Laurie Anderson on finding inspiration in Amelia Earhart's story for her new album

Transcript

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Amna Nawaz: For some five decades, artist and musician Laurie Anderson has been redefining cultural boundaries. In a new album, she's now exploring the story of an earlier Woman who reached for the heights.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown: So this is where a lot of stuff happens.

Laurie Anderson, Artist and Musician: It happens. Some of the stuff happens here. And this is most of the audio world. So this is...

Jeffrey Brown: Laurie Anderson in her downtown New York studio altering the sound of her voice.

Laurie Anderson: This is a standard vocoder. If you sound different, you're a different person. So this, you can make more symphonic.

Jeffrey Brown: Creating musical layers with her electronic viola.

For some 50 years, she's been a pioneer of storytelling, mixing music, art, theater and film, a happily uncategorizable artist of our time.

Laurie Anderson: There are ways of making things that it doesn't matter what the material is in a way. If I'm playing a violin, or if I'm painting, I'm using the same arm. I'm asking myself the exact same questions. Is it bright enough? Is it crazy enough? Is it sweet enough, beautiful enough? Is it complicated enough? Is it communicating enough?

Jeffrey Brown: Now she's turned her attention to a fascinating pioneer of another time and talent.

Woman: Taking off, May 20.

Jeffrey Brown: Amelia Earhart and her 1937 attempt to circle the globe, a flight that ended in mystery and tragedy.

Amelia Earhart, Pilot: This modern world of science and invention is of particular interest to women.

Laurie Anderson: Anderson uses Earhart's own voice, logs and letters layered into narration and music to produce a 22-track evocative mix of classical and electronic strings, effects, sounds and percussion, all of it composed and performed by Anderson, joined by other singers and an orchestra, to imagine her way into Earhart's cockpit.

Woman: The instruments quiver.

Laurie Anderson: So I tried to imagine what it would be like for a pilot to be in a little plane like that with the motor going like aah days and days. This is really hot. There's no A.C. in these little cockpits.

She's like this. What did that feel like?

MAN: Amelia Earhart.

Jeffrey Brown: She also loved and connected with Earhart's deep interest in the latest technology of her time.

Laurie Anderson: She was not white gloves at all. She was down in the engine and seeing what's going on and working with her mechanics and her designers. And I really admire that.

Jeffrey Brown: That does sound a little like you.

Laurie Anderson: I identified with her, of course.

Jeffrey Brown: You did, from the beginning?

Laurie Anderson: Yes, I just -- there aren't many models for women in this country who do stuff. I just gravitated over to her. She's a Midwesterner also, so -- like me. And so I kind of thought, why would she want to do that?

Jeffrey Brown: Anderson has been known for asking herself and us pointed, sometimes unexpected questions, since her 1981 song "O Superman."

(Music)

Jeffrey Brown: A mix of electronic music, words and movement that became an unlikely pop hit. It was a breakthrough into the larger culture after years as an avant-garde artist.

One of her early signature pieces, "Duets on Ice" for violin and tape recorder performed on streets wearing skates frozen into a block of ice. When the ice melted, the music stopped, the ethos of the 1970s New York art and music world she was a big part of, experiment.

Laurie Anderson: We didn't know what we were doing. We didn't.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes.

Laurie Anderson: But we wanted to make things. So we all had pickup trucks. We were all like DIY people. I mean, we helped each other. This is so key. We never thought we'd make a living doing this stuff, music and dance and theater. We just wanted to experiment, make something that wasn't there.

Jeffrey Brown: But somehow you did.

Laurie Anderson: And it was exhilarating.

Jeffrey Brown: Over the years, in addition to her 13 albums and performances all over the world...

Woman: I want to tell you a story.

Jeffrey Brown: ... Anderson has made films, like "Heart of a Dog," written a multimedia performance based on Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick," helped create the Opening Ceremony for the 2004 Athens Olympics, and created solo exhibits of her paintings and drawings, including The Weather, shown at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., in 2021.

In 1992, she met another downtown star, rock 'n' roll legend Lou Reed. They worked together for the next 21 years, marrying in 2008 before his death in 2013. It was a loving partnership that encompassed Buddhism and tai chi, as well as music and, she says, constant artistic seeking and questioning.

Laurie Anderson: I talked to Lou a lot about why would -- why do anything and...

Jeffrey Brown: Why do anything?

Laurie Anderson: Why do anything?

Jeffrey Brown: Yes.

Laurie Anderson: Why write this song? Why do this show? Why -- what do you here doing this for? And the answer really is that you just look for the brightest light possible and go that way.

We had many conversations about what we were doing as artists and why we were doing it. And it was really about trying to go there, to that.

Jeffrey Brown: Now 77, Anderson is still going to new places with technology, including the world of A.I. She's working with a machine learning institute in Australia, which has inputted everything she and Reed wrote or recorded into a supercomputer.

And how does that sound? How does that feel?

Laurie Anderson: This is not like a Ouija board and I'm talking to my dead husband. Really, I'm not actually crazy. But people have styles, and they are real things. I mean, I'm not afraid of machines taking over at all. I'm afraid of people becoming machines, not even seeing things for themselves or thinking for themselves. That's what I'm afraid of.

Jeffrey Brown: She's also become something of a TikTok sensation, as "O Superman" has been taken up and restyled by a new generation, especially her lines, "You don't know me, but I know you."

Laurie Anderson: I was thrilled because I want to be useful. I want to have people use this for something. As I learn more and more about what stories are, I realize, this is a constant. The stories you tell yourself about who you are and what you want, those are stories to help you live.

If you don't have those suddenly, it's terrifying. I mean, you will keep living, you will keep eating, but it's the story that keeps you going.

Jeffrey Brown: After finishing work on Amelia, Laurie Anderson has turned to an even more ambitious work about nothing less than climate change and the possible end or saving of the world. She calls it "ARK."

For the "PBS News Hour"...

Laurie Anderson: I'm Jeffrey Brown with...

Jeffrey Brown: Laurie Anderson.

(Laughter)