‘Optimists have happier lives’: Laurie Anderson on Bowie, Lou Reed and ‘romantic, inspiring’ JFK
![‘Optimists have happier lives’: Laurie Anderson on Bowie, Lou Reed and ‘romantic, inspiring’ JFK](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/901b5321587a829c066bb0bcb2eceeebf7a144e5/0_117_3000_1801/master/3000.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=bb3f123837f8cdad20a21e2287053cbf)
Releasing a new album inspired by Amelia Earhart, the US musician answers your questions about her letters to Kennedy, wrestling Andy Kaufman and performing for thousands of dogs at Sydney Opera House
Your debut album, Big Science (1982), opens with: “Good evening, this is your captain, we are about to attempt a crash landing”, while your latest album, Amelia (2024), chronicles Amelia Earhart’s tragic final flight. Do you find yourself drawn to the wonder of aviation and its inherent risks? VerulamiumParkRanger
Not only aviation, but shipping, because I did [Songs and Stories from] Moby Dick about a big ship that went under. I guess I like sinking ships and crazy captains. I’ve done three versions of Amelia that are very distant cousins. The first version, at Carnegie Hall in 2000, was a cacophony, probably the worst thing I’ve ever heard from an orchestra! A few years later Dennis [Russell Davies, conductor] said there were some really beautiful melodies in there, so we made an arrangement for the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra and toured Europe. It sounded really pretty. Then we recorded the new version remotely during the pandemic, with his [Czech orchestra] Filharmonie Brno.
I fell in love with Amelia’s story at the beginning, but by then had narrowed it down to her last flight. She wrote telegrams to her husband, who was also her press agent, and loved to tell the world where she was. She was the original blogger. She was very connected to her public, especially women. She’d go: “Ladies, you’re in your kitchen and I’m in my cockpit at 10,000 feet.” The thing that made me really want to write about her is that she said that if she made it through that last flight she wanted a workshop for girls to do woodworking, engines, metal. In the 1930s, women did cooking and cleaning. Fast forward 87 years and how many women are in engineering and so on? Not enough. I look at the pop world and think: “Why aren’t more people writing about that?”
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