was, I was resisting that move. And then, but I was glad I did that. It gave me a lot of opportunities to do things. I never took this seriously for one second, maybe for a second, I did, you know, I got seduced by this thing. But I approached it, I think a little bit like an anthropologist. Just, this is so absurd that people are surrounding this car, banging on the windows, going, I was like, what are you out of your minds? You know, this is so stupid. But did you also like the appeal of having a broader audience and the accessibility of the pop music format and maybe the almost like the immediacy as well of pop music? And like I said, I was seduced by part of it for sure. And it did give me chances to do things. And, you know, I'm not sneezing at that. It was really, it was really fun to do. And, but it's also very easy to get carried away with, you know, your own self-importance. So I didn't want to be, I guess I was afraid how disappointed I would be, you know, it just comes and goes, you know, it's like, so I decided I'm going to be very philosophical about this. I'm not going to get sucked in. And the people at Warner Brothers, however, would really like, they decided, okay, after that record, Big Science, we need another hit. So they would, for a while, they would come to the studio and sit in the back. And usually people from record companies, they don't know what to say, you know, they could, so the, their default is, I think this needs more bass. And everyone's like, getting more bass. Okay, they record company talking. And, and, but there wasn't much bass at all on what I was doing. There was a lot of things like birds and stuff. But I'm sure that they would not sit in the back of the studio and go, I don't get any, I don't know, more birds. Put a bird on it, as they say in that Portlandia. Bird on there. So, but I mean, I had, I had a lot of friends at Warner Brothers. They, they, they were, they were just a great company for, for musicians. And now it's the time that was a very, I was so lucky to be part of that era of singer songwriters who had, could suddenly write their own things, put it out, and, and, and make a living doing that for it. That is gone for now. So that it, it's thanks again to largely to technological innovations in which musicians lost the ability to control their, their own market. So they couldn't make it, you can't make a living from records maybe three people do now or something, but then you could. And so it became about touring. And then, and then other elements came into that to try to make touring a really big blockbuster thing. So, and combined with what's happening now with a lot of smaller venues closing because of COVID, I hope they can come back. It's those things that will suffer the little venues, the clubs, the scenes, places where you can do live music. And if you're a young musician, you can check, try things out. Those are so important. They're so important. And New York has had a dwindling number, but the we're trying to hold on to the ones that we have. Now we still have some venues and hope that those come back because they are where musicians figure out what to do, how to do it, and, and without that, there's, there's not a way, you know, I guess a few people are, are doing their podcasts and stuff. And, and, and that's it. And some of them are pretty good. Music is so, is so important to so many people. And I, I don't know if you feel the same way, both as someone who creates music, but also somebody who listens to music and you create in so many different disciplines, a myriad of different disciplines. But do you feel that music might have a stronger emotional resonance in terms of it just gets right into those emotions a lot quicker than some of the other mediums in which you work? Yes, in certain ways, because it's things that come through your ears are, you have a very different relationship to them. And music makes you want to get up and dance sometimes even though the dance is some kind of other trance dance of, you know, you're listening to William Baczynski. It's physical. It's the body. This is what a big thing that I learned from Lou is how do you know when something's good? Okay, he always had a way, it was his arm, he would show you his arm, he would say, see that? See that? See that? And it was all the hairs are sticking up going like this. He said, it's good. I was like, okay, the body will tell you. And especially with music gets into your, it can make your heart rate go up. It can make you cry very easily. It can make you laugh. I see very few people in museums standing in front of a beautiful, their beautiful favorite painting, crying. Play them their favorite song and they'll be sobbing. It just comes into your body and mind in a different way. I'm not saying better or worse. I mean, visual art that is beautiful comes into your brain, it mixes with other visual images, it sticks there. It's some kind of thing you could never forget. It is, but your mind is gliding past it in different ways. It's kind of a little bit analyzing it. So what I'm just saying, I guess in some ways is that that hearing is inherently more overtly emotional than seeing. Seeing is analytic and your mind approaches what it sees in a very different way. And sometimes a little bit more skeptically. And worried that it can be fooled by what it's seeing. Like that's just, it's worried sometimes. And your ears are just bringing on, you know. No filters. Yeah. Yeah. And you can't close your ears. You can plug them up, but you can't close your ears, you can close your eyes. I mean, this album, a lot of the music is quite physical and I'm not sure if it's just because I'm also imagining the concert performance. You move so wonderfully in the home of the brave concert movie. The whole choreography is fantastic. But this also brings me to another topic I'd like to talk about and that's the technology and your sense of inventiveness within the actual instruments. And one part in the movie, you have a suit. You're doing body percussion. Can I go back to one thing for a second? Sure. Yeah. I just wanted to pick up on something. We'll get to the drum suit in a second, but okay. What was going on with choreography in Home of the Brave was not choreography. It was conducting because in smoke rings, nobody could count the song. It's tune. So I invented a conducting thing that's boom. So this is what I'm doing there, is showing them where the downbeat is. And Dolette and Janice were always like, where's the downbeat? I was like, forget downbeat. They're all downbeats. Thinking them all as downbeats. And here's how it goes. So you hit your heart and you do this conduct. So that was what I was doing with the violin and the kicks and showing them how that phrase, because it was a loop-like phrase that they needed to know the shape of. So I would just show them the shape as it was kind of, it was a diagram of the shape of the beats. So it wasn't choreography. It was something different. With drum suit and drum dance was a, I guess, also had to do with the body and beats, of course, but it was, I was taking apart a lindrome machine. And I just got some new tiny drum machines. Now, pocket operators are, oops, pocket operators. pocket operators are tiny now. They are just circuit boards, really. And you can, if you have super tiny fingers, you can program your song on this tiny little thing. And actually, it's not that much tinier than a lindrome machine. Once you take the box off, because with the lindrome, I was like, okay, I want to, I needed to fix it. It was broken. So I was, I mean, I have like zero fix it skills, but I thought maybe there's something easy in there. It took it apart. And the cables were very, very long, you know, they, and at the end was a sensor. I thought, why are they so long? They don't need to be so long. So I thought, if I put this one on my shoulder, and this one over bass drum thing over my heart, and the, on my knee, I put the kick, I'll do a bass clap, you know, body dance. So anyway, the, the body and how it worked was, was my, one of my, it was my material. So as somebody who stands on the stage, I wasn't somebody who was just in the studio doing things and issuing them. I was putting them out and, and being part of them. So the drum dance was, was like that. Sint, I just love how you've been so inventive with instrumentation. You invented the tape bow violin in, in 1977. Yeah. Could you tell us a little bit about that? Well, that was a kind of language machine initially. And it was also a result of, of editing. So with tape heads. So for example, I'd be playing the violin and, and then stop the tape machine because I'm engineering myself. And then I'd rock it back and forth to get to the start point again and edit point. And then I'd play again. So playing, rocking, playing, rocking suddenly, that's the same gesture. Tape over a head, going back and forth over a head. Why not just put it right on the bow? So I read it, read it, read it. So I put a, pulled the record, a playback head off of otherwise perfectly good Reevox tape machine and put it on the, put it on the bridge of a violin, like, like there. And then the, the tape bow goes over that head. And, and suddenly you have, you know, audio palindromes. God is always dog backwards in spelling the world of letters. But if you say God, oh, you know, backwards language spoken is totally unpredictable. So I just try to find words that would sound, make sense backwards. So no is one. No, one, no one say weirdly is yes, say, yes, say, yes, yes. So unpredictable, mean is name. So I had one song was say what you mean, I mean what you say and say yes, say yes, and no one, no one, no one, I wish you mean name, name, mean, you know, so anyway, super geeky. And we did a orchestra with this, and I can't tell you how disgusted the orchestra players were when they saw that they had to play these instruments. They're like, I'm not going to play this gimmicky stupid thing. I'm a, I'm a cellist. I mean, I'm, you know, and then I said, I know, I know, I know it's geeky, but just try it because it's really hard to control. I mean, for string players, you know, chops, chops are their left hands, you know, the bow is the expressive, the beautiful tone, you know, how you shape the note and where it blooms and where it cracks. I mean, that is all in the touch of the bow. So I said, you know, you are studying expression in your right hand. And that's what this is. You're not just a revox tape machine, you have control of your right hand. And, and just look at the, here's a random person tried playing this and they can't play it. And then, but string players picked it up and they knew how to do it. And I said, that's, that's what I'm saying. It's like, you're the people who can play this. So, so then they kind of like, swallowed their like, has some of them were just still like, I'm not playing this stuff, no way. And they just sit there like, it's tight. It's more than a novelty or a gimmick, I think. I think you're using these sounds and these, these instrumentation and playing around with language to really reinforce the story that you're trying to get across. I mean, but when you're a string player, that's not how you see it. It is not how you see it. Fortunately, there's a lot of different kinds of people in the world. Now, in terms of the sequence of the album, I love getting into sequencing of the album, you start with smoke rings, and then it ends with credit racket. It was there a kind of idea behind the sequencing, was there a way that you wanted the album to flow from beginning to end? You know, we did end with credit racket, which was something that we, a vamp that we did in the film with a film band, let's say, and I really want to put this out of this record. It's just wild and fun. And for me, there's no, no more fun than getting a really big band of like disparate but related people to, to vamp. And the last time I did that was, oh, somewhere before last, we had a second annual Lou Reed Tai Chi Day, and we celebrated with a big band of people who were playing all sorts of things. So there was John Zorn and Hal Wilner, who I have to say, one of the greatest producers of the world, and a great friend of Lou's and a great friend of mine who died of COVID last year, almost a year ago now, it seems like completely impossible. You know, some people are so vivid. Hal was just a genius producer, and also a wonderful live player, just who had zero rules. So in credit racket, we tried to do that, do that things in that spirit that would just like be, wow, you know. And so we thought, let's end the party, why not? And the beginning was a kind of hello song in a way, and starting with a game show, I thought at that time and was, I don't know, I guess I thought that was a good idea. Well, we have some questions that people emailed us, and one person had a question about credit racket, and I also have a question about credit racket, too. So I'll ask both in the same question. Bill Lazwell is listed as playing bass animals, which I need to ask you exactly what is bass animals. And we also had a question from Dumb Dumb Boy, he went by Dumb Dumb Boy name. He was asked about Adrian Beleuze playing what it was like working with him on he plays a lot of great guitar on that record on that song. Oh yeah, he does. So both Bill Lazwell and Adrian Beleuze are animals for sure. They're like, they're music animals. They're just so, and I say that in the most respectful way possible, they're intuitive, they're fierce, they're right in your face, they're 100% both of them, and they're both the greatest people to play with. So because of that. And strangely, many of the sounds that they were making, especially the ones that I gravitated to, the most had to do with things like love most about music, the whales of sound, you know, that Adrian is somewhere between a saxophone and a guitar. He's, you know, what instrument is he playing? I mean, because the end and between the shriek, you know, and siren, it's and Bill the same. I mean, to get this grittiness into a sound is no, it is a trick, you know, it's really not easy to do to get it to be so visceral. And I guess that's what I mean by animals and animal sounds. And I think that's what Bill meant by that as well. You know, base animal, that's like, it's just an animal is there were also lots of sounds that were rumbles in there. Though the main sound that I heard was necamp. Necamp was a program, a mixing program, computer program that we used. And every time we shut down for the day in the studio, you'd hear this boom. And I thought, that's the most beautiful sound on the record. And it's shutting down for the day. So we, I, I, Leanne Unger was the engineer and I said, Leanne, we've got to record the necamp crashing. Oh, and it made an even better sound than it crashed. And it was always crashing. It was always crashing. Home of the brain was about the computer crashing in the mix. So the necamp, that's all over the record. It is, yeah. It's the sound of radar. So it's like also technology crashing. And it's in, it's in smoke rings. It's in it's the featured instrument of the tag of smoke rings. It's also in, I think I put it everywhere I could because I just loved this big animal techno sigh of just, you know, of stopping. I love that sound. I was going to ask you about that sound, actually. I'm glad, I'm glad you spoke about it. In fact, also a couple of things, another person emailed in Herbie King and he says, is Laurie Anderson aware of how her music really impacted the UK rave scene and also the scene in Ibiza? I'm not sure if this is on your radar, but, you know, White Lily and radar were both on Cafe Del Mar mixed tapes done by Jose Padilla. And an old Superman, you know, it's very inspirational to the UK rave scene. In fact, there's even been a new remake of it by Book of Shade versus Mandy, which you may not be aware about. I don't know. I don't know if I get in trouble there. Oh, well, part is fine with me. Okay, cool. But were you aware about how impactful this was over here in the UK to different scenes that are outside of what might normally be considered experimental or avant garde? That's cool. I know I wasn't really in it. So thanks, thanks for mentioning that. It's really interesting because, you know, you can sit like me, like a lot of musicians were sitting around trying to make things. And, you know, especially when you're in an isolated situation like making a record, and now when you're in an isolated situation like COVID, you're making stuff and you're thinking, no one's ever going to hear this. It's just weird. So it can be very isolating. So especially without any touring or live things, it's just quite weird. So to hear that somebody else heard it and thought about it is just really wonderful. It's very touching. So thanks for saying that. Well, I just want to ask you a couple of final questions before we ask people to listen to the album themselves at home. You recently listened to the album and you hadn't listened to it, I'm sure, in decades. How did you feel about it today? I loved it. I mean, frankly, I was dreading this, like, because never, ever, ever listened to these things that I've done after the final mix. And well, actually, let's listen to the days of raps. I did listen to it, had to, and it was technical listening, of course. So it was, and you're listening in many different ways. I also just realized in working on a record called Document Two with Brian Eno, in Denmark, we made this, we made it in 2016 and it came out, I think, a couple of years ago. But we would play all morning, four hours, we'd take a lunch break, and then we would sit down and in real time listen to the four hours. I have never done that in my life. And I realized, I don't know how to play and listen simultaneously. Listening is a real skill. And I think when you listen 100% and I'm glad that you said, try to listen with, you know, turn the lights out and actually focus on it. I did do that. And it was, I had a very good time. Like I said, I was just dreading it. I thought, Oh, this is going to be so out of date, coy, snarky. I remember, you know, I bet the irony is really stupid. You know, this is going to be torture. And I had put it off for quite a while. And I listened to it. I was like, number one, great bass sound. You know, really good sound and nice, nice perspective of things. I feel like I'm reviewing the record of somebody else. But I did enjoy it. And I did, I did like, I did like the end of smoking still a lot with the knee camp thing. And I remember playing with that. And I was playing a synth violin, which is a thing I designed with Max Matthews. That was a different violin, lots of people, but it was connected to the Sinclair, which I was wedded to, and many of those Sinclair sounds are all through the record. I was like, I used to, it was a big, big synthesizer with sampling. So a lot of the sampling that you hear on the record was not tape, but it was Sinclair sampling. So it was not tape. It was computer looping. So it was, it was an era when you would buy a synthesizer for an enormous amount of money, and then they would just send you boxes. And you would call Dear Sinclair owner. Here's a box of updates. And we know you'll want, please send us $40,000. And you're like, at that point, you know, like you could buy $3,000. This little update that got rid of a few of their problems. So I was a Sinclair owner, not user, not musician, Sinclair owner, Dear Sinclair owner. So anyway, a lot of those sounds were made that way. So computers were very, were really integrated into, into what this record was about as were visuals. But listening to it, I did, I did fall into that feeling. And also, I remember in playing that violin, and I had Mikam on the synthesizer violin. So I was playing a breaking computer. And, and I felt, I felt like it, you know, I, I go for these moments where music just, you know, carries you away in a huge wave. And you kind of, you know, live for those moments, it can be a small wave too, can be something just so beautiful and delicate, like some little piano part, doesn't have to be big. But anyway, to be carried away. Yeah. Well, I think we're all ready to jump on that wave now, Laurie. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks a lot, Colleen. I really enjoyed all your, your questions and comments. Maybe you really brought me back into the world I just left long ago. Oh, lovely. Well, thank you. And thank you to the British Library staff for allowing this, this event stream to happen. And thanks to all of you for, for watching and listening. And I want to encourage you to take a moment to yourself and to listen to the entire album, to the entire home of the brave soundtrack on whatever format you have, I have a record. And use our classic album Sundays listening guidelines, which means turn off your phone, you'll be glad you did. It's a good thing for you. Turn down the lights, refrain from conversation, do not talk. It's hard to listen while you're talking, turn up the volume, kick back and give yourself over to the music. Thanks for listening.