Photography by Noah Greenberg

There’s something comforting yet mystifying about Laurie Anderson. In a single breath, Anderson can wax provocative about economic apocalypse before discussing an upcoming Christmas record by her piano-playing dog, Lola Belle. Yet, no matter how hyper-intellectual or flat-out absurd her words and works might seem, in conversation she somehow straddles the line between pretentiousness and preposterousness without ever succumbing to either. Since her breakthrough work from forty years ago, Duets on Ice, in which she wore ice skates frozen into a block of ice and played violin until the ice melted away, through her ten-plus albums featuring collaborations with William S. Burroughs, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Antony Hegarty, and husband Lou Reed, Anderson has mastered the far-flung worlds of avant-garde art, literature, film, experimental music, and even technology, inventing instruments such as tape-bow violins and voice filters. Using the voice filters in much of her spoken word and musical works, Anderson cultivated a male alter-ego (in an act she calls “audio drag”) named Fenway Bergamot, whose visage and voice take center-stage on Anderson’s latest album, Homeland, which continues her critique of American identity and injustice.

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Buy Homeland at iTunes. Visit Nonesuch Records to hear song samples. And for more remixes of “Only An Expert”, visit Indaba Music.