What does it sound like?:
On 30 August Laurie Anderson released a new album – Amelia. It charts, over 35 minutes and 22 tracks, the 1937 round-the-world flight of Amelia Earhart. Each track takes you further on the journey, from Oakland, California, eastwards via Miami, San Juan, Brazil, Sénégal, Sudan, Pakistan, Burma etc.
Anderson uses multiple voices, many of which are her own as well as Earhart and Anomi, to quote from the travel logs and the reports to Earhart’s husband en route, as well as to describe the landscape and seascape below the low altitude flight.
The mainly spoken word, albeit sing-songy style that Anderson affects is accompanied by her ubiquitous viola tones and drones, string orchestra arrangements and live bass, drum and guitar overdubs. To create the roar of the aircraft engine which was the constant soundtrack to the flight, she sampled and mixed together tyres driving over gravel, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, and her own electronics. There are tracks with radio interference, tracks with almost no sound at all apart from spoken voice, even quotes from Altered Images, Buffalo Springfield and her own earlier work. To call it a soundscape may be a cliché, but it’s one that works. It’s best listened to in one go, joining Earhart and Anderson in the cockpit.
What does it all *mean*?
It’s a flight that ended in her disappearance over the Pacific Ocean, but this is a piece about someone as optimistic and fascinated by the latest technology of the day as Anderson is. Anderson focuses more on the inspiring life Earhart lived, as aviation pioneer, trailblazer for women, blogger and influencer, then on the accidental tragedy almost at the end of the flight completion. If she had completed the flight, Anderson revealed in an interview, Earhart would have worked to set up opportunities for girls to take ‘shop’ rather than home economics at school. Anderson comments that even today, 80 years later, there still aren’t many female engineers and scientists. This album is a fine tribute to the spirit of Earhart.
Goes well with…
A view of the big sky, or of the ground from up high.
Release Date:
30 August 2024
Might suit people who like…
Laurie Anderson’s other work, notably Mister Heartbreak and Songs and Stories from Moby Dick. flying round the world in their head.
A sample pair of tracks from the journey
A NYT album review
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/arts/music/laurie-anderson-amelia-earhart.html
Ah, paywall
Imagine — or perhaps remember — a time when the world seemed much larger, when air travel was novel and dangerous, when wireless communication could never be taken for granted.
That’s the era Laurie Anderson conjures on her new album, “Amelia,” out Friday. In a fast-moving 36 minutes and 22 tracks, “Amelia” traces the doomed final flight of Amelia Earhart, who set out “to become the first woman to circumnavigate the Earth,” as Anderson narrates. Earhart took off from Oakland on May 20, 1937, and flew across the Americas, Africa and Asia before her plane disappeared over the Pacific on July 2.
“I really fell in love with Amelia,” Anderson said in a video interview from her New York City studio, where she was surrounded by keyboards and mixing equipment, preparing for a tech rehearsal. “Amelia really was this badass person.”
Amelia Earhart “was the original blogger,” Laurie Anderson said, noting her journey was very documented.
Like nearly the entire body of work that Anderson has created since the 1980s, “Amelia” is an uncontainable hybrid. It unfolds as something between a song cycle, an oratorio and a vintage radio drama. Anderson deploys a string orchestra, electronics and a jazz-tinged rhythm section along with her gallery of singing and speaking voices. Parts of “Amelia” are matter-of-fact and diaristic, noting dates and places. But there are also stretches of heaving orchestral counterpoint that grow enveloping, even dizzying, evoking the vastness, and danger, of sky and ocean.
Anderson describes “Amelia” as “a distant cousin” of music she composed for a concert series in 2000 by the American Composers Orchestra for the turn of the millennium. The conductor Dennis Russell Davies programmed music about flight from Philip Glass, Samuel Barber and others.
Airplanes and flying had long been subjects for Anderson’s lyrics and spoken words. “Here come the planes” was the ominous refrain in her 1981 single, “O Superman (for Massenet),” which became a left-field hit in Britain. “Amelia” also ties in with many of Anderson’s other long-running themes: technology, communication (and miscommunication), geography, nature, travel and cross-cultural interactions.
“The Letter,” on “Amelia,” notes that when Earhart flew out of Khartoum, she carried “a letter which I myself cannot read,” Anderson calmly explains over pizzicato cellos and moaning, buzzing electric guitar. “It is addressed to Arab tribesmen and it explains how and why a woman pilot might drop out of the sky and onto their land.”
It was Davies who suggested Earhart to Anderson, who “didn’t really know that much” about the pilot, she said. But she delved into Earhart’s history, quickly coming to admire her feminist spirit, her practicality and her technical know-how. “She would talk to women saying, like, ‘Ladies, when you’re in your kitchen, it’s kind of like me in my cockpit with lots of equipment.’”
Earhart “never really got credit for being such a good mechanic,” Anderson added. “She was not a white gloves person at all. She wasn’t just stepping into her plane and going, ‘I’m a lady pilot.’”
Anderson’s original version of “Amelia,” titled “Songs for A.E.,” had its premiere in February 2000. “It was for full orchestra with a lot of electronics, completely different from this record,” she said, adding: “It had nothing to do with the last flight. It was just generally things about flying and air and aviation.”
Anderson wasn’t used to writing for a full orchestra, and she recalls her initial version as overwhelmingly cluttered. Her first rehearsals of “Song for A.E.” were a shock. “The performance was supposed to be the next night, and he played it, and it was probably one of the worst things I’d ever heard. And he turns around and goes, ‘How was that?’ I was like, ‘Um, um, you know …’ And he said, ‘Faster?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that would be over quicker.’ “
On the album, the plane’s engine sound is constructed from a guitar drone created by her late husband Lou Reed’s guitar and amplifiers mixed with her own heavily processed viola playing, a recording of tires going over gravel and many more elements.
Davies has kinder memories, and a few years later, when he was leading the Stuttgart String Orchestra, he urged Anderson to revisit the music. “He said, ‘I think there’s some really beautiful melodies in there,’” she said. “‘Let’s just do it for string orchestra.’”
Davies created a new arrangement, paring down Anderson’s overstuffed, full-orchestra score for an ensemble of 19 strings. “You find what the important lines are and make them sing,” he said. “And she was able to really then hear what she had done.”
Anderson completely reshaped the piece. She focused on Earhart’s final itinerary, drawing on the pilot’s own journals without quoting them directly. Earhart “was the original blogger,” Anderson said. Every stop she made on this last flight, she would send telegrams to G.P. Putnam, her husband and press agent. “She would call reporters. She would write in her logs, and she would write in her diaries. This was very, very documented. She had a real sense of what she was doing with history.”
Anderson was leery of simply talking over an orchestra. “That idea of ‘Peter and the Wolf’ really scares me a lot,” she said. “So I tried to sink into the music.” She developed multiple vocal strategies. There was a reportorial voice. There was a voice on the radio, and the peaky, nasal voice of someone speaking through a 1930s-era microphone. There was “a story voice, sort of a softer one.” Another voice was “just delivering hard facts.” There were “a lot of vocoder things that were trying to slide around, mostly in the viola range.” For other vocals, Anderson said, “I tried to drown myself in the swirl.”
During the pandemic, Davies and Anderson agreed to revisit the material once again. Davies recorded his string arrangement with a central European string orchestra, Filharmonie Brno, in the Czech Republic. Then, in the studio, Anderson took the music further. She brought in improvisers including the bassist Tony Scherr, the percussionist Kenny Wollesen and the guitarist Marc Ribot. They extrapolated above the string-orchestra arrangements. “I never did a record like this,” Anderson said. “It was just upside-down.”
One of the album’s foundations — recurring at the beginning, middle and end — is the drone of Earhart’s airplane engine. It’s loud, thick, intrusive, unavoidable, wearing Earhart down as the mission continues. “I’m just trying to imagine what it would be like,” Anderson said. “It’s so hot in that cockpit, and loud, and for days and days and days and days and days and days.”
On the album, the engine sound is not a recording of an actual airplane engine. Anderson constructed it from a guitar drone created by her late husband Lou Reed’s guitar and amplifiers — his setup for “Metal Machine Music” — mixed with her own heavily processed viola playing, a recording of tires going over gravel and many more elements. It’s an artist’s interpretation, not a document.
That play between reality and impression, artifact and experience, facts and sounds, is at the core of “Amelia.” Anderson is relating events, telling a story and trying to convey what history felt like in the moment — a disastrous moment.
In the album’s penultimate tracks, “Howland Island” and “Radio,” Earhart is trying to navigate to a vital fuel stop; a Coast Guard ship was supposed to guide her. But she’s using the wrong frequency, and her signal is drowned out in other traffic; it was an unregulated radio era. Anderson mixes in Morse code that Earhart didn’t actually use; it says, “I can’t hear you. I can’t see you.” Earhart didn’t transmit Morse code; it wasn’t what happened. But it sounds like it could have been.
Cheers
A wide-ranging video interview, moving from the album to thoughts on death and AI. Laurie is ever-vital in her curiosity and exploration, even at 77.
She does come over a bit like the Paul Whitehouse ‘very, very drunk indeed’ character at times. Even, at 11.30, making the same crazy incoherent noises….
Such a wonderful voice. Incredibly magnetic performer on stage, too.
And in October, Public Service Broadcasting will release their new album “The Last Flight” which is also based on Amelia Earhart…..
https://publicservicebroadcasting.net/
You wait 87 years for an Amelia Earhart…
It’s only been 52 years since Plainsong released In Search Of Amelia Earhart, though in truth only a couple of songs concerned the missing aviatrix.
And, of course, Ronnie Lane and Slim Chance did a fine version of “Amelia Earhart’s last flight” on the “Anymore for Anymore” album:
Redolent of the work of Stanley Rogers to my ears (sorry!)
Iain and Andy are touring next year so I’m hoping for some from this, plus they mention navigator Fred Noonan. ( I’m not sure if L Anderson does)
Yes, she does.
Thanks Sal
I for one am very excited by the PSB album. If the singles are anything to go by it’s shaping up to be their best since the Race for Space. In the meantime I’ll give Laurie a go. Never knowingly heard anything by her before.
I’m glad that you want to try her out. I’d be interested in your impressions as you pop your Laurie cherry.
@salwarpe I’m glad I’ve heard it, but I suspect it’s not for me. A slightly odd mixture of background and foreground listening. Still, I have been making (hesitant) forays into modern classical and electronica recently so I’ll give it another couple of listens to see if it clicks.
My go-to albums for Laurie novices would be either Strange Angels or Life on A String – more in the mainstream pop vein (if that is possible for Laurie). Here’s Coolsville for a taste.
In a couple of weeks, I will be presenting at the Cambridge University Cavendish Labs, as part of an event entitled Physics at Work. The idea being 60% of GCSE students take Physics/Science but only 4% study it at A-level, and only a quarter of those are female. But the economy is 11% physics-based, so there’s three jobs for everyone ( = competitive salaries) and not enough women.
Anyhow, I’m all in favour of WISE (Women In Science & Engineering), but how many 15-year-old GCSE students will be listening to a Laurie Anderson record remains to be seen.
That’s great advice, fs! My dad was an engineer and I tried to follow in his footsteps by taking physics to A level. I got an ‘A’ at O level (I am that old), but the standard for the higher exam was beyond me – I got an ‘E’. He moved to Switzerland because they valued science and engineers more on the continent than in the UK, where at the time they seemed to be treated as glorified mechanics, rather than the skilled and knowledgeable problem solvers across so many parts of industry and the economy.
I don’t think Laurie’s music will touch many teenagers’ ears, it’s true. You never know – there might be some young bluestockings who get inspired by her infectious, pixie-like vivacity and curiosity.
As I regularly admit to those who accompany their students, supply and demand means b-grade physics students like me get paid more than than teachers, and we don’t earn it.
I got spellchecked from ‘advocacy’ to ‘advice’ in my comment above.
A ‘b’ grade is still pretty impressive in my book. While I found the idea of physics interesting, getting bogged down in maths-based theorems without seeing much practical application beyond oscilloscope and tying weights to springs meant I got lost in the abstraction. I remember a visit to an Oxford college and seeing students constructing model bridges to support increasingly heavy weights and thinking that looked a lot more fun than what we had to do at school.
I hated physics, didn’t “get” it and couldn’t ever fathom out the practical aspects of the A level. Yet it was then a requirement for my degree. I scraped an E, enough courtesy my other grades in biology and chemistry, then in fear that it would be a major part of the physiology that made up a 1/3 of the syllabus of the first two years. Luckily it didn’t. Still don’t understand why those and/or maths were seen as essential for, in my case, GP.
I got B (Maths), B (Physics) and E (Chemistry). I was doing S-level (first year undergraduate) Maths as well, but was told by UCAS that my three passes had to be three different subjects.
Having understood and enjoyed O-level Chemistry, and got a B, I turned up to day one of A-level to be told “forget everything you learned for O-level, that was all grossly over-simplified, now we’re going to start again.” I never did recover from that sinking feeling.
“forget everything you learned for O-level, that was all grossly over-simplified, now we’re going to start again”.
I may have been told that when considering physics post 16. I don’t remember, but I certainly wish I had been.
@salwarpe
We were driving down to Dorset on Wednesday and it was Mini Paws’ (who turned 13 this week) turn to have her playlist on the car stereo. Penultimate song as we arrived at the hotel was Laurie Anderson’s x=x. She also had Sufjan Stevens on the playlist but Mrs. Paws asked for that one to be skipped as it was too depressing. The thing is, she hasn’t got any of this from me as far as I can tell.
Did you ask your daughter where she first heard the song?
It’s one of my favourite songs off Big Science, if only for one of her wittiest couplets:
‘Cause I can see the future, and it’s a place
About seventy miles east of here, where it’s lighter.
I guess your wife got off lightly, as it could have been ‘Sweaters’ that was played. A song featuring viola dirge and bagpipe drone, I love it, but it’s not too everyone’s taste!
I may have mentioned this before but I’d heard Sweaters on the John Walters programme so I hied myself to the record shop found Big Science and asked if they’d play Sweaters.
As the drone started up the other customers in the shop stopped riffling through the racks and as one stared at the shop speakers in as I like to think with a mystified look.
I bought the album.
I remember distinctly where I was when I bought it – in a record shop in Zurich in the late 80s – all the surfaces were bare concrete and the shelves were unpolished steel. I like to think they only sold monochrome records – Joy Division, Patti Smith – Horses, the first Young Gods album. Completely theatrical and SO fitting my austere goth mindset.
Laurie looking (and sounding) completely robotic fitted right in there. I had to have it.
I was living there at the time. Which store?
You’ve got me now. All I remember is that there was a fairly small alternative area across the Limmat from the Bahnhofstrasse. A few second hand clothes shops and I think the record shop was on the right on the same road that crossed the river. Maybe that reminds you of somewherre?
I have far clearer memories of the Rote Fabrik, where I saw Young Gods at least once. That was a cool joint in what seemed like such a square city.
Sounds like Niederdorfstrasse area. There were a few over there, but not ringing a specific bell. Saw quite a few gigs at the Rote Fabrik.
Nick Cave, Billy Bragg, Wilco etc.
Niederdorfstrasse certainly rings a bell, and looks like it was the street where I liked to hang out when I went into town from the burbs.
I did ask. Something to do with tik tok, I’ll see if I can get any further info* and report back.
* Not at this time.of the morning, though
Does it mention she was shot down for spying, rather than just disappearing, presumed crashed?
Isn’t that just one of the theories (having brushed up on Wikipedia while listening to the album)? Anderson doesn’t go beyond the recorded evidence – the last recorded contact (and miscontact) through radio interference and transmitting on different frequencies to the cutter USCGC Itasca stationed at Hiwlands Island.
It’s a theory, but a “fun” one. I did a similar search around the subject when a box set of the Plainsong Amelia Earhart repertoire was issued a year or two back.
Excellent review, Sal. I am now very keen to give it a listen.
Laurie Anderson is always fascinating.
I cracked up to read that she now sounds like t th e “very very drunk indeed” character from the Fast Show.
Thanks, KFD.
A little unfair of me to make the comparison possibly, but it was meant affectionately. The burbling starts at 11.10, not 11.30. Blink and you’ll miss it.
I had intended to post this picture earlier, but only found it about 5 minutes ago:
– from a 1930s Peggy Mills strip.
It was just a false alarm.
That’s a relief!
For those interested in more Laurie:
Laurie will present a four-episode BBC Radio 6 Music ‘Artist in Residence’ series December 16–19, 11pm–12am GMT. The themes of her four playlists: the real world; love and energy; loneliness and change; and the dream world. “It’s been a blast being your DJ and I hope you like the things I put together for 6 Music,” she says. “I always wanted to have a late night radio show for people who are somewhere between awake and asleep. But even if you’re out and about—I hope you have a good time listening to some of my favorite music.”
source link
Also a soundcloud link to some of her rarer songs.