Laurie Anderson is a singer, composer and musician hailing from Glen Ellyn, Illinois, U.S who was born on June 5th 1947. After making her name as a performance artist in the late 60’s, she began a music career in 1975 and has since released seven studio albums.
Anderson began performing while still studying at university. Her first performance art piece – a symphony played entirely on car horns – debuted in 1969 while she was still studying Art History at Barnard College. Even though she obtained an MFA at Columbia in 1972, she pursued a career in performance art directly after leaving university, while also working as an illustrator and an art critic. She was always musical, with one of her most celebrated performance pieces being her playing a number of famous violin duets while wearing a set of ice skates frozen into a block of ice, however it wasn’t until the middle of the 1970’s that she began to record and release her own songs. Despite most of her musical output being firmly avant-garde, she scored the one of the least expected hit singles of all time with the release of “O Superman”, a number two hit in the U.K.
Off the back of this she secured a seven album deal with Warner Bros. Records and spent the rest of the 80’s releasing a number of hugely acclaimed records that were as influenced by spoken word artists and performance art as they were by the pop music of the day. Ever since then she’s remained an artist in the truest sense of the word, her pieces both live and on record are still as challenging and as beautiful as they’ve ever been. Her performances today are still riveting and original, and for that, Laurie Anderson comes highly recommended.
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