Laurie Anderson Risks Her Sanity to Complete 'Homeland'

Laurie Anderson developed most of her new album, 'Homeland,' through a series of improvised concert performances all starting in 2007. It was a freeing way to work, the experimental musician and performance artist tells Spinner, but it presented a certain challenge: namely, making sense of all the bits and pieces of live recordings from all over the world when she got home.

"I sat there, staring at 100,000 files," Anderson says. "It's kind of horrible to know what's in 100,000 files, and I thought I was going to genuinely lose my mind. I thought, 'Why am I doing it this way? This is really insane.'"

Instead of going crazy, Anderson chipped away slowly at the mountain of material for what would become her first studio album since 2001's 'Life on a String.'

"I was doing two other projects, so I did it kind of like a hobby, a couple days a month," she says. That was until her husband, Lou Reed, interceded. "Finally Lou got sick of hearing me complaining and he went into the studio and helped me finish it," she says.

Anderson ended up with 45 pieces for the album, which she whittled to 13 tracks. Many of the numbers she cut were political in nature.

"I wrote part of it in the Bush era," she says. "There was a song called 'Bad Guys,' which was about us. Then Obama came and I thought, maybe 'Bad Guys' should take a break. So when I did the selection for the record, it became some political stuff but more little poems and some personal stuff."

And the remaining tracks?

"There's a giant 'Homeland' bin of material that I guess I'm going to just put in my archives," Anderson says with a laugh.
'Homeland' is due June 22 on Nonesuch.