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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ม.ค. 2025
- The Tiny Desk is working from home for the foreseeable future. Introducing NPR Music's Tiny Desk (home) concerts, bringing you performances from across the country and the world. It's the same spirit - stripped-down sets, an intimate setting - just a different space.
Bob Boilen | May 20, 2021
Laurie Anderson is a revolutionary artist who has mixed storytelling, music and technology for the past four decades plus. This Tiny Desk (home) concert celebrates the truly breathtaking breakthrough album she put out in 1982, Big Science. On that record, she used a few different voice processors; one of them was a Vocoder. By singing into a microphone attached to a keyboard, you can hear how it effectively adds harmony to her voice on "Let x=x." Laurie Anderson also used that effect, creating what I think of as 'the voice of authority' in her storytelling, on "O Superman," a song unlike anything music I'd heard when it came out in 1981. She made use of a vocal loop, something ever-present these days in sampling, but here she uses an Eventide Harmonizer, looping the single syllable "ha" as the rhythm of the song. It's a song about dealing with the technological revolution, about compassion; if it's your first time hearing it, take it in and see what strikes you.
Here, Roma Baran, who played on and produced Big Science with Laurie Anderson in 1982, performs on synthesizer. We also hear some brilliant cello and improv from Rubin Kodheli.
On a personal note, I was a lover of Laurie's music back in those days; they were also the days I played synthesizer in my band Tiny Desk Unit. We opened for Laurie Anderson in 1981, and Laurie joined us onstage for a song. I bring this up because the Tiny Desk name (created by our guitarist Michael Barron) was familiar to Laurie long before this NPR series existed. At the end of her home concert, Laurie, I assume, mistakingly, thanks Tiny Desk Unit for having her. It made me smile and sparked so many memories. Thank you, Laurie.
SET LIST
"Let x=x"
"Violin Cello Improv"
"O Superman"
MUSICIANS
Laurie Anderson: vocals, electronics, violin
Roma Baran: synthesizer
Rubin Kodheli: cello
CREDITS
Video: Jason Stern
Audio: Jason Stern, Roma Baran
Production: Jim Cass
TINY DESK TEAM
Producer: Bob Boilen
Video Producer: Maia Stern
Audio Mastering: Josh Rogosin
Associate Producer: Bobby Carter
Tiny Production Team: Kara Frame, Gabrielle Pierre
Executive Producer: Keith Jenkins
Senior VP, Programming: Anya Grundmann
#nprmusic #tinydesk #laurieanderson
We may not deserve Laurie, but the world sure needs her.
isn't that the frickin' truth !!!
I'm hoping she's working on the pandemic world as she sees it........it she sees all of the frailties....
Jackson, perfectly said.
As much as Laurie Anderson is appreciated, Laurie Anderson is under-appreciated.
@@drdalewisely always ahead of time, very primordial and perfect NOW. So, blossom ...
O Superman is the song that cracked my mind open to the beauty and power of music. My life was one before seeing this come up on MTV and another one after.
I randomly throw in the line "He may have been a hat check clerk at an ice rink" in conversation, and while nobody ever knows what I am talking about, it makes me happy. Saw Laurie A in Princeton NJ sometime around '84
I do a lot of public speaking, and I constantly use that entire lyric to test the sound system. You're right: no one ever knows, and they often think it was written specifically for practicing enunciation or testing PA systems.
o mai. i must use this .
I saw her 4 times. Twice in Buenos Aires, 1992...Madrid 2007 playing with Lou Reed, and the last time, Buenos Aires 2015...And waiting for the next time🔥❤️❤️🎇🎇🎶
my go to line is "thinking about the ham and cheese sandwiches in the other room." lol
Try it again in a Beyonce discussion forum, you may have better chances.
Im a 56 year old man covered in battle scars from a life lived hard, . . .and i just cried for 18 minutes straight. Tears for the 16 boy that loved Laurie Anderson. Transcendent. ❤
💖💖💖
I’m in tears too
I was there crying with you...literally
Half your age and I’m crying with you. Hoping I have an opportunity to earn more battle scars along the way to age 56. An unscarred body is a sign of a boring life.
I have that same nostalgia. Not crying, but smiling widely- from my heart to my face.
Big Science was my mother’s house-cleaning album for most of my childhood.
That is soooo cool!
Stan bless your mother :)
Would love to have lived in your house!
i think that i would have liked your mother
Lucky you.
This woman is just working on a different level, what else can you say? True living artwork.
Well put.
She glides past most of us, really. What a talent! ❤
.......sure........😅
The magic is still radiating from her eyes. Her facial expressions ALWAYS fascinated me. Oh, I do love this artist.
This was beautiful, and it's particularly poignant to hear Laurie singing "O Superman" in a duet with her own voice from 40 years ago.
I was incredibly fortunate to meet Laurie Anderson at UC Davis when I was an undergraduate there about 1978. She was brought in as a visiting guest artist. She was relatively Unknown at that point and those of us who were fortunate enough to hear her lecture and take part in an answer question session, we’re pretty blown away, just by what she said, and how she thought. Later that evening, she performed for us in a room which held about 150 people. We stumbled out of there, stunned by her amazing performance and more importantly, the concepts presented and the unique way she presented them. Probably the most exceptional artistic experience I have ever experienced, and I will forever be grateful for it.
I just saw her tonight, we had a 10 second audience scream session and the one encore song had everyone doing tai chi moves. Unforgettable concert for sure.
Oh my goodness. I just discovered Laurie and I'm OBSESSED! Wow!
ENJOY!
Lucky you - there are so many beautiful things to see and hear in store for you.
To the people I loved, to the people I hurt, so many years ago, when we listened and conversed to Laurie Anderson. I am home now.
In 1981, my high school classmate Ted handed me an LP and said, "I think you'll like this."
What an understatement. I put it on the turntable and was mesmerized as I listed to it four times straight. Laurie Anderson opened my eyes to storytelling, melody and harmony in ways I hadn't previously considered. I made a point of seeing her in concert every 5 years or so for decades.
It's an absolute pleasure to see Roma Baran and Rubin Kodheli perform.
Thank you for many years of beauty and joy.
Laurie has a singular voice that is the personification of art in America. She is the epidome of innovation & authenticity, the true embodiment of love & compassion, while managing to remain totally unassuming. By my estimation, she sits at the apex of genuine humanness. I'm incredibly grateful that she exists, because she reminds me that the negativity & hate of our current paradigm is not our ultimate fate, but a bump in the road. Laurie Anderson is my North star, and I will follow her path to find my way home.
As a child of the 70's and 80's her music transfixed me and helped build my love of all forms of art.
same!!
Laurie Anderson was the soundtrack to living room dancing and laughing with my mom in the 80's. Smart, sardonic, irreverent-- such a seminal musical experience for a kid!
Snapperoo! But swap the living room for holiday car journeys.
Thanks for shaping our childhoods and subsequent adult openness and embrace of the weird and wonderful.
Sending this to my mum and sister now 😊
Ya want to clear out a room? Put on a Laurie Anderson album in the eighties. Concert at Va Tech auditorium May 1981. After everyone ran out of the hall with their hands on their ears she let me read a weather report into her echo machine.
Thank you so much for sharing this story I hope to share Laurie with my kids when I’m a mother :))
@@65TossTrap That's funny.
Raised my kids on Laurie!
Well, that was an unexpected treat.
This is gratifying in every way except instantly. Hilarious, trivial and playful yet profound, insightful and revelatory. Abstract but emotional, nonsensical but considered.
She said it to no-one, but everyone listened.
Excellent liner note 💕 MrDisasterboy
@@af7748 Fully agree with ashly!
Great comment
Wonderful
mm
Happy Tears from a 55 year old who was formed and inspired by Laurie. Such happy tears and strength!
Watching and smiling with lou
🥺
We really don't realize how lucky we are to see this...
I’ve been on this earth for 40+ years. How am I now just discovering the musical genius which is Laurie Anderson?
I almost never comment on anything TH-cam, but I cannot help but express my love and appreciation for Ms. Anderson, as a fellow musician, artist, and visionary. She is unique, truly one of a kind. By the way, I was not hinting that I am a visionary.
i. can NOT get over how happy i am that laurie's still making music. if there is any force in the universe to bless anyone, may it bless her.
Laurie is a genius so far ahead of her time back then. I was pretty sure she was a visitor from the future. Her music was the rare thing I listened to over and over.
I'm 62 and was gob smacked when I first saw Home Of The Brave back in the late 80's. I'd loved O Superman and still have my single but I'd not followed Laurie at all until giving in and watching this Tiny Desk Home Concert. As I watched I was taken at how Laurie still carries her youthfulness. I closed my eyes during O Superman and revelled in the wondrous aural soundscape. Thank you Laurie for opening up my mind.
Two years after the fact, I just stumbled upon this. This trio is great and Laurie Anderson still has the same punch to her music as she had 45 years ago.
Yep, I just stumbled upon this Tiny Desk performance myself, and I really loved it.
I remember hearing O Superman on my turntable for the first time sitting in my darkened room in mid 80s from my grad student days. It was other worldly. Even though I don't get to listen to her much these days it is one of those hauntingly beautiful precious experiences that surfaces in my memory time to time and takes me back trying to relive that first time feeling. Had a chance to see her live couple of times many years ago. Remember listening to Strange Angels, Girl in a Red Dress for so many times. Now I am seeing her for the first time in a very long time. Everybody I liked and knew has grown older. Very glad to see she is still performing.
What an incredible suprise...unbelievably welcome
Laurie Anderson has always been an enigmatic warm blanket for me. I have to listen with my peripheral vision, if I look at her art straight on it usually doesn’t make sense. But later on, after it seeps into my subconscious - I get it (clarity) as I pet the dog or taking out the trash…
This makes a strange kind of sense. I've been listening to her works again recently. Somehow, across the 5 albums I have, like muscle memory, I know every word of every line, right before she says it. It just seeps into your brain, even though you can't pin down exactly what any of it means.
Her delivery (timing) is impeccable. And the word rhythm, .... all of a piece, ... the aesthetic, the style, ... the pièce de résistance .
Epic, iconic, laurie is a cosmic gift.
Trump just got re-elected and this is such refreshing reminder that there is still great art in America to provide light relief to the darkness.
2 of my Favorite Songs by Laurie Anderson!
One of my regrets is not "getting" Laurie Anderson all those years ago. Still, better late than not at all. She was aeons ahead of the rest of the pack. Love this woman. 😍🙏🤗
you don't get Laurie... she gets you :)
Laurie Anderson is one of the my fav American singers. Can't believe that her first studio album BIG SCIENCE has been released for near four decades! So much wonderful memories for the first time when I heard her works, especially BIG SCIENCE at UW-Madison when I studied as a graduate student there. As a Taiwanese, I am so happy about her collaboration with a Taiwanese VR artist in recent years.
Used to rock my son to sleep to X=X 34 years ago. He is expecting his own baby now and alerted me to this concert. Laurie's magic is vast and generational and divine and she makes me cry at her sheer genius. Thank you.
I've lived the last 40 years loving Laurie. (I have bought all her albums, but have seen her live just ONE time). She, Roma (and me) have white hair now, but that doesn't matter, the music (and the feeling) is always strong. Thanks for allowing me to see her today!!!
50 years later...: still love what u are doing.. big thanks
Laurie Anderson is one of the most brilliant minds ever. Truly a once in a lifetime artist.
O Superman was my top played song of 2020. Thank you, Laurie.
Just astoundingly beautiful. O Superman is, if anything, more relevant today than when it was written over 40 years ago. A true visionary.
Thank You, Laurie Anderson.
Her music and art knows no time...no dimension....thank you Laurie.
I can't believe the Tiny Desk story! So amazing Laurie is finally featured here, the most important artist of the last 100 years to me.
so full right now.... beauty- full... I have no words ... except thank you, Laurie Anderson and collaborators, oh, thank you.
As a very young man, I carried United States Parts One Through Four from Fairbanks, Alaska to Santo Tomas, Guatemala in the middle-late 1980s. Laurie Anderson has been one of my Main Women ever since. (And, when the Matrix came out -- including the latest, Resurrections, I've greatly enjoyed saying Ms. Anderson in my best Smith voice.)
Her work is perhaps the best soundtrack for the end of things that we know, as the unraveling continues.
Laurie Anderson?! Wonderful! About a week ago, I had listened to O Superman. Throughout the composition, I was covered in goosebumps. Timeless artists are timeless. 🌸
The picture behind them is how this made me feel. The part about when force is gone there's mom had me tearing up. I've missed so much. What all else might have passed me by. 😔
i’ve seen laurie countless times
across the decades but haven’t
heard live performances of those
2 songs since their creation
so fun to hear them live again
Gawd it's been over thirty years when I first listened to this album, and it made an impression. It makes my heart very heavy and light and free at the same time.
There will always be room on my list of badass women for Laurie Anderson. I was captivated as a kid watching her and joyful today. Keep on keeping on Laurie...
Hearing Laurie Anderson still brings that same moment of frisson that it did so many years ago. Thank you for the concert. What a wonderful way to start a day.
My dear Laurie, thank you for the beauty.
Oh, Ms. Anderson ❤ When I was a kid (16 or some, now 52), I was lucky to meet "Big Science" for the first time. And it opened some beautiful doors...
Laurie you are an international treasure. I just want to say thanks. So, thanks.
Laurie Anderson is a gift from the Universe - thank you Universe
0:00 - *Let x=x* (6:20)
7:32 - *Violin Cello Improv*
[8:41] - *O Superman* (17:40)
[17:55 - Tiny Desk team]
0:15 me 🥰
Thanks! This needs to be added to the video description or NPR should pin it to the top of the comments.
Thank you
Once in a while I need to come back here and enjoy this incredible performance. ''I feel like I am in a burning building and I gotta go....". Thank you, Laurie, Roma and Rubin.
Do you think she had a foreboding of 9/11/2001? A bunch of the lyrics seem to point to it.
I've been listening in rapt awe to this amazing woman for almost four decades and she has just reminded why and left my jaw hanging. Again. Total love and respect to Ms Anderson and the mighty NPR, the life-affirming soundtrack to my lockdown.
Laurie is genius , why don't we hear more about this artist
Oh. My. Heaven. Thanks for this. This song led me thru so much life. Let x = x.
i have my degree in art history, and recently discovered laurie through o superman, and i never thought i'd get to see her perform. this is a blessing
I had to laugh at myself because when she started to play a Superman I got all wide eyed because I love that song so much. I love her freedom and innovation. I would so love to meet her someday.
I'm so grateful to have had the chance to see Laurie perform at least a half-dozen times live. Her work is always musically enjoyable, but also the ideas in her lyrics are so intellectually interesting, and delivered with a beautiful subtle sense of humor.
Now that the pandemic restrictions are beginning to wane, I hope to be able to see her perform live again.
belleza total...vanguardia..muy profundo....un viaje al corazon...gracias Laurie
Is it 40 years ago since I first heard Laurie Anderson's Superman .... amazing back then and amazing today. This 18 minute concert is amazing, pure joy and an absolute pleasure.
He said, Aw, isn’t it…. I saw Lou through Laurie’s eyes and heard him through her voice for an instant. Thank you, Laurie, this was wonderful.
One of the greatest living artists.
Forse la più grande ...
What an amazing Human! First record i got from the library when I was 8. born in 1966! Still love your hair and science/music
From first demo...now..goosebumps...oh Laurie...you!❤
Yay Laurie!!!!! You changed so many of us!!!! Yay!!!
I found Laurie on TH-cam quite by accident and her music and words are life-effecting. Thank you Ms Anderson. Thank you, Tiny Desk.
Laure has been one of my greatest inspirations in art, life, work.
SHE IS A GIFT !!!!!!!
The magic of Laurie Anderson music is so gravitating and mysterious so i can't able to come away from live Laurier's performance.
[great cry] thanks miss anderson. I heerd u on cassettee dubbed round 35 year ago n memorized nearly all of yer album.
Really cried joyously when i discovered bowie’s cover.
People tell me that i dont realize how big an affect i have on others.
You cant realize how much you have soothed and comforted me. Thank you.
She is a legend. Amazing artist
I only just now discovered Laurie via the 60 minutes piece from Anderson Cooper. Her work blows me away. Before you can even reach a conclusion of whether you like it or not her sound captures you and you almost have no choice but to simply listen to the whole thing. That's pretty amazing.
I appreciate Tiny Desk bringing these interesting artists right to my morning coffee. I may not know anything about these last few artists, but I have enjoyed every one of them in their own way. Thanks.
Her picking up the violin reminds me of when she had that "fiddle" that was fixed up with an audio tape player head, and a bow that had a tape in it instead of hairs, and she would run it across the tape head and sounds would come out.
One of the most beloved artists of my life in two centuries and sure to delight and provoke contemplation in many more. Hey, she’s probably already popular intergalactically. If I were an interstellar cosmonaut, I’d be listening to her. Wouldn’t you?
I think in decades to come the world will look back on Laurie Anderson with more appreciation than now. I know she's an icon, but I think she's underrated. She was way ahead of her time and I'm sure she fought against sexism and patriarchy her whole career. What a powerful woman. Superman
What an excellent surprise! It has just cheered up my morning. Thanks!
Wonderfull! And I must get that record...
Laurie is such a master.of dynamics. Legend. ❤️❤️
Thank you, Laurie! STILL great songs that I move to.
Very avant-garde and interesting! 🎶
I’ve loved Laurie for 40 years?!? Time flies.
This is fantastic. Brings back many fond memories of listening to Big Science when it first came out while I was a student at Ohio State. Fortunately, my room mates were into alternative music too.
I couldn't help myself remembering that light beam inside her mouth on the video for O Superman. An image that's as haunting as astonishing and beautiful too.
Heartbreaking and wonderful. Loved Laurie Anderson's music from when I was a kid and this was all new. Helped me in so many ways. Influenced my whole life. Glad for this performance. Thank you Laurie Anderson and the crew. And Tiny Desk for making this space for wonderful music to take place and be out there.
Love you Laurie!
What a gift on a Friday! Thank you Tiny Desk and thank you Mrs. Laurie Anderson!
What a surprise! A good one. A gift indeed. Good morning from Brasil
And thanks!
Yep
Também adoro ela.
Conheci Laurie Anderson em 1984 através de uma reportagem do Jornal do Brasil quando Big Science foi lançado no Brasil. Gostei do disco antes mesmo de ouví-lo, só pela descrição feita na reportagem. Anos depois, quando finalmente o comprei, foi paixão a primeira ouvida.
@@willianii1105 conheci Laurie Anderson pela participação dela na faixa Enquanto Isso/Meanwhile do disco Cor de Rosa..., de Marisa Monte. Eu era adolescente, num mundo pré-internet, mas intuí algo sobre Laurie, fui buscando sua obra e ficando cada vez mais maravilhada.
No words, just love and admiration to the Great Laurie Anderson.
Hello Laurie good to see you again!
What does one say to their Heart's Musician? Your understanding of music structure added to life in ways tongue cannot tell. Thank You. 💛
I listened to Big Science so much. So moving.
it is so good that poetry has no age
it is so good it is
just amazing